View Slideshow

Mystery and magic—not only good design—are what I look for in an object," says Frank Maresca, the esteemed dealer in American folk, self-taught and outsider art. And indeed those are the qualities exuded by the human and animal figures, the decoys and industrial molds, the whirligigs and weathervanes, the trade signs and stimulators, the paintings and sculptures, and the circus and carnival artifacts that literally—which here, more often than not, means figuratively—form his personal collection. It is both a wonder and no wonder that almost every object stands possessed of cultural as well as aesthetic significance, for through the gallery in Chelsea that Maresca runs with Roger Ricco, his business partner of 27 years, and through the six books they've written together, he has helped to boost traditional folk art and visionary vernacular art into the constellation of mainstream American art forms.

The collection is housed just a few blocks up from the gallery, in a musicians' rehearsal studio that Maresca has converted into a loft for himself. It's furnished with such midcentury-modern icons as Eames, Nelson, Noguchi, Warren McArthur, Vladimir Kagan and Ward Bennett. The bleached-oak floors and atrium-white walls set off the strangely compelling pieces that, well, people the place. "I don't think of them as inanimate," Maresca freely admits. "Every single thing here is very much alive to me."

It was the 1976 landmark show at the Brooklyn Museum, "Folk Sculpture USA," that kindled his interest and kicked him into collecting. "I'd never before seen such fresh depictions of the human form," he recalls, proudly adding that today he possesses two objects from that magic first exhibition: a carved wood sculpture of Eve with the serpent, and another of a bowler-hatted man sitting with his legs crossed.

For Maresca, beyond the sustaining beauty of the artifacts he's accumulated there is a larger, complex appeal—that they reflect and even reify what he calls "the art-historical continuum." He points out that the late-19th-century peacock he owns—with its neck and tail made of table legs, its feet and beak of piano-stool legs, and its comb of a fragment of Victorian hinge—could profitably be mistaken for some circa 1912 Picasso assemblage. His four late-19th-century game boards—all variations on Parcheesi boards—convey to him no less the essence of the modern movement: "They predate Russian Constructivism, and they're as good as the best Kandinsky." Better yet, a Mondrian is what the game board in the entrance hall calls resoundingly to mind: the great Broadway Boogie Woogie, which was painted a half century later.

And the continuum continues. Maresca's 1940s steel sign advertising a Maytag washing machine is, he reckons, "just about as Lichtenstein as you can get," while his weathervane in the form of a monumental weaver's shuttle, which held sway over one of the big New England mills, "you could call late-19th-century Claes Oldenburg." And what he sees prefigured in his circa 1900 tramp art chest—made of dynamite crates labeled in bold capitals "Explosives Dangerous!"—is, of all things, a 1980s Transformers robot.