African American Art
Officers
Nigel Freeman
Vice President & Director, African American Art
nfreeman@swanngalleries.com
212 254 4710 ext. 33
Corey Serrant
Cataloguer
cserrant@swangalleries.com
(212) 254-4710 ext. 29
George S. Lowry
Chairman
Nicholas D. Lowry
President, Principal Auctioneer
924899
Andrew M. Ansorge
Vice President & Controller
Alexandra Mann-Nelson
Chief Marketing Officer
2030704
Todd Weyman
Vice President & Director, Prints & Drawings
1214107
Nigel Freeman
Vice President & Director, African American Art
Rick Stattler
Vice President & Director, Books & Manuscripts
Administration
Andrew M. Ansorge
Vice President & Controller
aansorge@swanngalleries.com
Ariel Kim
Client Accounting
akim@swanngalleries.com
Diana Gibaldi
Operations Manager
diana@swanngalleries.com
Kelsie Jankowski
Communications Manager
kjankowski@swanngalleries.com
Shannon Licitra
Shipping Manager
slicitra@swanngalleries.com
19th Century & Harlem Renaissance
Henry ossawa tanner (1859 - 1937)
Head of a Sheep.
Oil on canvas, mounted on board, circa 1880-81. 248x229 mm; 9¾x9 inches. Signed in oil, lower left.
Provenance: the estate of the artist, with estate blue ink stamp and the ink signature of Jesse O. Tanner, on the frame back; Grand Central Art Galleries, New York, with the label on the frame back; the artist Harry Andrew Jackson; thence by descent, private collection, Wyoming.
Tanner painted Head of a Sheep early in his studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts when he seized on the speciality of painting animals. With the support of his parents and inspiration from the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition, Henry Ossawa Tanner enrolled at the Academy in December of 1879. A year later he began life drawing classes under the tutelage of Thomas Eakins. After an interest in maritime painting, Tanner settled on painting animal subjects, with his stated desire “to become an American Landseer.” According to Anna O. Marley, “Tanner was so devoted to animal painting that he bought a sheep to serve as a model for his pastoral compositions.” This small study has clear ties in subject to Tanner’s 1881 Boy and Sheep Under a Tree. But its bold passages of painterly brushwork are closer to his naturalist study of lions, Pomp at the Zoo, circa 1880, and Lion Licking its Paw, 1886. Marley p. 19; Mosby pp. 74-75.
Estimate
$15,000 – $25,000
Edward m. bannister (1828 - 1901)
Crossing the Bridge before Sunset.
Oil on linen canvas, 1893. 406x660 mm; 16x26 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower right.
Provenance: Benjamin E. Perry; thence by descent, private collection, Connecticut.
Exhibited: Edward M. Bannister 1828 - 1901: A Centennial Retrospective, Roger King Gallery, Newport, RI, October 21 - November 30, 2001; Kenkeleba House, New York, NY, December 12, 2001 - February 9, 2002.
Illustrated: Corrine Jennings and Roger H. King, Jr. Edward M. Bannister 1828 - 1901: A Centennial Retrospective, p. 23.
This landscape is an excellent example of Edward M. Bannister's mature landscape painting, representing both the natural beauty of rural Rhode Island and man's place in it. Bannister began to explore more atmospheric and tonal painterly effects in his late 1880s and early 1890s landscapes. His Crossing the Bridge Before Sunset displays a beautiful overall golden hue and painterliness; the fading light of the day, filtered through an atmospheric sky, traverses a rich and verdant countryside. Bannister draws the viewer into the scene by placing the horse drawn cart moving into the center of the composition.
Estimate
$40,000 – $60,000
James bolivar needham (1850 - 1931)
Untitled (Chicago River Scene).
Oil on linen canvas, mounted on wood panel, 1905. 191x254 mm; 7½x10 inches. Signed in oil, lower right recto. Inscribed within a diamond “7½x10 inches” and “55” and “1905” in blue paint on burlap mounted on the verso.
Provenance: the Center for African American Decorative Arts, Atlanta; private collection, New York.
This charming nautical scene is a wonderful and scarce example of the painting of early Chicago artist James Bolivar Needham. Painted on the scene, these small paintings are Needham’s immediate observations from the city’s lakeside docks. Needham was born in Chatham, Ontario, Canada, a terminus point of the Underground Railroad. He left at the age of 14 and worked his way to Chicago on lumber schooners, via Lake Huron and Lake Michigan. His brother Will Needham recalled that he spent some time at the Chicago Art Institute - yet there are no records to support this claim. Needham has only had one documented exhibition - in a Central Art Association show in 1895. He worked in obscurity throughout his lifetime. A retrospective was held at Robert Henry Adams Fine Art, Chicago, February 28 - March 20, 1998, and several of his paintings from the collection of the Chicago Historical Society were included in the 2004 exhibition Chicago Modern 1893 - 1945 at the Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago. Schulman pp. 132-34.
Estimate
$7,000 – $10,000
William a. harper (1873 - 1910)
Untitled (Landscape).
Oil on thick cardstock, circa 1907. 324x387 mm; 12¾x15¼ inches. Signed in oil, lower right.
Provenance: estate of the artist; private collection, Decatur, IL (circa 1922), thence by descent, private collection, VA. The owner’s great grandmother acquired this painting from the Harper family in Decatur. A number of oil paintings by William A. Harper were exhibited at the Decatur Art Institute in January of 1922 .
William A. Harper likely painted this beautiful landscape on his second trip to Paris when he studied with Henry Ossawa Tanner. Like landscape painters Edward M. Bannister and James Bolivar Needham, William Harper was also born in Canada. His family moved from Cayuga to Illinois in 1885, and Harper attended the Art Institute of Chicago from 1895-1901, working as a night watchman and janitor to pay for his tuition. He studied in Paris first from 1903-1905 at the Académie Julian like Tanner. In 1905, the talented Harper earned the Municipal Art League’s blue ribbon at the Art Institute of Chicago for nine of his paintings. Harper’s career was cut short when he died of tuberculosis only a few years later at the age of 36. The Art Institute held a memorial exhibition in Harper’s honor, showcasing 60 of his works. His paintings are found today in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery, the Smithsonian American National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Tuskegee University and Dr. Walter O. Evans.
Thank you to Janet Nussbaum for her assistance with this painting with her extensive research of William A. Harper and the provenance of his paintings. Barnwell p. 157; Kennedy p. 119.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
James vanderzee (1886 -1983)
Shoe Store Salesman and Customer.
Silver print, circa 1925. 240x190 mm; 9½x7½ inches. Printed in the 1920-30s.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; private collection, New York; private collection, New York, acquired from Swann Galleries, Feburary 17, 2009.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
James vanderzee (1886 - 1983)
Untitled (Portrait of a Boy in a Sailor Suit).
Silver print, 1927. 171x127 mm; 6¾x5 inches. Signed and dated in pencil with Vanderzee’s “G.G.G. Photo Studio, Inc., 109 West 135th St.” ink stamp, verso.
Provenance: Howard Greenberg/Photofind, New York, with the gallery label on the mat; private collection, New York.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
James vanderzee (1886 - 1983)
Eighteen Photographs.
Portfolio of 18 mounted silver and sepia-toned silver prints, 1905-1938. Each approximately 184x241 mm; 7¼x9½ inches, loose as issued.
Edition of 75 numbered copies. Each signed and numbered I-XVIII and 75/75 in pencil on the mount, recto. Printed by Richard Benson, New York. Published by Graphics International Ltd., Washington, DC in 1974. Folio-size gray cloth slipcase.
Provenance: Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, private collection, New York.
Titles include: Couple, Harlem, 1932 * Nude, Harlem, 1923 * Mrs. Turner, Lenox, Mass., 1905 * Whittier Preparatory School, Phoebus, Va., 1907 * The VanDerZee Men, Lenox, Mass., 1908 * Kate and Rachel VanDerZee, Lenox, Mass., 1907 * Miss Suzie Porter, Harlem, 1915 * Marcus Garvey and Militia, Harlem, 1924 * Garveyite Family, Harlem, 1924 * Dancer, Harlem, 1924 * Portrait of an Actor, Harlem, 1929 * Swimming Team, Harlem, 1925 * Wedding Day, Harlem, 1926 * Black Jews, Harlem, 1929 * Atlantic City, 1930 * Portrait of Two Brothers and Their Sister, 1931 * The Heiress, Harlem, 1938 * Daddy Grace, Harlem, 1938.
A handsome portfolio, published by Harry Lunn, Jr., with iconic images from VanDerZee’s photographic career. It includes various subjects of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as studies of Marcus Garvey, Daddy Grace, and formal family portraits.
