More than 1,200 items of self-taught art in a variety of forms will be on display and for purchase this weekend at the Slotin Folk Art Auction at Buford Hall, 112 E. Shadburn Ave.

Items from face jugs to paintings, quilts to pottery will be offered to the top bidders.

The auction comes on the heels of the enormously successful 17th annual Folk Fest, also staged by Slotin Folk Art Auction in Buford. More than 12,000 attendees poured into town from all across the country to experience what was billed as "The World's Greatest Self-Taught Art Show and Sale."

Amy Slotin said the attendance was the second-highest ever for a Folk Fest.

This weekend's featured art will include outsider, antique and anonymous folk art, Southern folk pottery, vernacular photography, quilts, canes, African-American decorative arts, circus works, oddities, industrial molds, the strange, the unusual and vanishing America. Headlining the two-day auction will be the prestigious Howard Campbell Americana Collection.

The most unique piece offered is an original Eli Whitney cotton gin, hand-carved and assembled wood with all original parts in near-mint condition, which is expected to go for an estimated $25,000 to $45,000. This piece of American history was previously on display at a museum in Owensboro, Ky. It features metal cotton cutting blades and metal wire seed separating brushes.

Potter Billy Ray Hussey of North Carolina has a pair of sculpted and glazed matching dogs (estimated $2,000-$3,000), each initialed by the artist and in mint condition.

Also offered will be a tobacco-spit glaze jug with a devil face created by folk potter Lanier Meaders, famous for his spooky face jugs.

An important piece of civil rights history will change hands when Larry Godwin's signed oil canvas, "Lookaway, Lookaway" from 1965 will go for an estimated 3,000 to $5,000).

Slotin is accepting quality consignments for future sales. A 140-page color catalog of pieces soon will be available.