Miller Off Main art gallery and custom framing. We've all heard the phrase, "I don't know much about art, but I know what I like."

Robert Miller, proprietor of the Miller off Main art gallery and frame shop, has learned quite a lot about art in his 35-year career, and he has acquired his knowledge and a gorgeously diverse collection simply by pursuing what he likes.

Miller doesn't ride the wave of trends in the art world so much as the meandering current of his own tastes. In choosing to collect and display only objects that he personally appreciates, he has become an unlikely weather vane for the evolution of what is fashionable (or even acceptable) material for the museum curator and high-end art dealer.

Miller off Main is perhaps best known around town for its diverse collection of pieces from Africa and Asia. Miller began collecting African masks and statuary in the 1970's when a dealer happened to stop by the gallery. He then branched out into buying antique furniture and Chinese wood carvings, initially because he wanted more interesting display surfaces for the artwork than generic, white plinths and pedestals.

Over the years, the gallery bloomed into a lively jumble of antiques and contemporary objects made by artists in the New River Valley and all over the world. A whimsical toy chicken with moving parts sits beside a large, beaded Yoruban ceremonial soft-sculpture. A kaleidoscope, elegantly handmade in wood, metal and glass by Virginia Tech professor Paul Knox, rests unassumingly beside nesting wooden bowls and 20th century antique Chinese ceramics. A red-painted wooden Indonesian deer head, with genuine antlers, hangs like a hunting trophy on the wall (Miller calls the head "my concession to the Christmas decorating season"). A basket of Tibetan tantric amulets sits for customers to sift through on a table in front of the frame shop's display of samples. A peek down the basement stairs reveals an impressive wall display of masks: massive faces and bird-heads from Africa, carved out of wood, as well as Mexican Day of the Dead masks painted on cut-out copper flashing, which is commonly used to make roofs leak-proof.

Like Warhol, Miller is fascinated by the aesthetic potential of commercial art and mass-produced pieces. While getting his college degree in the early 1970's, Miller studied printmaking, still a misunderstood medium. "What is an 'original print?' When a photographer makes a print, what's the original? The negative? Your newspaper is a lithograph. Your Coke can is a serigraph. You see what I'm saying," he says.

Trained as an architect at Virginia Tech, Miller has a keen eye for design and an educated respect for the beauty of utilitarian objects, particularly those from Africa . He values the clean structure of a tripod neck rest from Somalia or Northern Kenya, and the decorative intricacy and workmanship put into tools used for daily survival and metal objects used as tribal currency. Although Miller has not been alone in this appreciation, overall it has taken some time to catch on.

The term "indigenous art," freed from its traditionally ethnocentric implications, means nothing more than "art made by people from a specific location with locally available materials." Miller had the chance to make this point recently when Blacksburg High School's art teacher, Jesi Pace-Berkeley, approached him asking to borrow some of his masks to inspire her students in a project on indigenous art. He suggested that her students might be more excited by an approach that related more closely to their everyday lives, by making "body adornments" out of materials that were readily available or personally meaningful to them. The results of this project will be displayed in an exhibit in Virginia Tech's Perspective Gallery this spring.

The difference, if any, between what is called "fine art" and what is called "commercial art," "craft," or "tribal artifact" has been challenged and changed continuously for as long as Miller has been in business, and his collections reflect the fertile, sometimes chaotic history of the definition of art over the last three decades.