Estimate
$40,000 – $60,000
James vanderzee (1886 - 1983)
Swimming Team.
Silver print, 1925. 64x236 mm; 2½x9⅜ inches. Signed and numbered XI and 70/75 in pencil on the mount. Printed and published by Richard Berson and Graphics International Ltd., Washington, DC in 1974. From Eighteen Photographs.
Estimate
$1,500 – $2,500
James vanderzee (1886 - 1983)
Wedding Day, Harlem.
Silver print, 1926. 236x178 mm; 9⅜x7 inches. Signed and numbered XII and 70/75 in pencil on the mount. Printed and published by Richard Berson and Graphics International Ltd., Washington, DC in 1974. From Eighteen Photographs.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
James vanderzee (1886 - 1983)
Untitled (Woman in Fur Holding Cat).
Silver print, 1935. 171x127 mm; 9⅜x7⅝ inches.
Provenance: Howard Greenberg/Photofind, New York, with the gallery label on the mat; private collection, New York.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Richmond Barthé & Feral Benga
Feral Benga is an iconic artwork of the Harlem Renaissance. It represents the culmination of Richmond Barthé’s study of the figure in sculpture, anatomy and dance in the 1930s, and his pioneering realization of an ideal male nude. According to Barthé scholar Margaret Rose Vendryes, Feral Benga, Barthé’s “signature piece,” was completed within a few months of seeing the Folies Bergères dancer Benga perform on stage during his first visit to Paris in 1934. Vendryes describes how Benga was an exotic celebrity–a Senegalese cabaret dancer known in Parisian and Manhattan gay circles, who had performed on stage with Josephine Baker and had even appeared in a Jean Cocteau surrealist film. Barthé used postcards, photographs and his memory to recreate a life-like representation of the dancer. The raised sword pose also recalls the muscular nudes of the famous Mannerist engraving by Antonio Pollaiuolo, Battle of Naked Men, circa 1470.
Grander in scale than its actual size, Feral Benga was one of the artist’s major achievements in his life-long body of work, a natural and sensual representation of the male nude, made at the height of his career. The sculpture was first shown at the 1937 Dance International exhibition at Rockefeller Center, and was later featured and illustrated in Alain Locke’s seminal survey, The Negro in Art. The figure is also important as a groundbreaking evocation of both male and homosexual sexuality in early 20th century American Art. Vendryes pp. 66-69.
Carl Van Vechten and ©Van Vechten Trust. Richmond Barthé, and his sculpture, Feral Benga, 1937. Carl Van Vechten Papers Relating to African American Arts and Letters. James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Richmond barthé (1901 - 1989)
Feral Benga.
Bronze with a dark brown patina, modeled in 1935, cast circa 1960. Approximately 483 mm; 19 inches high (not including the marble base). Cast by the Modern Art Foundry, Long Island City, NY. Signed at the base edge.
Provenance: the artist; Samella Lewis, Los Angeles; Dr. Linda F. Rankin, New Jersey (1988); William Watson Hines III, thence by descent, private collection, New Jersey. Hines was a business writer, art dealer and collector who lent many works from his collection to the Art In Embassies Program of the US State Department.
Illustrated: Cedric Dover. American Negro Art, plate 70 (another impression).
Feral Benga represents the culmination of Richmond Barthé's study of the figure in sculpture, anatomy and dance in the 1930s, and his pioneering realization of an ideal male nude. According to Barthé scholar Margaret Rose Vendryes, Feral Benga, Barthé's "signature piece," was completed within a few months of seeing the Folies Bergères dancer Benga perform on stage during his first visit to Paris in 1934. Vendryes describes how Benga was an exotic celebrity--a Senegalese cabaret dancer known in Parisian and Manhattan gay circles, who had performed on stage with Josephine Baker and had even appeared in a Jean Cocteau surrealist film. Barthé used postcards, photographs and his memory to recreate a life-like representation of the dancer. The raised sword pose also recalls the muscular nudes of the famous Mannerist engraving by Antonio Pollaiuolo, Battle of Naked Men, circa 1470.
Grander in scale than its actual size, Feral Benga was one of the artist's major achievements in his life-long body of work, a natural and sensual representation of the male nude, made at the height of his career. The sculpture was first shown at the 1937 Dance International exhibition at Rockefeller Center, and was later featured and illustrated in Alain Locke's seminal survey, The Negro in Art. The figure is also important as a groundbreaking evocation of both male and homosexual sexuality in early 20th century American Art.
Thank you to Margaret Vendryes for her assistance with the cataloguing of this cast. This is only the second mid-career cast of this bronze sculpture to come to auction--there are only two bronzes known to exist from the first 1935 casting. Under the supervision of the artist and the Richmond Barthé Trust, an edition of 10 numbered casts and a small number of artist's proofs of Feral Benga were made in 1986. Vendryes pp. 66-69.
Estimate
$75,000 – $100,000
Richmond barthé (1901 - 1989)
Head of a Dancer (Harald Kreutzberg).
Bronze with a brown patina, mounted on a white marble base, 1937. Approximately 311 mm; 12¼ inches high (not including the base). A later casting, from an edition of 25. Signed, inscribed “xxx” and number stamped “25” along the upper edge, verso.
Provenance: private collection, Washington, DC.; the estate of Allan O. Hunter, Jr., acquired at Swann Galleries, October 4, 2018.
This contemplative but powerful head by Richmond Barthé is his well known portrait of the Czech-born German dancer Harald Kreutzberg (1902 - 1968). Kreutzberg is an important figure in German ballet and modern dance whom Richmond Barthé befriended when he performed in New York in the 1930s. Barthé made several sculptures of the expressive dancer in busts and figures. Barthé himself had studied Martha Graham dance techniques in an effort to more fully understand the movement and form of dancing figures.
A plaster cast of this head was exhibited and illustrated in the 1974 Anacostia Museum catalogue The Barnett-Aden Collection. A similar bronze casting, the same size as this head, is illustrated in the 1995 The Catalogue of the Barnett-Aden Collection and dated “circa 1973.” Other bronze casts of this head are in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, the David C. Driskell Collection, the Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art at the Savannah College of Art and Design, and the Kinsey Collection of African-American Art and History. Kinard p. 40; Auzenne, p. 42.
Estimate
$15,000 – $25,000
James lesesne wells (1902 - 1992)
Group of 5 linoleum cuts.
Each on cream thin Japan paper, circa 1930. 387x273 mm; 15¼x10¾ inches (sheet), full margins.
This illustrative series is a very scarce example of printmaking from the Harlem Renaissance era. James Lesesne Wells’s early career as a printmaker is characterized by his easy mastery of block prints. Wells also was very successful in having this graphic work widely published in leading black periodicals like The Crisis and Opportunity; his illustrations accompanied the writing of the likes of writers Alain Locke, Marianne Moore, Willis Richardson and Carter Woodson.
Estimate
$8,000 – $12,000
Modern Art
Allan rohan crite (1910 - 2007)
Way Down in Egypt’s Land.
Pen, brush and ink on cream illustration board, 1937. 432x305 mm; 17x12 inches. Signed and dated in ink, lower right.
Provenance: private collection, New Jersey.
This large, beautiful drawing by Crite impressively illustrates the second verse of the refrain from the spiritual Go Down Moses, popularized by Fisk University Jubilee Singers: “Go down, Moses! Way down in Egypt’s land. Tell old Pharoah. Let my people go!”
Estimate
$7,000 – $10,000
Frederick d. jones (1914 - 2004)
Go Down Moses.
Wood engraving on cream wove paper, circa 1937-40. 178x127 mm; 7x5 inches, wide margins. Signed and titled in pencil, lower margin. A very good, dark impression of this scarce, early print.
Estimate
$1,200 – $1,800
Loïs mailou jones (1905 - 1998)
Untitled (Street Scene in Cabris).
Gouache and pencil on artist’s gesso board, 1938. 406x305 mm; 16x12 inches. Signed and dated in gouache, lower right recto. Inscribed “Lois M. Jones Cabris” in pencil on the verso.
Provenance: Parrish Gallery, Georgetown, Washington, DC, with the gallery label verso; private collection, Florida; private collection, North Carolina.
This charming street corner scene is an unusual example of a gouache from Loïs Mailou Jones’s oeuvre. Cabris is a picturesque village in the Alpes-Maritimes department of southeastern France, and was the hometown of her close friend Céline Tabary. Jones first visited the town in 1937 during her first year of studies in Paris, and returned numerous times over a period of some 50 years. Jones and her husband Pierre-Noël were also married there in 1953.
Estimate
$6,000 – $9,000
Claude clark (1915 - 2001)
Three Men.
