BUFORD, GA.- Slotin Auction has been the go-to auction house for folk art, especially made-in-America self-taught art, since it held its first auction in 1994. But with each of the handful of sales it holds each year, Slotin expands the borders of what it defines as folk as well as the geographic lines of where that art is created.

The growth in international folk art is particularly pronounced in the Buford, GA-based auction house’s Self-Taught Art Masterpiece Sale on April 27-28. So much so that Slotin’s recent email blast to collectors carried the headline “Around the World in 80 Lots.” While the auction house didn’t really feature 80 international lots in one email, Slotin did include a sampling of work by artists from far-flung places that read like a United Nations roll call, including Michael Kashalos of Cyprus, Nikifor of Poland, Amos Ferguson from the Bahamas and Ukrainian-born Israel Litwak.

“It's a small world,” says Steve Slotin, “and when you stop and take a really good look at where these artists are from, you realize folk art is just like America -- it's a melting pot.”

The international pieces are sprinkled throughout the Self-Taught Art Masterpiece Sale’s 731 lots over its two days. Steve Slotin, who owns and operates the auction house with wife Amy, is an expert folk art hunter and gatherer, often driving across multiple state lines when a collector (or the estate of a collector) is ready to divest his or her holdings.

Depending on availability, each Slotin auction ends up taking on a personality of its own. This weekend’s sale includes many pieces from the estate of a collector who specialized in international folk art. By coincidence, several other consigners offered up works from distant shores, as well.

Haitian artists and artists representing the Art Brut movement in Europe are typically well represented in Slotin sales, but, in this weekend’s event, the auction house is handling some international artists for the first time. After all these years, Steve Slotin has deep knowledge about the wide, wild world of folk art, but there are some artists in the sale that he only knew through photographs in books such as the “World Encyclopedia of Naïve Art,” having never seen their work in person.

Amassing works for this sale, he’s seen many more. That’s made him interested in learning more about artists such as Croatian Franjo Mraz (1910-1981), represented by six paintings in the auction, who helped put that country's naive art movement on the map.

Mraz studied under Krsto Hegedušić, called "one of the first Croatian primitives," who encouraged his students to reject established art movements and rely on their own visions of the world. For Mraz, who grew up in the Croatian countryside, that meant recalling the rural life of his youth: the sowing and harvesting of the fields, shepherds with their cattle, folk festivals and holidays.

He worked in watercolor, then oil paints and, finally, tempera on glass, painting in soft tones that avoided hard lines and contours. It’s been noted that, after he served in World War II, Mraz’s later landscapes often whispered with an anxious tone, suggesting, perhaps, that his boyhood paradise had been lost.

“I have a feeling that if you were to travel anywhere in the world, you would probably come across self-taught artists,” Steve Slotin says. “I think this is still a growing and evolving field.”

Even with that expansion, there are artists who continue to command a big presence in Slotin auctions, such as Howard Finster (1916-2001), one of the 20th century's most celebrated creators. Among the 20 Finster lots in this weekend’s sale, a couple stand out: "Evening of Time at Hand" (1953) was painted more than two decades before the Northwest Georgia preacher famously heard a Godly voice telling him to “create sacred art” in 1976. He then prolifically produced and fastidiously numbered 46,991 pieces over the last 25 years of his life. Also noteworthy is “Elvis At 3 Years Old” (c. 1976, from just before Finster began his obsessive numbering system), painted on a heavy burlap sack.

As usual, Slotin Auction's Self-Taught Art Masterpiece Sale also will offer important works by major African-American artists of the 20th century, including the late Alabama street artist Bill Traylor (whose simple painting of a pig on the back of a cardboard Granger tobacco advertisement, c. 1939-42, carries the auction’s highest estimate, $60,000-$90,000). Other important artists with pieces in this category are by Miami’s Purvis Young (seven paintings, most notably including the 8-foot-wide “Trapped Spirits,” estimated at $50,000-80,000); and Louisiana plantation worker Clementine Hunter (four memory paintings).

Another late African-American artist to watch is Chicago artist Joseph Yoakum (1891-1972), who began illustrating his memories at age 71. Interest in Yoakum’s landscapes (of places real and imagined) has been on the rise since the Museum of Modern Art exhibited more than 100 of his works in the 2021-22 exhibition “What I Saw.” (There are four Yoakums in this weekend’s auction.)

“That's the kind of attention we expect to see hopefully in the future for a lot of these artists, a one-man show at MOMA,” Steve Slotin says. “I mean, once the rest of the art world catches up to what art collectors already know.”

Slotin Auction’s Self-Taught Art Masterpiece Sale on April 27-28 will be held online (via LiveAuctioneers.com), with phone and absentee bidding available. Information: slotinfolkart.com.