By Frank Storey | Tucson, AZ
Dealer Profile
Grace Yamamoto has been buying and selling American pottery and folk art for forty years. She has done this from the front seat of a succession of vans — currently a 2019 Ford Transit with 188,000 miles on it — driving a circuit that takes her from the Rose Bowl Flea Market in Pasadena to the Springfield Antiques Show in Ohio and back again, roughly eight times a year.
She does not have a shop. She has never had a shop. “A shop is a building that costs money whether anyone walks in or not,” she said, sitting in a folding chair behind her booth at the Tucson Antiques & Collectibles Market on a Sunday morning in March. “A van is a shop that goes where the customers are.”
— Grace Yamamoto
Her inventory runs deep in Roseville, McCoy, and Bauer, with a sideline in hand-forged ironwork that she picks up from estate sales in rural Arizona and New Mexico. She can spot a Bauer ringware pitcher across a crowded field from forty feet — “It’s the color. That orange doesn’t exist in nature. Once you’ve seen it, your eye finds it automatically.”
She learned the business from her father, Ken Yamamoto, who ran a small antiques booth at the Pasadena City College Flea Market in the 1970s and 1980s. He specialized in Japanese woodblock prints and small bronzes, buying from Nisei families in the San Gabriel Valley who were downsizing. Grace started helping him at age twelve, wrapping purchases in newspaper and making change from a cigar box.
“My father taught me two things,” she said. “First, always be honest about condition. Second, never fall in love with inventory. He was terrible at the second one. I’m worse.”
Her regular customers include decorators in Scottsdale and Phoenix, a handful of museum curators who call her when they need a specific form to fill a gap in a collection, and a growing number of younger collectors who find her through Instagram, where she posts under the handle @desertpotterygrace. She has 14,000 followers, a fact that amuses her. “I don’t understand how it works. My granddaughter set it up. I just take pictures of pots and people seem to like them.”
She turns seventy next year and says she has no plans to slow down. “I’ll stop when the van stops,” she said. “And I just put new tires on it, so that’s not happening soon.”