Etching on wove paper, 1939. 114x152mm; 4½x6 inches, full margins. Signed and titled in pencil, lower margin.
This scarce etching is based on Claude Clark’s same-titled 1939 painting of soldiers carrying their wounded compatriots during the Spanish Civil War. Clark also made a carborundum mezzotint entitled Three Men in Spain of the same subject.
Estimate
$1,500 – $2,500
William e. smith (1913-1997)
War Fatigue.
Linoleum cut on wove paper, 1940. 304x254 mm; 12x10 inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 7/10 in pencil, lower margin.
Another impression of this very scarce print is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
William E. Smith, alongside artists Hughie Lee-Smith, Elmer Brown, Charles Sallée, and others, formed the influential circle of African American artists who trained and exhibited at the WPA-funded Karamu House art center in Cleveland, Ohio in the late 1930 and early 1940s. Smith’s important, early linocuts were exhibited nationally throughout his lifetime. After his service in WWII, Smith settled in Los Angeles where he worked as both as an artist and cultural activist. He helped found the group Art West Associated in 1960, an organization formed to promote African American artists in California.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Claude clark (1915 - 2001)
Medal of Honor.
Crayon and graphite on printed cream wove paper, 1944. 127x203 mm; 5x8 inches. Signed in pencil, lower edge.
Provenance: the estate of the artist; thence by descent, private collection, Texas.
This image on a reclaimed page from a book is a scarce example of an interracial wartime image of American soldiers. Troop integration did not occur in basic training camps until after World War II when President Harry Truman reluctantly integrated the Armed Forces in 1948.
Estimate
$1,500 – $2,500
John n. robinson (1912 - 1994)
A Black Man at the White House.
Oil on canvas board, 1943. 292x292 mm; 11½x11½ inches (image); 406x508 mm; 16x20 inches (board). Signed, titled and dated in felt tip marker and blue ink, verso. With a pencil sketch of the artist John Farrar, and inscribed with Farrar’s Washington, DC address on the verso.
Provenance: collection of the artist, with the artist’s typed label on the verso; private collection, Washington, DC. (circa 1979-80), acquired from Aldous Ealey and the Barnett-Aden Gallery, Washington, DC.
Exhibited: John Robinson: A Retrospective, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, June 18 - July 30, 1976.
Illustrated: Adolphus Ealey, John R. Kinard and Roy Slade, John Robinson: A Retrospective, the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum, Smithsonian Institution, in cooperation with the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, p. 31. The catalogue notes quote Robinson: “this (painting) was done for a mural competition at the Recorder of Deeds Office; it depicts Senator Pomeroy introducing Frederick Douglass to President Lincoln”.
Frederick Douglass famously visited President Abraham Lincoln in August of 1863, without an appointment. On the way to the White House, Douglass met Samuel C. Pomeroy, a senator from Kansas, who introduced him to the President. The artist’s typed description reads; “A Black Man at the White House. In 1863, during the Civil War, Frederick Douglass visited President Lincoln at the White House to ask that Negores be enlisted in the Union Army. This resulted in the forming of the two Negro regiments, the 54th and the 55th from Boston, Massachusetts. The First Negro Soliders in the Union Army.”
This historical scene is an early, significant painting by John N. Robinson, a great artist whose work rarely comes to auction. This native Washington, DC painter should be considered a significant modern portrait artist alongside Archibald M. Motley. Robinson excelled at warm depictions of African American friends and family, in addition a series of striking self-portraits. Despite a long career and museum exhibitions, Robinson’s work went largely unheralded outside of Washington, DC during his lifetime. Robinson received recognition for his painting late in his career with a solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1976, and a retrospective at the Anacostia Museum and Center for African American History and Culture in 1983. His paintings are found today in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Anacostia Community Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Howard University Gallery of Art.
Estimate
$12,000 – $18,000
Gordon parks (1912 - 2006)
American Gothic, Washington, D.C.
Silver print, 1942, printed circa 1970s. 241x165 mm; 9 1/2x6 1/2 inches (image); 254x203 mm; 10x8 inches (sheet). Signed (twice) in ink, lower edge verso.
Provenance: the estate of the artist, New York; private collection, New York, acquired from Swann Galleries, February 21, 2008.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Norman lewis (1909 - 1979)
Untitled (New York Park Crowd).
Watercolor, ink and gouache on cream wove paper, 1943. 356x508 mm; 14x20 inches. Signed and dated “7-21-43” in ink, lower left recto.
With an unfinished city scene in watercolor, pen and ink on the verso.
Provenance: private collection, Maryland.
This exceptional modernist watercolor by Norman Lewis shows his increasingly abstract approach to his city subjects. These two different locales depicted on each side of the sheet of paper are from Lewis’s summer in New York. Ruth Fine wrote that in 1943 Lewis won a competition to design a war relief poster, and had a supervisory dock job working in Vancouver where he encountered fierce discrimination from workers. Upon returning to New York, he held a job tending to housing project lawns. Then in the fall, Norman Lewis began teaching painting at the new progressive George Washington Carver School in Harlem, where he joined an impressive staff, including Ernest Crichlow (painting), Charles White (drawing), and Elizabeth Catlett (sculpture). Lewis taught there through 1944. Fine p. 252.
Estimate
$12,000 – $18,000
Henry w. bannarn (1910 - 1965)
Rowhouses, Charleston, SC.
Oil on canvas board, 1943. 454x606 mm; 17⅞x23⅞ inches. Signed "P.F.C. H. Bannarn", inscribed "Charleston S.C." and dated "19[4]3" in oil, lower left recto. Signed and inscribed "This is the one that Mike gave [illeg.]" in pencil, verso.
Provenance: the estate of the artist; private collection, New York (2017).
Exhibited: Menconi+Schoelkopf, New York; Conner & Rosenkranz, New York, with the gallery labels on the verso.
Born in Wetumpka, OK, Bannarn moved with his family to Minneapolis when he was a child. There Bannarn studied at the Minneapolis School of Art (now the Minneapolis College of Art and Design). He won two first place prizes in sculpture at the Minnesota State Art Fair and showed at the Harmon Foundation in New York in 1933. With a grant from the Minneapolis philanthropist James Ford Bell, Bannarn moved to New York in 1934. There Bannarn and Charles Alston rented the studio which became the Harlem Workshop or the "306", a creative center and meeting place for artists, musicians and poets. Bannard also taught at the Harlem Community Art Center, where he worked alongside Norman Lewis and Charles Alston, and mentored Jacob Lawrence.
Rowhouses, Charleston, SC is a scarce example of Bannarn's modernist painting made during his wartime service in the US Army. Bannarn was inducted around 1940, and his painting skills were soon put to use in the Army’s Special Services Division. In Camp Plauche, Harahan, Louisiana, he created a series of murals depicting soldiers on furlough in various theaters of operation. Later at the Charleston Port of Embarkation, South Carolina, he completed murals depicting American soldiers on leave around the world, and recruitment and war bond posters, painting some of the the first service and support images to depict African American soldiers as a fighting men. Bannarn continued to paint his own work at the time, and returned to his studio practice in New York in 1949.
Estimate
$10,000 – $15,000
Hale woodruff (1900 - 1980)
Untitled (Georgia Landscape).
Watercolor on paper, mounted to cardstock, circa 1940. 470x635 mm; 18½x25 inches. Signed in watercolor, lower left.
Provenance: private collection, Massachusetts.
This vivid watercolor is an excellent example of the landscapes of the eroded, wooded rural hills that Hale Woodruff painted around Atlanta in the late 1930s and early 40s.
Estimate
$6,000 – $9,000
Charles alston (1907 - 1977)
Santa Ana Winds, Ariz. (Arizona).
Goauche and watercolor on wove paper, 1944. 305x457 mm; 12x18 inches. Signed, dated and titled in pencil, lower right.
Provenance: Bill Hodges Gallery, New York (then A.F.T.U. Gallery), with the label on the frame back, private collection, New York
This dramatic watercolor of a storm over an Arizona valley shows Charles Alston’s modernist approach. Alston and his friend Hale Woodruff made similar landscape studies and sketches of the West during a later exploratory trip to California in 1948. Both artists were preparing for the pair of large historical murals they would complete the following year for the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company in Los Angeles.
Estimate
$6,000 – $9,000
Loïs mailou jones (1905 - 1998)
Untitled (Geraniums).
Watercolor on thin cream laid paper, circa 1940s. 305x305 mm; 12x12 inches. Signed in watercolor, lower right.
Provenance: Merton Simpson, New York; private collection, North Carolina.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Claude clark (1915 - 2001)
The Plow.
Oil on burlap canvas, 1944. 505x610 mm; 20x24 inches. Signed in oil, lower right recto. Signed and tited in ink, upper stretcher bar verso.
