COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. - "Petrified Creatures... Dinosaurs - Fun - Fossils" says a sign at the intersection of Routes 80 and 20 in Springfield, N.Y. Creatures and fun notwithstanding, the one filling-station town in upstate New York offers little competition to nearby Cooperstown, a postcard-perfect village steeped in legend.

So many legends are afoot in Cooperstown that visitors could happily spend days retracing the steps of giants. In the early Nineteenth Century, James Fenimore Cooper set some of his quintessentially American tales in the hills pocketing the long, blue gash he called Glimmerglass, or Lake Otsego.

A century later, art collector Stephen Clark donated a stately brick mansion built on the site of Cooper's farmhouse to the New York State Historical Association. The colonnaded brick expanse now contains the 250,000-object collection of the Fenimore Art Museum, the fine-arts companion to the Farmers' Museum. The latter, another Clark family contribution, showcases heritage breeds, rural New York architecture, farm implements and the Cardiff Giant, the "petrified man" who mesmerized America in the 1860s. The Cardiff Giant was a hoax; not so batting champion Mark McGuire, whose uniform is enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame a mile away.

All these are all sideshows in a town whose main attraction this summer is "Empire State Mosaic: The Folk Art Of New York State." Organized by the New York State Historical Society's chief curator, Paul D'Ambrosio, the display at the Fenimore Art Museum culls more than 100 works from 85 public and private collections.

One of several shows planned to coincide with NYSHA's centennial, "Empire State Mosaic" boasts its own giants and legends. For Americana enthusiasts, a tour of the galleries summons recollections of the kindred spirits - among them Elie Nadelman, Jean Lipman, Mary Allis, Lou Jones, Mr and Mrs Gunn, Herbert Hemphill, Cora Ginsburg, Peter Tillou, Marguerite Riordan, William Guthman and Ron Bourgeault, to name a few - who gathered, preserved or sold some of the masterworks on view.

D'Ambrosio remembers the day in 1981 when, fresh out of the Cooperstown graduate degree program in museum studies, he joined NYSHA's staff. "There was a show at the Farmers' Museum that had been on view since 1959," recalls the curator. The museum currently mounts a dozen displays a year. In addition to "Empire State Mosaic," "A Century of Collecting, " "Hallowed Ground and Holy Water: Lake George In American Art" and "When The Hop Was King: The Hop Industry In New York State" are also up through December. The lively calendar is one feature of an institution that has, over the past half decade, flourished under the leadership of NYSHA president Gilbert T. Vincent.

For almost as long as he has been at NYSHA D'Ambrosio imagined an exhibition that would plait the disparate strands of vernacular art produced in the state over three centuries. "This is an organization that was brought together in 1899 to study New York history. We've been collecting folk art since the 1940s, when we acquired 13 pieces from the Nadelman estate through Stephen Clark. It was only two years later that Clark bought the folk art collection of Jean and Howard Lipman," the curator notes.

Clark was guided by Lou Jones, who died in 1990. NYSHA's legendary former director influenced D'Ambrosio as well, indirectly helping to shape his views on what should, and should not, be included in "Empire State Mosaic." "Both Stephen Clark and Lou Jones were broad-minded humanists," explains the curator. A folklorist and educator when he came to NYSHA in 1947, Jones, says D'Ambrosio, "cared about people, especially ordinary people and their heritage. He was democratic and inclusive in his intellectual endeavors. He wasn't wed to one discipline, but looked objectively at a body of material. He didn't exclude what might not be folk art in the purest definition."

Thus unburdened by ideological constraint, D'Ambrosio placed vernacular art produced over many decades by people of diverse ethnic origins into a single context. Moreover, he arrived at a conclusion that some traditionalists might find startling: "...Folk art is not always created in isolated communities," the curator wrote in the April issue of The Magazine Antiques. "In some cases it can be in the vanguard of taste and cross cultural boundaries."

After revisiting the literature and consulting specialists, D'Ambrosio concluded that New York is as much of a melting pot as ever. Moreover, it has been a place of extraordinary cultural exchange from its earliest days. "From the beginning, diversity has made New York different from New England, the Mid Atlantic and the South. We decided to look at the folk art of the state as evidence of how diverse peoples came together and formed a majority culture," he says. With the Thaw Collection of American Indian art permanently housed at NYSHA, it is no surprise that the interplay between Native people and European settlers is particularly well drawn.

Contemporary Scene

"Empire State Mosaic" begins where it ends, showcasing in its first gallery the often flamboyant efforts of self-taught artists working between 1950 and 1999. Malcah Zeldis's vivid acrylic on masonite portrait of the celebrity couple Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio is a tabloid tribute to the glitz and glamour of New York City.

The gallery also pays tribute to several of D'Ambrosio's heroes, among them the late Herbert W. Hemphill, Jr. "Marla," a moptop tin woman given by the visionary collector to the National Museum of American Art, takes its place beside Harry Lieberman's "Two Dreamers," a promised gift from David Davies to the Museum of American Folk Art; a Mohawk basket made in 1995; and a fishing box made in the 1980s by Michael Lavery, a member of the quartet of Troy, N.Y. tramp artists who call themselves the Hermitage Artists.

Modern Primitives

Behind a partition in the first gallery are the so-called "modern primitives." The influence of French self-taught artist Henri Rousseau on painters working between 1920 and 1950 is evident in the colorful, stylized imagery of Lawrence Lebduska. The son of Czech immigrants, Lebduska was brought to public attention by Museum of Modern Art director Alfred Barr in his seminal, 1938 exhibit "Masters of Popular Painting." The following year, Modern art dealer Sidney Janis introduced Grandma Moses, also represented here. In step with Social Realism, populist themes inform paintings from the 1940s by Ralph Fasanella, the late Yonkers, N.Y. artist who is the subject of D'Ambrosio's doctoral dissertation.

