Major works, and some wild and wooly ones, on block at Slotin fall folk art auction

Chuck and Jan Rosenak literally wrote the book on folk art and now many of the most coveted pieces in their once-expansive personal collection are going up for auction this weekend in Buford.

Published in 1991, the Rosenaks’ “Museum of American Folk Art Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century American Folk Art and Artists” has long been considered by collectors, galleries and museum curators to be the essential book (or at least one of them) of the many documenting the field, including several more tomes that followed by the couple.

In the course of their travels while chronicling the wild and woolly world of self-taught art, the Rosenaks collected hundreds of works themselves, a number of which they consigned in recent years, as they downsized to a new Florida home, to the twice-yearly Slotin Folk Art Auctions staged in Buford. But with the passing of Jan Rosenak earlier this year, her husband decided to put their most prime pieces on the auction block at this weekend’s Slotin Fall Masterpiece Sale.

The Rosenak collection accounts for 179 — and some of the most choice — of the 1,225 lots in the Saturday and Sunday auction. The sale also includes a number of paintings and sculptures by anonymous makers being deaccessioned by the Columbus Museum of Art, as well as pieces from the collection of Kelly Ludwig, author of yet another folk book, “Detour Art: Outsider, Folk Art, and Visionary Environments Coast to Coast.”

“This sale rocks,” said Amy Slotin, who helps her husband Steve orchestrate the auctions and Folk Fest, a summertime show-and-sale by galleries, dealers and artists at North Atlanta Trade Center. “It is so filled, probably too filled, with masterpieces. We always try to have enough of the major pieces to draw an interested audience, but there are so many in this sale.”

A sampling of major works from the Rosenak collection, almost all by now-deceased artists, include Alabama sidewalk artist Bill Traylor’s circa 1940-42 painting “Horse” (estimated to bring $20,000-$40,000); Gullah artist Sam Doyle’s undated painting on roofing tin with applied seashell, “Dr. Buz” ($20,000-$30,000); and Georgian Howard Finster’s 1977 painting “I Baptised My Wife, #464” ($5,000-$8,000).

As vintage works of this ilk have become more rare on the open market, the Slotins have broadened their definition of folk to include what they bill as “The Strange, The Unusual, The Vanishing America,” and there is plenty from each of those categories for sale this weekend.

Among the unique pieces are circus and carnival freak show signs and objects, hand-carved walking sticks, fraternal banners, sculptures of bottle caps and wire, a movie banner from Ghana, tramp art, a Day of the Dead ceremonial costume from Mexico as well as an array of native American and international folk art.