Provenance: collection of the artist, with his typed label on the verso; the estate of the artist, Oakland, CA.
Exhibited: Artists of the 1930s and 1940s, California Afro-American Museum (CAAM), 1984, with the label on the frame back.
The Plow is a significant, modernist painting by Claude Clark, made during his most innovative period as a young artist living in Philadelphia. After winning a 4 year scholarship to the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art., he was supported by Dr. Albert C. Barnes, who gave him access to his famous collection at the Barnes Foundation from 1939-1944. In 1944, his painting Cutting Pattern was just the second art work by an African-American artist accepted into the Barnes Foundation, after one by Horace Pippin. Clark also was a colleague of Dox Thrash and Rayond Steth in the WPA Printmaking Workshop from 1939-1942, where he helped Thrash develop his innovative carborundum etching technique. Clark’s paintings and prints are in many institutional collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Newark Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, and the De Young Museum. Messenger p. 48.
Estimate
$20,000 – $30,000
Elizabeth catlett (1915 - 2012)
Head.
Carved limestone, 1943. Approximately 343x241x184 mm; 13½x9½x7¼ inches. Incised initials at rear lower edge.
Provenance: Charles White, New York; private collection, New York; thence by descent, private collection, New Jersey.
This impressive carving of a young man's head is an important sculpture by Elizabeth Catlett. It is one of only a few known stone sculptures made by the artist, and the only work from her seminal 1940s period whose location is known today. The only other recorded 1940s stone work is Mother and Child, her 1940 University of Iowa MFA thesis project. The 35 inch high carving in limestone is now sadly missing from the University's collection. In Samella Lewis's monograph, The Art of Elizabeth Catlett, Lewis catalogued just two works for the year 1943: "Abstract Forms, plaster" and "Head, stone". Catlett primarily worked in plaster and terracotta in the late 1930s and 1940s. All four works included in her I am the Negro Woman solo exhibition at the Barnett-Aden Gallery in 1947, Negro Woman, Tired, Pensive and Frustration, were terra cotta.
Elizabeth Catlett's Head stone shows her synthesis of her studies and interest in depicting modern African American subjects in the early 1940s. Melanie Herzog describes Catlett's education at the University of Iowa, and how in her second year of graduate studies, she focused on sculpture - learning several techniques in bronze, stone, wood, terra cotta and plaster. But it was Mother and Child, the centerpiece of her 1940 thesis project, that crystallized many of her interests; as Catlett wrote in her thesis, "stone imposes a certain discipline which cannot be ignored." Her work won First Award in Sculpture in the 1940 American Negro Exhibition in Chicago, and caught the interest of James A. Porter who included an image and description of Mother and Child in his 1943 Modern Negro Art. Porter wrote "it is a pity that this young woman has had so few opportunities to continue her work in stone." In 1942, Herzog describes how after moving to New York, Catlett also studied with the French-Russian emigre and modernist sculptor Ossip Zadkine - taking private lessons from him that summer, while working in terra cotta. Zadkine was also a stone carver, and helped her develop a modernist sense of abstraction in her work by simplifying the forms of the human figure. Head displays Catlett's emerging modern approach to an African-American subjects in the 1940s. Herzog pp. 19-21, 30-34; Porter p. 132; Lewis p. 188.
Estimate
$150,000 – $250,000
Charles white (1918 - 1979)
Joven (Youth).
Lithograph on cream wove paper, 1946. 343x273 mm; 13½x10¾ inches, wide margins. Proof, from an edition of unknown size. Signed and dated in pencil, lower right. Printed by the artist at El Taller de Gráfica Popular, Mexico City.
An impression of this scarce print can be found in the collection of Clark Atlanta University, illustrated in Le Falle/Collins’s In the Spirit of Resistance. According to Lucinda Gedeon, another impression is illustrated in the album El Taller de Gráfica Popular, Mexico, published in 1949. Gedeon Ea7.
Estimate
$6,000 – $9,000
Hughie lee-smith (1915 - 1999)
Untitled (Portrait of a Young Girl).
Oil on masonite, 1949. 290x230 mm; 16x12 inches. Incised signature and date in oil, upper left.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; private collection, Detroit, MI; thence by descent, private collection, California..
This charming portrait is a scarce example of Hughie Lee-Smith’s painting from his early years in Detroit from the late 1940s. In 1938, Lee-Smith graduated from the Cleveland School of Art with honors, where he studied under Clarence Carter, and won a scholarship to continue studying for a fifth year. He also attended Karamu House in Cleveland, joining Charles Sallée, Elmer Brown, and William E. Smith. After serving in the United States Navy during World War II, he used funds from the G.I. Bill to earn a Bachelor of Science degree in education from Wayne State University in Detroit in 1953. Lee-Smith also worked in Detroit automobile factories in 1945 and 1947 between teaching stints. In 1949, he exhibited paintings both at the Detroit Arts Market and the Karamu House Art Gallery, Cleveland.
Estimate
$20,000 – $30,000
Postwar Art
Norman lewis (1909 - 1979)
Untitled (Figure Study).
Pen and ink with wash on wove paper, circa 1940s. 229x159 mm; 9x6¼ inches. Signed “Norman Lewis/OBL” in ink, lower right, posthumously by the artist’s widow Ouida Lewis.
Provenance: the estate of the artist; Bill Hodges Gallery, New York; private collection, New York.
Illustrated: Norman W. Lewis: Works on Paper, 1935 - 1979, Bill Hodges Gallery, New York, p. 66.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Norman lewis (1909 - 1979)
Untitled (Three Figures).
Pen and ink on cream thin wove paper, circa 1940s. 184x121 mm; 7¼x4⅞ inches.
Provenance: the estate of the artist; Bill Hodges Gallery, New York, with the gallery label on the frame back; private collection, New York.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Norman lewis (1909 - 1979)
Untitled (Gate Composition).
Oil on masonite board, 1947. 356x457 mm; 14x18 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower right. Also incised “To Dorothy, Leonard, Glenn” in oil, lower right.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; Margradel and Leonard Hicks, New York (1960s); thence by descent, private collection, Vermont.
This striking abstraction is a scarce example of Norman Lewis’ early exploration of form and technique in the late 1940s. Norman Lewis made several of these modernist paintings on masonite board between 1946 and 1947. They share a central abstract composition with a rich variety of surfaces, including graffito and scrapings, surrounded by a halo of deep monochromatic color. Norman Lewis found these particular abstract forms in the iron work of New York doors and gates. Two very similar works Gate, graphite on paper, and Harlem Gate, oil on canvas, both circa 1950, were included in his 2016 retrospective Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis organized by Ruth Fine. Fine plate 14, fig 27; pp. 42-43.
Estimate
$60,000 – $90,000
Norman lewis (1909 - 1979)
Untitled (Procession Composition).
Oil, pen and ink with wash on cream wove paper, 1949. 610x483 mm; 24x19 inches. Signed and dated ‘49 in pencil, lower right.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, private collection; thence by descent, private collection, Texas.
This striking work on paper is one of the earliest examples we have located of a processional composition by Norman Lewis. This descending calvacade predates his inventive calligraphy of small figures of the early 1950s - figures that will inhabit his paintings and works on paper for over a decade.
Estimate
$20,000 – $30,000
Norman lewis (1909 - 1979)
Untitled.
Oil on linen canvas, circa 1950-51. 991x610 mm; 39x24 inches. Signed in oil, lower right.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; Margradel and Leonard Hicks, New York (1960s); thence by descent, private collection, Vermont.
This elegant, modern painting is a very fine example of Norman Lewis’s abstraction of the early 1950s. Lewis painted thinly on linen canvas to created subtle, atmospheric effects to represent natural phenomena. At the same time, in addition to his well-received 1950 and 1951 solo exhibitions at the Willard Gallery, Lewis began to achieve greater public recognition. He was included in the important 1951 group exhibition Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York where his 1950 painting Urban was hung alongside works by Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky and Man Ray. Fine p. 256.
Estimate
$150,000 – $250,000
Robert blackburn (1920 - 2003)
Untitled (Reclining Nude).
Pen and ink on buff wove paper, circa 1945-1950. 305x445 mm; 12x17½ inches. Signed in ink, lower right.
Provenance: private collection, New Jersey; private collection, New York, acquired at Swann Galleries, February 17, 2009.
This early and fine ink drawing by Blackburn shows the influence of Picasso and Matisse on the young artist.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
John woodrow wilson (1922 - 2015)
Green Checked Table Cloth.
Tempera on cream wove paper, 1949. 610x457 mm; 24x18 inches. Signed and dated in red ink, lower right recto. Titled in blue ink, lower left verso.
