How Bazaar

“These objects come to us in forty-year cycles,” John Radtke, an antiques dealer from Santa Fe told me as we chatted at his booth at the Nameless Art + Design Show. “That’s our chance to find them and see them. Then they get bought and go into someone’s house for another forty years.” Radtke’s display included a set of asymmetrical, hand-ornamented chairs and a century-old cashbox with prismatic enameling, but his centerpiece was a frame filled with a grid of 153 Polaroid portraits taken at a class reunion in Springer, New Mexico, sometime in the 1970s. Radtke and his collaborator Garett Miller had found the photographs stacked by the register of a junk shop not far from the school. Beneath the period fashion—cowboy hats, beehives, and colored sunglasses, worn indoors—the subjects appeared remarkably at ease. They didn’t know it at the time, but they were each doing a small part in creating a piece of vernacular art.

Nameless, an antique fair dedicated to work by authors who are either anonymous or little known, held at a rentable gallery space on West Twenty-Sixth S…