Incollect Magazine - Issue 2

2022 Incollect Magazine 35 wealthy family so my entry point was at a price that was reasonable, the material was available and interesting.” The field was wide open back then, he recalls. “Folk Art is at the root of every culture in the world. It had taken time for a young America to begin to celebrate its own Folk Artists. They were greatly influenced by America’s melting pot culture. To an extent, as a market genre it was somewhat young in the formation stage when I began collecting.” Collecting led Katz into dealing, he says. He was invited in 1983 to take a booth at the Fall Folk Art Show in New York, organized by show promoter Sandy Smith, who was a friend and knew of his collecting interests. “Sandy would save a booth each year and invite a collector who wanted to show and maybe sell some of their excess pieces, and I got the booth that year. That was my first show.” He became a full-time dealer around 1985, selling out of his home, and became a regular on the antique show circuit. For the next decade Katz did 12–14 shows a year all over the country, focused on Folk Art. It was, he says, a tremendous education. “During the 1970s and 80s so much new material was being discovered that it allowed someone to get a lot of on-the-job education and training, especially as prices were more relaxed. You could learn a lot by buying it, living with it, learning about it, and taking it to shows to see how it resonated with others. There were also books being published and museum shows. I was honored to be part of a generation of dealers and collectors that were permitted to judge the material as it was increasingly being discovered.” As the Folk Art market matured, so did Katz as a collector and dealer. He began to focus more on finding higher end pieces, doing shows with better Previous page: Hanging on the wall, a stunning and important work, “Exciting Event” by Bill Traylor, a Black Folk Artist born enslaved, whose work depicts simple, traditional folkways, often with veiled and potent symbolism or allegorical meaning. A design dating to 1929, the Mies van der Rohe Barcelona coffee table displays a carved pipe display piece circa 1880 by William DeMuth, from his tobacco shop on Broadway, NYC. Above: The elegant and romantic nineteenth-century swan child’s sled is one of the cornerstone pieces of the Katz’s collection, They have lived with and loved it for over 35 years and and as Penny Katz remarked, “It’s everyone’s favorite.”