Provenance; private collection, Massachusetts.
This remarkable and very scarce work on paper is from John Wilson’s time in Paris, and is unequivocally inspired by Fernand Léger. In 1947, John Wilson won the James William Paige Traveling Fellowship from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and moved to Paris, where he worked in Fernand Léger’s studio. Wilson adapted many of his mentor’s modern techniques of abstracting forms, developed more modernist compositions, and added to the social and political consciousness of his art. After returning to the US in 1950, Wilson earned the John Hay Whitney Fellowship and moved to Mexico City.
Estimate
$8,000 – $12,000
Merton d. simpson (1928 - 2013)
Untitled (Portrait of a Young Woman).
Oil on masonite, circa 1950-52. 502x248 mm; 19¾x9¾ inches. Signed in ink, lower left recto. With a partial figure sketch on the verso.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; private collection, New York.
This intimate, modernist portrait was painted during Merton Simpson’s first years in New York, when he studied visual art at Cooper Union and at New York University with Hale Woodruff.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Charles white (1918 - 1979)
Gideon.
Lithograph on cream wove paper, 1951. 565x375 mm; 22¼x14¾ inches, full margins. Edition of 50. Titled and inscribed “Ed. 50” in pencil, lower right. Printed by the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, New York. Gedeon Ea10.
Estimate
$6,000 – $9,000
Margaret burroughs (1917 - 2010)
Sojourner Truth.
Lithograph on cream wove paper, 1955. 425x311 mm; 16¾x12¼ inches, narrow margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 17/20 in pencil, lower margin.
Estimate
$1,500 – $2,500
Roy decarava (1919 - 2009)
Bass Player, Small’s, New York.
Silver print, 1956, printed in 1981. 355x279 mm; 14x11 inches. Signed, dated and inscribed “printed in 1981” in ink, left edge verso.
Provenance: private collection, New York (1982), purchased from Witkin Gallery, New York.
Roy DeCarava frequently photographed jazz musicians throughout New York City. DeCarava was interested in documenting the essence, versatility, and talent of both famous and less well-known jazz musicians. The dark basements of jazz clubs and their nocturnal activities were also well suited to his aesthetic. DeCarava here captures the image of a bassist passionately playing the double bass while sweating profusely at Smalls Paradise.
Smalls Paradise (often called Small’s Paradise and Smalls’ Paradise, was a nightclub in Harlem, located in the basement of 2294 Seventh Avenue. It opened in 1925 and was owned by Ed Smalls a nightclub owner throughout the Harlem Renaissance. During the era, Smalls Paradise was the only well-known of the Harlem nightclubs to be African American owned and integrated. It became the longest-operating jazz club in Harlem before it closed in 1986.
Estimate
$20,000 – $30,000
Norman lewis (1909 - 1979)
Untitled.
Brush and ink on cream wove paper, 1954. 483x610 mm; 19x24 inches. Signed and dated in pencil, lower left.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, private collection; thence by descent, private collection, Texas.
Estimate
$12,000 – $18,000
Charles alston (1907 - 1977)
Untitled.
Gouache, pen and ink on buff, fibrous Japan paper, 1957. 368x317 mm; 14½x12½ inches. Signed and dated in pencil, lower right recto. Signed in pencil, lower right verso.
Provenance: the artist; Kate Keith Field, New York (2006), acquired at Doyle’s, November 8, 2006; private collection, New York; private collection, New York (2011), acquired at Swann Galleries, February 7, 2011.
Exhibited: The Artist’s Gallery, New York, with the ink stamp on the mount verso.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Hale woodruff (1900 - 1980)
Carnival.
Oil on linen canvas, circa 1958. 1029x1727 mm; 40½x68 inches. Signed in oil, lower left recto. Signed and titled in oil across the verso.
Provenance: private collection, New York; Beverly Sacks Fine Art, New York, with the gallery label on the frame back; private collection, Los Angeles.
Exhibited: Paintings by Hale Woodruff, Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York, September 15 - October 4, 1958. This was the third of Woodruff's solo exhibitions at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery of the 1950s which established his New York career as a significant abstract artist.
With its gorgeous jewel-like colors and rich painterly passages, Carnival is an excellent and important example of Hale Woodruff's postwar abstraction, and his largest abstract canvas to come to auction. Carnival is part of Woodruff 1950s body of work in which describes landscape and natural phenomena within the idiom of Abstract Expressionism.
Not seen publicly in over seventy years, this striking canvas shows Woodruff's continued evolution as an abstract painter in the postwar period. By the late 1950s, now a Professor of art education at New York University and an important member of the New York School, Woodruff showed more freedom in his approach, in both color and brushwork. Carnival is related in palette and composition to another large, vertical canvas Blue Intrusion, 1958, in the collection of New York University and the smaller Red Landscape, 1957 (sold at Swann Galleries on Feb. 14, 2013) - both were included with Carnival in his 1958 solo exhibition at Bertha Schaefer Gallery. Dore Ashton in her New York Times review wrote: (Woodruff's) "large abstractions are often based on impressions of landscape. They are done with emphatic, broad strokes, and colors are bright and cleanly handled. The free swinging brush movements have enabled Woodruff to clarify his ideas of the implied movements of nature - hills, trees, sky." Additionally, Arts magazine review of his exhibition mentioned Carnival as one of his large paintings which engage on the level of its title "with an excitement, rhythm, progression of swift angular, broken shapes and beautiful color". Woodruff continued to use landscape as the structure of his abstract painting through the late 1960s - see in such later works as Primordial Landscape, 1967, (sold at Swann Galleries on April 22, 2021) with similar jewel-like colors.
Estimate
$250,000 – $350,000
Walter h. williams (1920 - 1998)
Sunflowers.
Color woodcut on thin imitation Japan paper, 1959. 431x558 mm; 17x22 inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 127/200 in pencil, lower margin.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Walter h. williams (1920 - 1998)
Marguerite.
Color linoleum cut on thin imitation Japan paper, 1961. 317x826 mm; 12½x32½ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated, inscribed “imp” and numbered 54/210 in pencil, lower margin.
Estimate
$1,500 – $2,500
Calvin burnett (1921 - 2007)
Edna.
Linoleum cut on thin imitation Japan paper, 1960. 214x133 mm; 9½x5¾ inches, full margin. Artist’s proof, aside from an unknown edition size. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed “linocut” and “AP” in pencil, lower margin.
Provenance: the Melvin Holmes Collection, San Francisco; private collection.
Estimate
$1,000 – $1,500
Sam middleton (1927 - 2015)
Sunken Meadow.
Mixed media and collage on buff wove paper, 1960. 483x622 mm; 19x24½ inches. Signed and dated in ink, lower right recto. Titled in pencil, verso.
Provenance: private collection, Toronto.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Earl hooks (1927 - 2005)
Untitled (Five-footed Vase Form).
Thrown and hand-built glazed stoneware, circa 1960. 215x165x165 mm; 8½x6½x6½ inches. Inscribed signature on base with the artist’s address label.
Provenance: collection of the artist; private collection, Chicago; collection of Ronald Voelker, Chicago, private collection.
This unique ceramic vessel featuring biomorphic shapes shows Hooks’ commitment to exploring the relationships between color, balance, and form.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Charles alston (1907 - 1977)
Moon Haze (Standing in the Moonlight).
Oil on linen canvas, 1960. 1270x1270 mm; 50x50 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower right recto. Signed and titled in graphite across the verso, and additionally titled Standing in the Moonlight on the canvas over flap, upper edge verso.
Provenance: estate of the artist; Kenkeleba Gallery, New York; private collection, New York.
In the artist's papers in the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a color photograph of this painting, identified as "abstraction no. 6" , which is inscribed "abstraction" on the verso.
Moon Haze is an ethereal and beautiful abstraction and a significant mid-career painting by Charles Alston. By 1960, Alston had achieved wide recognition for his post war painting, including receiving the Emily Lowe Memorial award for his painting An Ancient Place, and a solo exhibition at Feingarten Galleries, New York in April of that year. Alston included in his Feingarten exhibition a group of 1958-60 abstract paintings with several similar compositions, including his 1960 Composition #1, sold at Swann Galleries on April 4, 2018. In Moon Haze, Alston masterfully creates a subtle, hazy atmosphere of thin layers of silvery grey paint which blurs boundaries. Bearden/Henderson, Jr., p. 269; Wardlaw p. 91 and 93.
Estimate
$80,000 – $120,000
Norman lewis (1909 - 1979)
Untitled (Abstraction.).
Oil with crayon, pen and ink on wove paper, 1964. 603x480 mm; 23¾x19 inches. Signed and dated in pencil, lower center.
