The Winter Show: Fair Play: American Game Boards c. 1890 - 1940

Making its debut at The Winter Show, Ricco/Maresca presents a group of unique American game boards dating from the late 19th century through the first half of the 20th. Crafted as functional objects by unknown makers, these boards have outgrown their original purpose. Seen today, they feel like unexpected cousins of modern and contemporary art—rigorous, graphic, and boldly abstract.

Before mass entertainment and factory production made leisure disposable, people often built their own means of play—in homes and small workshops, using native hardwoods and durable household paint. Within the shared “rules” of each game, makers took creative liberties that feel like improvisation: the framework is fixed, but the visual language is personal—sometimes ornate, sometimes distilled to near-minimal form.

Game board structures offer a striking vocabulary: rhythmic grids, quartered architectures, dagger-like triangles, perfect symmetries, and concentric webs—patterns as direct and cohesive as the best minimalism and geometric abstraction (and often made earlier). Just as compelling is their material truth: worn surfaces, scratches from years of touch, cracking paint, and softened pigments make time visible—a threshold to lives once lived around a table.

For over forty years, Ricco/Maresca has championed self-taught, outsider, and vernacular art as essential to the larger art-historical story. This presentation argues that exceptional game boards—especially those made by anonymous hands—deserve to move closer to fine art and further from the limits of “craft.”