About Looking | Episode One : Online Exclusive | Kate Hackman on Carlotta M. Huse and Wayne B. Blouch

14 February - 31 March 2022

For over 40 years, Ricco/Maresca Gallery has helped build some of the great private, museum, and corporate collections. We have also come across wonderful works at a lower price pointwell below Darger, Traylor, Edmondson, Hawkins, and Ramírez — that have great integrity, and the ability to teach us about looking and collecting. “What’s it worth?” This question is only easy to answer if we look at art as a commodity. That is not what we’re doing here. Modestly priced works can still have important things to say and speak eloquently alongside master works; visionary collectors have been exploring this realm for a long time.

We found Kate Hackman, a dealer who works under the name of Critical Eye Finds, whose eye we admire and who deals with this type of material. We struck up a conversation about looking—how we look, why we look—and about our shared pleasure in finding unexpected things in unexpected places. Ultimately, our dialogue led to the concept of this online viewing room, which we hope will be the first in an ongoing collaboration. This is an experiment, one that we are not approaching from the mindset of commerce. We are interested in exploring the idea of looking at art and objects as independent from the realm of the art market, as only then will we truly understand what they have to say.

With this in mind, we invited Hackman to introduce this project and to consider a group of late 19th-early 20th century drawings by Carlotta M. Huse of Ossipee, New Hampshire and Wayne B. Blouch of Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, which we selected together.