Provenance: private collection, Columbus, OH; private collection, New York.
Estimate
$20,000 – $30,000
Robert blackburn (1920 - 2003)
Color Symphony.
Color lithograph, 1960. 400x560 mm; 15¾x22⅛ inches, full margins. Edition of 15. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed “Ed. 15” in pencil, lower margin. A very good impression of this scarce, important print, with vibrant colors.
From 1957 to 1963, Blackburn served as the first master printer at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), West Islip, NY. In most cases, he taught the artists, including Jim Dine, Helen Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg, how to make lithographs, sharing his sensibility of the medium and his approach to the stone. In 1963, Blackburn began to operate his workshop full time, providing an open studio for artists of diverse social and economic backgrounds, styles, and levels of expertise. Under his direction, the Printmaking Workshop became one of the most vital collaborative art studios in the world.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Robert blackburn (1920 - 2003)
Untitled (14 x 14).
Etching and aquatint on cream wove paper, 1962. 349x349 mm; 13¾x13¾ inches, wide margins. Edition of 10, printed in 1979. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed “ED/10” in pencil, lower margin.
Another impression is in the permanent collection of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Washington DC and the Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georiga, Athens.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Robert blackburn (1920 - 2003)
Man in Top Hat.
Color lithograph, circa 1960. 307x225 mm; 12⅛x8¾ inches, full margins. Artist’s proof, aside from an unknown edition. Signed and titled in pencil, lower margin.
A very good impression of this scarce print - two other impressions, each printed with different colors, are in the Cochran Collection of Wes and Missy Cochran.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Bob thompson (1937 - 1966)
Tree God.
Oil on wood panel, 1960. 187x546 mm; 7⅜x21½ inches. Signed, titled and dated in oil, verso.
Provenance: private collection, New York, acquired from Sotheby’s New York, April 4, 2008.
This fascinating painting on wood is related to a number of similar horizontal scenes painted by Bob Thompson in 1960. Thompson created compositions set in a mythological paradise or Garden of Eden, including his dark hatted figures, classical nudes and over-sized demigods. His monumental Garden of Muse, 1960, in the collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum is the best known example of these scenes.
This early painting dates from the artist’s second year in New York after leaving Provincetown. Thompson moved to Greenwich Village, finding a studio on Clinton Street in 1959, and soon became part of the downtown art scene. There he reconnected with his close knit group of Provincetown artist friends. In 1960, he had his first solo exhibition in New York at the Delancey Street Museum, founded by Red Grooms, and a two-person exhibition with Jay Milder at the Zabriskie Gallery. In December, he married Carol Plenda whom he had also met in Provincetown.
Estimate
$30,000 – $40,000
Bob thompson (1937 - 1966)
Untitled (Blue Figure in Profile).
Oil on linen canvas, mounted to wood panel, 1963. 275x350 mm; 3¾x11½ inches. Signed and dated in ink, verso.
Provenance: John and Kimiko Powers; gifted to a non-profit orginization; private collection, New York, acquired at Shannon’s Fine Art Auctioneers, Milford, CT, April 28, 2011.
Estimate
$10,000 – $15,000
Bob thompson (1937 - 1966)
Winter.
Oil on wood panel, 1960. 275x350 mm; 7⅜x13½ inches.
Provenance: the artist; Carol Thompson, the artist’s wife; Vanderwoude Tananbaum Gallery, New York, with the label on the frame back; private collection, New York, acquired at Christie’s New York, July 28, 2015.
Estimate
$8,000 – $12,000
Bob thompson (1937 - 1966)
The Ten Plagues.
Goauche and pencil on cream wove paper, mounted to illustration board, 1963. 216x178 mm; 8½ x 7 inches. Signed and dated in ink twice, lower right and lower right margin, with an inscription in the lower margin.
Provenance: private collection, New York, acquired at Christie’s East, New York, November 7, 2000.
Estimate
$7,000 – $10,000
Bob thompson (1937 - 1966)
Untitled (Study for Satyr Painting).
Felt tip pens and color inks with pencil on cream wove paper, 1966. 279x216 mm; 11x8½ inches.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist’s widow, Carol Thompson; private collection, New York (1981).
Bob and Carol Thompson moved to Italy in 1965 so he could study the Renaissance paintings that inspired him in person. While recovering from gall bladder surgery in Rome in 1966, Thompson died in Rome just before his 29th birthday, only eight years after the start of his career in Provincetown.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Palmer hayden (1890 - 1973)
Sardine Boats (of Concarneau).
Watercolor on wove paper, 1961. 306x408 mm; 12⅜x16⅜ inches. Signed (twice) and dated in watercolor, lower right.
Provenance: estate of Miriam Hayden, the artist’s widow; private collection, California (1997), purchased from M. Hanks Gallery, Santa Monica, CA.
The fishing boats of Brittany is one of Palmer Hayden’s favorite subjects. In the summer of 1927, Hayden produced a group of oil paintings, watercolors and sketches from along the Brittany coast. His first images of these are found in several of his sketchbooks from Concarneau in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
James a. porter (1905 - 1970)
Seraphim and Cherubim, Lagos.
Oil on cotton canvas, 1964. 508x356 mm; 20x14 inches.
Provenance: the estate of Adelaide Cromwell; private collection, Massachusetts. Adelaide Cromwell was the founder of the African American Studies program at Boston University.
Exhibited: Retrospective Exhibition: Paintings of the Years 1954-1964, Howard University, Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, January 22 - February 26, 1965, cat no. 24.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
John woodrow wilson (1922 - 2015)
Untitled (Portrait of a Young Woman).
Black and sanguine conte crayon on cream wove paper, 1964. 445x340 mm; 17½x13½ inches. Signed and dated in crayon, lower right.
Provenance: private collection, Massachusetts.
Estimate
$6,000 – $9,000
Charles searles (1937 - 2004)
Standing Woman.
Watercolor with pen and ink on cream wove paper, circa 1967. 660x357 mm; 26x14 inches. Signed in pen and ink, lower left recto. With figure studies in pencil, verso.
Provenance: private collection, New Jersey.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Charles searles (1937 - 2004)
Untitled (Portrait of a Young Man).
Oil on cotton canvas, circa 1968-69. 455x555 mm; 18x22 inches.
Provenance: private collection, New Jersey.
This striking portait is a scarce, early oil painting by Charles Searles. Born in Philadelphia, Searles studied at the University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, graduating with honors. By 1971, Searles had risen to prominence with the inclusion of his 1970 painting, News in the survey exhibition Contemporary Black Artists in America at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Searles received the Cresson Traveling Scholarship and the Ware Traveling Memorial Scholarships which allowed him to travel to Nigeria, Ghana, and Morocco in 1972. He later taught at the Philadelphia College of Art for over twenty years. His works are found in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Montclair Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Smithsonian National Museum of American Art, the Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum, Philadelphia and Howard University.
Estimate
$12,000 – $18,000
Carl Richard "Dingbat" Smith
Charles “Teenie” Harris American, 1908–1998
Carl R. “Dingbat” Smith standing next to nail art of three abstract heads, in art gallery, c. 1960-1977
black-and-white: Kodak safety film
H: 4 in. x W: 5 in. (10.20 x 12.70 cm)
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh: Heinz Family Fund, 2001.35.1215
© Carnegie Museum of Art, Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive
Carl richard “dingbat” smith (1927 - 1980s)
Three Brothers.
Assemblage of nails on a wood panel, 1966. 1219x1219 mm; 48x48 inches. Signed, dated “66” and titled in ink, verso.
Provenance: private collection, New York.
Three Brothers is a large wall relief made from thousands of nails, and an excellent example of the unusual nail art of Charles Richard “Dingbat” Smith. A Pittsburgh native, Smith worked in sculpture using only nails from the 1960s through the late 1980s. While little is known about him today, this self-taught artist’s artworks are highly prized by collectors, and deserve much wider recognition. Two other examples of his work are in the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Samella lewis (1924 - )
Migrants.
Linoleum cut on thin imitation Japan paper, 1967. 432x610 mm; 17x24 inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 7/25 in pencil, lower margin.
Provenance: Ankrum Gallery, Los Angeles, with the label on the frame back; Benny Carter, Los Angeles; private collection, California (2003), acquired at Abell’s Auction, Los Angeles. This print was acquired from the estate auction of jazz great Benny Carter (1907-2003).
A very rich, dark impression of this scarce print; other impressions are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Barbara jones-hogu (1938 - 2017)
America III.
Color screenprint on brown wove paper, 1968. 647x622 mm; 25½x24½ inches, full margins. From the edition of fewer than 10 impressions printed by the artist. Signed in pencil, lower right.
