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"View Slideshow\n\nIn January designer Elissa Cullman went shopping for folk art at the upscale American Antiques Show and the more affordable Stella Americana Pier Show, two fairs that are part of New York's busy annual Americana Week.\n\n\"We need to go to shows of all levels to realize an entire design project,\" Cullman explains. \"With antiques, it's not just a question of money. The stars' of a room won't shine as much if there are too many of them.\"\n\nUnlike most designers, Cullman is a folk art expert. She was a curator at the American Folk Art Museum in New York for five years before becoming a designer and has collected folk art for decades.\n\nAt the fairs, she was on the prowl for pieces for her clients. \"The shows are great because they offer something for every collector,\" she says. Cullman and her associate of 14 years, Tracey Pruzan, attended both fairs armed with workbooks from the office containing floor plans and elevations of their clients' houses, fabric swatches and lists of what was needed by room.\n\n\"A private person can pick something up before it's resold\u2014at a higher price\u2014up the antiques food chain.' \"\n\nTheir first stop at The American Antiques Show (TAAS) was the booth run by Mark and Marjorie Allen, dealers in folk art for 39 years in Manchester, New Hampshire. \"The Allens know everything,\" says Cullman. \"They also always go to the trouble of putting in a period room of great refinement.\"\n\nThis year, the Allens set a Queen Anne drop-leaf walnut table from Philadelphia and four 1760s Chippendale chairs from Massachusetts in front of an 18th-century Connecticut fire surround with its original blue-and-white paint.\n\n\"We're primarily pre-Revolutionary,\" Mark Allen says of his specialty. A faux-marbre corner cupboard with fluted moldings and scalloped shelves\u2014likely from Portsmouth, New Hampshire\u2014circa 1750, held 18th-century Dutch blue-and-white calendar plates signed by Justus Brouwer.\n\n\"I love the fact that he has things that aren't American,\" Cullman remarks. \"That's how it should be.\"\n\nA rare Taunton, Massachusetts, blanket chest painted with red decorations caught her eye, too. \"That chest is museum quality,\" she says. (In fact, the Allens often sell to museums such as the Winterthur and Colonial Williamsburg.)\n\nA graduated stack of 19 antique pantry boxes, all in different colors, drew Cullman to the offerings of Jewett-Berdan, of Newcastle, Maine, which was new to the show.\n\n\"I always try to focus on dealers who are less familiar,\" Cullman says. She was especially taken with a whimsical Nantucket, Massachusetts, whirligig in the form of an African American sailor\u2014the first of its kind she'd ever seen, Cullman notes.\n\nNearby, a late-19th-century Navajo blanket was stopping traffic at the display by Hill Gallery, of Birmingham, Michigan. A red figure with arms raised was repeated in four parallelograms bordered by white and red zigzag stripes. \"It's particularly interesting because the hands are waving in different directions,\" Cullman says.\n\n\"The Navajo were extremely creative; we call their tight, bold, graphic weavings eye dazzlers,' \" says Timothy Hill, who, along with his wife, Pamela, has been dealing in fine art and folk art for decades. \"We like textiles that have the kind of internal connection that talks to people.\"\n\nAdds Cullman: \"It's important that Native American material be part of the whole package at these fairs.\"\n\nA set of five boldly colored circa 1900 golden plover decoys from Massachusetts beckoned Cullman to the RJG Antiques booth, run by Russ and Karen Goldberger, Rye, New Hampshire, dealers who specialize in decoys that retain their original painted surfaces. It's rare to have a large number of such decoys from the same source, Russ Goldberger says.\n\nElliott Grace Snyder, of South Egremont, Massachusetts, created a room with an elaborate turned ocher-painted 1830s bed, a small New England yellow dressing table from 1820, several hooked rugs and a set of fancy red-and-polychrome Sheraton chairs with stars on the central back splat. \"The red chairs are in mint condition\u2014and so happy,\" Cullman comments.\n\n\"Our fanciful wood bed has to be from Pennsylvania,\" Elliott Snyder says. \"The turnings have a Germanic, robust quality you don't often see in New England.\"\n\nFor Cullman and Pruzan, the final stop at TAAS was to New York dealers Woodard Greenstein American Antiques. Cullman admired shelves filled with brown-, yellow- and green-glazed Jasp\u00E9 bowls and pitchers from the Savoy region of France. \"Jasp\u00E9 pottery is similar to American redware, but it's cheaper and less rare,\" says Blanche Greenstein.\n\n\"I love the mix and variety,\" Cullman says. \"I tend to buy a whole group of objects like these to make an instant collection for a client.\"\n\nThen she and Pruzan were off to the Stella Americana Pier Show, an event Cullman says \"is always exciting, because that's where the dealers go to shop as well as the private collectors, so a private person can pick something up before it's resold\u2014at a higher price\u2014up the antiques food chain.' \" There they made a beeline to the vintage African American quilts presented by David Kim Leggett, dealers from Newbern, Tennessee.\n\nThe quilts, in bold, geometric patterns, are mostly from the South and date to the early 1900s. One colorful example from Alabama was made with dish towel fragments on one side and bits of discarded dress fabric on the other. Another, in a multiple Housetop pattern, had strips of red, white and blue material.\n\n\"Customers tend to hang these quilts as art,\" Kim Leggett says. \"They're more moderately priced than paintings.\"\n\nTheir next stop was at the display by Nancy and Craig Cheney, by-appointment dealers in Newark, Ohio, who specialize in antique weathervanes, especially one-of-a-kind types. \"Homemade weathervanes always have so much charm,\" says Craig Cheney, who showed a large yellow cow made of wood, a quirky rooster in copper and a four-foot-long horse in sheet iron. \"We try to buy from private collections,\" he says. \"In Ohio there are still a few things left in houses and barns.\"\n\nNancy Fishelson, a former Los Angeles designer turned Connecticut antiques dealer, created a fully furnished room using two stylishly monogrammed wing chairs from Rhode Island, an 1820s pewter cupboard, a pastel folk portrait and a multicolor penny rug from the late 1800s. \"I buy things for their form and color,\" she says.\n\nRobert J. Perry, of Orchard Park, New York, had one truly distinctive piece: a wood wigmaker's head with protruding eyes, nose and mouth. \"It's very unusual because it has a carved face,\" he explains.\n\nCullman's last visit was to the booth of Susan E. Oostdyk, of Andover, New Jersey, a specialist in vintage textiles: French toile, mattress ticking and homespun linen.\n\n\"I get all my antique ticking in France,\" she says. \"New fabrics don't have the same depth of color.\"\n\nThe fabrics were piled on a 19th-century cast-iron \"mountaintop\" bed (named for the three humps in the headboard). On it was one of her Old World-style, hand-rolled French wool mattresses. \"I make them to measure,\" she says. \"People use them for banquettes and beds.\"\n\nFolk portraits, needlework, hooked rugs, decoys, quilts, furniture, weathervanes and whirligigs\u2014the diversity of the offerings at the Americana shows was staggering. For Cullman, it's not just the variety of objects themselves that's impressive but also the range of the sources: \"What's great about these fairs is that there are dealers from all over.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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