BUFORD, GA.- After 30 years of putting folk art and sundry other forms of untrained expression on the block, Steve Slotin approaches Slotin Auction’s Spring Self-Taught Art Masterpiece Sale with the same fervent enthusiasm he exhibited in the beginning.

Even if he’s claimed previously that this or that auction held the best art he’d ever assembled, Slotin is persuasive in proclaiming the April 22-23 sale as Slotin Folk Art’s best grouping yet.

“Piece for piece, this is the best auction in our 30 years of doing it,” he says, motioning around the packed auction hall, a funky former neighborhood grocery north of Atlanta. “There may have been greater pieces here and there, but as a collection, I think this is the best grouping I’ve ever seen. If you were to put this into a museum show, there would be rave reviews. People would say, ‘I was able to see great examples by a lot of different artists. Super impressed!’ But not only can you see it, this is the only place where you can buy museum-quality pieces from beginning to end.”

Alright, alright, sold! But give a gander at the printed or online catalog, and even a doubting Thomas can see why Slotin is tossing out such superlatives. This sale’s selection is deep but also unusually wide. There are more than 200 artists – many familiar, some never shown before -- represented in the 709 lots.

They include strong examples by the Greatest Generation of self-taught masters from the mid- to late-20th century, including Joseph Yoakum, Howard Finster, Sam Doyle, Thornton Dial and Edgar Tolson. The Black female artists from the South that Slotin has championed in recent years – including Minnie Evans, Nellie Mae Rowe, Clementine Hunter and Inez Nathaniel Walker – stand out and should be counted.

A sampling of artworks that fit into “The Strange, The Unusual, The Vanishing America,” Slotin’s favorite broad catchphrase for his sales, are represented, too. (A hand-carved walking stick of Dolly Parton being chomped by a gator or a set of eight miniature 1940s-‘50s Coke machines crafted of painted cardboard, anyone?)

You want it, this Self-Taught Art Masterpiece sale, which will take place online at LiveAuctioneers.com, seems to have it. It’s the work that lives outside of Slotin’s usual categories that may surprise some bidders.

Unapologetically close to the front of the catalog, where Slotin usually showcases its hottest, high-estimate folk lots, he’s presenting five pages of works by indisputable contemporary artists – the late Chicago Imagist Roger Brown, the British figurative drawing duo Hipkiss, Pop-influenced Ed Paschke and Mississippi nature artist Walter Anderson.

Brown’s “Visit the Oregon Coast,” a 52-inch-tall oil on canvas with a 3-D platform for four taxidermy seagulls, carries the auction’s highest estimate: $100,000-$200,000. Paschke’s oil on canvases, “Holy Stick Man” and “The Optimist,” are projected at $50,000-$75,000 each. The auction catalog’s cover image, a carved and painted mixed media figure with a cigarette clinched in his lips, is another 40 pages back and sports a $2,000-$3,000 estimate.

So, is Slotin Folk Art changing its colors? Hardly, says Steve, who views the contemporary invasion as a kind of overdue validation for folk art. He says he’s told folk sellers and collectors and self-taught artists for years that they should stop chasing acceptance in the contemporary field. “I’m like, ‘No, we’re our own field, we’re the greatest art form that America has ever produced.’”

He notes that Brown collected folk art, and Paschke’s father was a folk art carver and that there’s a long history of trained artists looking to untrained for inspiration. (See Picasso, Pablo.) Slotin says the collectors who want to include their contemporary pieces in a folk art auction “are moving the needle forward.”

Or maybe they’ve just noticed that Slotin Auction moves art, and the prices it realizes are steadily rising. In Slotin’s Fall Self-Taught Art Masterpiece Sale last November, the auction house shipped pieces all over the country and internationally. Mostly American-made folk art landed in some exotic spots: a Roy Ferdinand painting in Dubai, Billy Ray Hussey folk pottery to Canada, a Z.B. Armstrong doomsday calendar in France …

“I just think it is so much fun to imagine the work of Roy Ferdinand telling the hardscrabble struggle of life on the streets of New Orleans hanging in a collection in Dubai,” says Amy Slotin, Steve’s wife and business partner.