Provenance: estate of the artist; private collection.
A very scarce print which includes powerful imagery of the swastika and the white stars of the US flag as robed Klu Klux Klan members. In an interview with Rebecca Zorach and Skyla Hearn, published online for the archival project Never The Same, Jones-Hogu described her choice of this imagery: “The swastika is used to represent racism, governmental control, oppression, suppression, and fascism it is used in several of my images…I feel that racism and fascism played a great deal in my father being successful or not successful in his life, so some of these prints’ ideas and content deal with the fact that we and he were not really free to do whatever we and he really wanted to do and could do due to radical oppression and suppression..” She used similar imagery in her 1968 printsLand Where My Father Died and Be Your Brother’s Keeper.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Barbara jones-hogu (1938 - 2017)
I’m Better Than These Motherfuckers and They Know It.
Color screenprint on yellow artificial Japan paper, 1968. 635x927 mm; 25x36½ inches (sheet). From the edition of 10 or fewer impressions printed by the artist.
Provenance: estate of the artist; private collection.
Exhibited: Barbara Jones-Hogu: Resist, Relate, Unite, DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, 2018.
Illustrated: Barbara Jones-Hogu: Resist, Relate, Unite, DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, p: 54.
This work is one of two different compositions that Jones-Hogu produced using this title. AfriCOBRA members typically produced individual works related to a group-determined theme. The I’m Better Than These Motherfuckers theme was too controversial for some members of the collective. Jones-Hogu produced two related prints, and co-founder Wadsworth Jarrell produced a painting using this title. Another impression of this work is in the collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. The other, very different, screenprint that Jones-Hogu made using this title is in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum. Both prints use the image of an African American woman on a beach with white sunbathers.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Timothy washington (1946 - )
Triptych.
Triptych of engraving on aluminum, mounted on wood panels, 1968. Each 914x914mm; 36x36 inches. Center panel signed and dated "September 16, 1968" with drypoint, lower left.
Provenance: collection of the artist; Lee Nordness Galleries, New York, with the gallery label on the verso, Metromedia Company, New York; private collection, New Jersey (2001).
Exhibited: 19Sixties: A Cultural Awakening Re-Evaluated 1965-1975, Californian Afro-American Museum, Los Angeles, 1989, with the museum label on the verso. This significant exhibition was organized by curators Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins and Cecil Ferguson.
This important and powerful anti-war artwork by Timothy Washington is one of the first and the largest of his ground breaking early works on aluminum. At the age of twenty, Timothy Washington pioneered his innovative technique in the later part of 1967. Washington describes the special circumstances of this important creative moment in the catalogue essay by Joseph Young of Three Graphic Artists:
"I was in class, and our problem was to do something that we would consider very personal. And I think it was the very same day that I went home and found that I was reclassified for the draft as 1-A. So, I knew that I was going to make something relating to the army or war. l wanted to work on a substance that was cold and hard, and I thought of aluminum as a material that I would like to work on. The first piece that I did on aluminum was a triptych which was a social commentary against wars."
The artist spray painted the aluminum plates with black enamel paint, and then incised the imagery with an engraving tool - similar to a mezzotint or a scratchboard. The Los Angeles native had not yet graduated from the Chouinard Art Institute - he received his BFA in 1969. Eleven of these works were included in the 1971 ground-breaking LACMA exhibition Three Graphic Artists when the young artists Washington and David Hammons exhibited alongside Charles White. Washington continued to exhibit his assemblage work, drawings and sculpture at the Brockman Gallery, Gallery 32 and Wylan Gallery in Los Angeles through the 1970s.
Today the significance of this body of work is widely recognized. Washington's work was included in the influential 2011 Tilton Gallery exhibition L. A. Object & David Hammons Body Prints and the 2012 traveling museum exhibition Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1960-1980. The Los Angeles artist had his first solo museum exhibition Love Thy Neighbor at the California Craft & Folk Art Museum in 2014. More recently, Washington's artwork was featured in the 2017-2020 important traveling museum exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power organized by the Tate Modern.
Estimate
$50,000 – $75,000
Lev mills (1938 - 2021)
Gemini I.
Etching and aquatint on cream wove paper, 1969. 305x305 mm; 12x12 inches, full margins. Signed, titled, and numbered 6/30 in pencil, lower margin.
Provenance: collection of the artist; private collection, Savanah, Georgia; private collection.
A superb, richly inked impression of this scarce, significant print - another impression was in the Evan-Tibbs Collection, Washington, DC.
Born in Tallahassee, Florida, Lev Mills lived and worked in Atlanta, Georgia from 1973. Mills studied printmaking at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in the late 1960s. He received his BA from Florida A&M University, his MA and MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a postgraduate certificate from the Slade School of Fine Arts, University College- University of London. Lev Mills' career had been split between being a working visual artist and an educator. He taught at Spelman College for thirty years, including fourteen years as the Art Department Chair, before retiring in 2009. Several museums hold work by Mills including Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the British Museum, London, and MOCA Georgia.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Charles white (1981 - 1979)
Elijah.
Etching printed in brown on cream wove paper, 1969. 324x552 mm; 12¾x21¾ inches, full margins. Artist’s proof, one of only a few signed artist’s proofs, aside from the edition of 20. Signed, titled, dated and dedicated “To Campo with warmest feelings of friendship” in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Joseph and Hugo Mugnani, Los Angeles.
A superb impression of this scarce etching - another impression is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gedeon Ec1.
Estimate
$12,000 – $18,000
Charles white (1918 - 1979)
Untitled (Study for Matriarch)
Charcoal, graphite and pencil on thin artificial vellum, circa 1967. 483x406 mm; 19x16 inches. With the artist’s estate signature ink stamp, lower right.
Provenance: the artist’s estate; Heritage Gallery, Los Angeles; the Allan and Susan Marion collection, Beverly Hills; Heritage Gallery, Los Angeles, with the gallery label on the frame back; private collection.
Exhibited: Looking In, Looking Out, Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles, 2002; Charles White, Images of Dignity, Bakersfield Museum of Art, Bakersfield, CA, 2003 (traveling exhibition.)
This careful study of a woman’s head is a strong example of the Charles White’s later work, and his use of preparatory drawings. His final oil painting Matriarch, 1967, is in the collection of the National Academy of Design, New York.
Estimate
$8,000 – $12,000
Richmond barthé (1901 - 1989)
Black Majesty.
Bronze with a brown patina, 1969. Approximately 610x260x133 mm; 24x10¼x 5¼ inches. Incised signature at the base edge.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; private collection, Rome.
Illustrated: Margaret Vendryes. Barthé: A Life in Sculpture, fig. 529; p. 177 (another cast).
This beautiful, tall sculpture is truly a majestic figure, and a scarce example of a large female bronze by Ricmond Barthé. Margaret Vendryes remarks how this striding figure “harkens back to Blackberry Woman to a time of Barthé’s newly discovered talent with clay” but with a regal air of remove. Black Majesty was made in Barthé’s last year living in Jamaica, before his move to Florence, Italy where he lived until 1975. Vendryes p. 177.
Estimate
$35,000 – $50,000
Norman lewis (1917 - 1979)
Untitled.
Oil, pen, ink and wash on wove paper, 1968. 482x698 mm; 19½x27½ inches. Signed and dated in ink, lower left.
Provenance: the estate of the artist; Bill Hodges Gallery, New York, with the gallery label on the frame back; private collection, New York.
Illustrated: Norman W. Lewis: Works on Paper, 1935 - 1979
Estimate
$15,000 – $25,000
Norman lewis (1909 - 1979)
Untitled (Abstract Composition).
Oil on wove paper, 1968. 508x660 mm; 20x26 inches. Signed and dated in ink, lower left.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, private collection; thence by descent, private collection, Texas.
The sheet has the printed Inkweed Arts illustrations on the verso - found on many Lewis works on paper from the late 1950s and 1960s.
Estimate
$15,000 – $25,000
Sam gilliam (1933 - )
Untitled (Abstraction with Silver).
Watercolor, ink, acrylic and aluminum powder on distressed hand made paper, 1970. 571x724 mm; 22½x28½ inches. Signed and dated in ink, lower right (and upper left, reversed).
Provenance: private collection, New York.
Estimate
$25,000 – $35,000
Sam gilliam (1933 - )
Untitled (Abstraction with Magenta).
Watercolor, ink, acrylic and aluminum powder on distressed hand made paper, 1970. Approximately 559x686 mm; 22x27 inches. Signed and dated in ink, lower right.
Provenance: private collection, New York.
Estimate
$25,000 – $35,000
Gloria r. bohanon (1941 - )
Out of Reach.