Colonial New York

The Twentieth Century material offers dramatic contrast to the show's earliest works. Made by New Yorkers of German, Dutch, English, Irish, French and Iroquois descent, the latter is arrayed in the darkened entry to the main gallery.

As crisp and delicate as a scherenschnitte, a sheet metal deer weathervane of circa 1720 is evidence of a culture whose roots were still firmly in the Old World. From the Holland Society of New York, "Coeymans Deer" is one of a number of rarely seen treasures that D'Ambrosio has coaxed out of institutions that seldom loan their collections, in part because they are not often asked.

Nearby, a circa 1732 painting on panel depicts the social and economic complexities of life on a Dutch farm. "We've shown the Van Bergen overmantel many times," says the curator of the panel found by a county historian and brought to the attention of Lou Jones. The earliest known genre painting of everyday American life is presented with a door knocker and date stone from the same estate, both on loan from the Greene County Historical Society. More evocative views of Eighteenth Century frontier life are offered in an assemblage of engraved powder horns. Two are from the collection of Westport, Conn. dealer William Guthman.

Federal New York

In the first decades of the Nineteenth Century, New York's population ballooned to 1.4 million as New Englanders migrated west. These English-speaking settlers brought with them their own cultural traditions, reflected in such curious hybrids as the Schultz family record, an Anglo-German document of 1795, or the Dennis Cusick watercolors, created in 1821 by an Iroquois leader and now property of the Rock Foundation.

Downstate, Brooklyn was emerging as the state's most fashionable address. Owned by Stonington, Conn., dealer Marguerite Riordan, an oil on panel portrait by James Herring depicts the man who laid out the streets of Brooklyn in 1836, John R. Pitkin. A second panel portrays his wife, Sophia.

"The biggest discoveries for me, personally, were Masonic items," confesses the curator. "I didn't realize how pervasive the fraternity was in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century, and how it affected the visual arts." Loaned by the Livingston Masonic Library & Museum in New York City, a hand-decorated ritual tracing board of circa 1800 offers clues for deciphering Masonic imagery. Says D'Ambrosio, "The Masonic emblems symbolize for me the notion that New York tried to be the kind of place where people of all backgrounds could speak a common language, one that was visual."

The Erie Canal

At the heart of "Empire State Mosaic" are paintings and artifacts produced between 1825 and 1865. The Erie Canal, which stretched 363 miles from Albany to Buffalo, generated enormous wealth and spurred development from Manhattan to the shores of Lake Superior. The canal was also a cultural conduit, disseminating styles westward and fostering artistic exchange with Native people.

New York's radically altered topography is shown in paintings such as "Poestenkill" by Joseph H. Hidley; "View of States Street in Albany" by John Wilson (Albany Institute of History and Art); and "Lockport on the Erie Canal" by Mary Keys (Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute).

The prevalence of portraiture is another sign of the newfound wealth along the canal. Dignified, stylized likeness by Noah North, Deborah Goldsmith, Sheldon Peck, Ammi Phillips, Susan C. Waters and Justus Dalee flattered the upstate elite.

"More than anything else, the Erie Canal created a New York style," says D'Ambrosio, who was struck by the profound effect that trade had on the production of pottery, metalwork and textiles. Producing cobalt-decorated stoneware, potteries sprung up in Utica, Athens and elsewhere along the water. Popularized by such publications as Godey's Lady's Book, Iroquois beadwork evolved in response to demand from Victorian women. On loan from the Museum of American Folk Art is tole-painted tin, made at the North, Filley, and Butler shops.

The decorative arts came together in interior design, reflected in a period room recreated in the center of the main gallery. Forming the basis of the display are 1831 murals by William Price. The panels were saved from a Springfield, N.Y., house that was dismantled by Henry Francis du Pont in the 1950s. The Delaware collector kept only a stair hall for Winterthur, giving the rest of the interior to NYSHA, where it has restored and presented for the first time with help from Don Carpentier and other talented craftsmen.

"An Empire State Mosaic" raises a curtain on an acquisitions program that remains active. Signed and dated 1845, portraits of Lyman and Helen Kingman by Susan C. Waters made news when they sold at Northeast Auction in 1998. A vibrant Yorktown album quilt, included in the landmark "Flowering Of American Folk Art" at the Whitney Museum in 1974, bears the provenance of textiles dealer Cora Ginsburg. NYSHA is still hoping to acquire Thomas Chambers' dramatic view of Cold Spring on Hudson, as seen from the proximity of West Point. Large and robust, the painting attracted attention at the 1999 Winter Antiques Show, where it was offered by Marguerite Riordan.

The Gilded Age

The seeds of our contemporary consumer culture are evident in the late Nineteenth Century trade signs and banners that close the show. Despite their familiarity, sculptures such as the "Lady of Fashion," attributed to Samuel Robb, or the iconic "Father Time," from the collection of the Museum of American Folk Art, are as forceful as when first carved.

True to its title, "Empire State Mosaic" is an intricately crafted display from which a cohesive design emerges. With much to be dazzled by, those familiar with folk art and the culture of collecting may find themselves drawn to the show's brilliant bits. Others will discern, perhaps for the first time, a pattern - the syncopated rhythm of continuity and change in the restless, regenerative vernacular art of New York.

Companion Catalog

Accompanying "Empire State Mosaic" is a catalog composed of four essays on New York State folk art by Rodney Blackburn, Paul D'Ambrosio, Ralph Sessions and Lee Cogan. Available in September, the publication costs $5 and is for sale in the museum's gift shop.

The New York State Historical Association is on Lake Road, Route 80, one mile north of the village of Cooperstown. Telephone 888/547-1450.