Oil and enamel paint on cotton canvas, circa 1970. 610x457 mm; 24x18 inches. Initialed in ink, upper right recto. Signed in ink, verso.
Provenance: private collection.
Born in Atlanta, GA, Gloria Bohanon received a BS in Art Education in 1962, and a MA in Art Education in 1968 from Wayne State University. She also attended Los Angeles City College and California State College in Los Angeles. Bohanon was very much a part of the Los Angeles art scene by 1970; that year she had both a solo exhibition at Alonzo and Dale Davis’s Brockman Gallery, was part of Suzanne Jackson’s Gallery 32 important exhibition Sapphire Show
This is only the second painting of Gloria Bohanon's to come to auction; the first was sold in the Johnson Publishing Company Collection of African American Art, auction at Swann Galleries, January 30, 2020. .Jones p. 25; Waddy/Lewis p. 51 and 134.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
DAN CONCHOLAR (1939 - 2017)
Group of 4 untitled drawings (Organic Forms).
Each colored pencils and ink on cream wove paper, circa 1970. Each 553x524mm; 21⅛x20⅞ inches. Each signed in ink, lower right.
Provenance: private collection, Colorado.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Bernard harmon (1935 - 1989)
Untitled (Young Man and Woman in a Striped Dress).
Oil on board, circa 1970. 1067x914 mm; 42x36 inches.
Provenance: private collection, Pennslyvania.
This expressive and captivating double portrait is an excellent example of the painting of Philadelphian artist Bernard Harmon. A graduate of the Philadelphia Museum School (BFA) and Tyler School of Art at Temple University (MFA), Harmon studied painting with a focus on portraiture early in his studies. He then worked for 32 years as an arts educator in Philadelphia - teaching art at Drexel University, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and in high schools throughout Philadelphia. He and Frederic Bacon helped Randall J. Craig organize the important exhibition and catalogue Afro-American Artists, 1800-1969, produced by the Division of Art Education of the School District of Philadelphia in cooperation with the Museum of the Philadelphia Civic Center.
Estimate
$10,000 – $15,000
Alvin c. hollingsworth (1928 -2000)
Untitled (Angela Davis).
Acrylic on wood panel, circa 1970. 470 mm; 18½ inches diameter (tondo). Signed in acrylic, lower right.
Provenance: private collection, New York.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Dana c. chandler, jr. (1941 - )
Genocide Series No. 2, Lil Junkies Waiting on “Bro” Pusher.
Screenprint on red wove paper, 1970. 406x279 mm; 16x11 inches, wide margins.
A very scarce impression from the artist’s 1970-71 Genocide Series.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Dindga mccannon (1947 - )
Disposessed!
Linoleum cut on burnt orange coated paper, 1970. 169x304 mm; 6⅞x12 inches, full margins. Signed, dated, titled and numbered 2/10 in pencil, lower margin.
Provenance: collection of the artist; private collection, acquired directly from the artist.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Dindga mccannon (1947 - )
The Last Farewell.
Linoleum cut on wove paper, 1973. 305x305 mm; 12x12 inches, wide (full?) margins. Signed, dated, titled and numbered 10/100 in ink, lower margin.
This print is of the same subject as Dindga McCannon’s same-titled oil painting. McCannon’s important 1970 painting The Last Farewell was part of the Johnson Publishing Company Collection of African American Art, sold at Swann Galleries on January 30, 2020.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Gerald williams (1941 - )
Wake Up.
Color screenprint on wove paper, 1971. 1066x711 mm; 42x28 inches.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, private collection (2008).
Exhibited: The Time is Now: Art Worlds of Chicago’s South Side, 1960-1980, Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. September 13 - December 30, 2018.
Illustrated: The Time is Now: Art Worlds of Chicago’s South Side, 1960-1980, Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, p. 71.
Wake Up. is a very scarce, significant AfriCOBRA print. Gerald Williams was a founding member of the art collective AfriCOBRA in 1968.Wake Up is the largest of six screenprints published and printed by AfriCOBRA in 1971. Other impressions are in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum and Tate Modern, London.
Estimate
$6,000 – $8,000
Casper banjo (1937 - 2008)
Self Portrait.
Etching and aquatint with embossing on wove paper, 1973. 577x469 mm; 22¾x18½ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 2/4 in pencil, lower margin.
Provenance: estate of the artist; M. Lee Stone Fine Prints, California; private collection.
Born in 1937 in Memphis, TN, Casper Banjo is known as an Oakland artist. After earning an Associate of Arts from Laney College in Oakland, Banjo went on to earn a BFA in 1937 and a MFA in 1975 from the San Francisco Art Institute. He worked out of his Oakland apartment, printing entirely by hand, without a press. Rooted in his community, Banjo taught homeless artists printmaking, contributed his artwork to the Street Sheet, and installed the annual art auctions for the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness. He also assisted the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame with creating prints, and contributed to the 2007 book Images of America: Black Artists in Oakland, in which he was featured. Unfortunately, Banjo was shot dead by the Oakland Police Department on March 14, 2008. The seventy-year-old was around the corner from his apartment in East Oakland and was just weeks short of moving to a board and care facility.
His artwork was featured in several publications including Black Artists on Art, Vol., 2, co-authored by Samella Lewis and Ruth Waddy, Los Angeles, CA and The International Review of African American Art, Vol. 17, Juliette Harris editor. He was also featured in significant group exhibitions such as Impressions/Expressions: Black American Graphics, the Studio Museum in Harlem, traveling from 1979 - 1981, and Aesthetics of Graffiti, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1978. His work is in the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum, New York.
Estimate
$1,500 – $2,500
Ernie barnes (1938 - 2009)
Loose Ball.
Oil on cotton canvas, 1971. 1219x1534 mm; 48x60 inches. Signed in oil, lower right recto. Inscribed with the artist’s copyright statement in ink, verso.
Provenance: private collection, Maryland.
Exhibited: the National Press Club, Washington, DC; Agra Gallery, Washington, DC, 1971. Barnes’s solo exhibiton at the Agra Gallery was hosted by hosted by Congressmen Jack Kemp and John Conyers.
Illustrated: “Barnes, A Former Player, Paints a Penetrating Portrait of Pro Football”, The New York Times, May 9, 1917.
This large painting is a striking example of Ernie Barnes’ mannerist football paintings in which expressive figures show the fierce conflict of the sport. Ernie Barnes played professional football in the NFL in the late 1960s before beginning his celebrated career as a figurative painter and graphic artist. The artist was able to launch his career with the patronage of Sonny Werblin, owner of the New York Jets, and his acclaimed one person exhibition at Grand Central Art Galleries in 1968 of these football paintings.
Estimate
$15,000 – $25,000
Ernie barnes (1938 - 2009)
Untitled.
Oil on cotton canvas, 1971. 914x1219 mm; 36x48 inches. Signed in oil, lower right recto. Dated “4/10/71” and inscribed with the artist’s copyright statement in ink, verso.
Provenance: private collection, Maryland.
Exhibited: the National Press Club, Washington, DC; Agra Gallery, Washington, DC, 1971. Barnes’s solo exhibiton at the Agra Galery was hosted by hosted by Congressmen Jack Kemp and John Conyers.
This painting is an excellent example of Ernie Barnes’ mannerist football paintings in which expressive figures show the fierce conflict of the sport. In 1971, Barnes moved to the Fairfax district of Los Angeles, and created his iconic painting The Sugar Shack, later used to illustrate the cover of Marvin Gaye’s 1976 album I Want You.
Estimate
$20,000 – $30,000
Jacob lawrence (1917 - 2000)
Olympic Games.
Color screenprint on Schoellers Parole Paper, 1971. 1092x695 mm; 43x27⅜ inches, full margins. Signed, dated and numbered 41/200 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Dietz Offizin, Lengmoos, Germany. Published by Bruckmann Verlag + Druck, Munich.
Additional impressions are in the permanent collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelpha and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC . Nesbett L71-1.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Romare bearden (1911 - 1988)
Ritual Bayou.
Set of 6 editioned collages, color photo-lithograph mounted on finished plywood, as issued, 1971. Each approx. 394x508 mm; 15½x20 inches. Each signed and numbered 21/75 in ink. Published by Sherwood Publishers, New York.
The individual titles are: Memories * Reunion * Ritual Bayou * Carolina Interior * Mississippi Monday * Byzantine Frieze.
This is a very scarce complete set from Romare Bearden’s brief experimentation with editioned collages in the early 1970s. Each was made from photo-lithographs printed from collages Bearden had shown in the 1971 Musem of Modern Art, New York, exhibition, Romare Bearden: The Prevalence of Ritual and the 1975 Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, exhibition, Mysteries: Women in the Art of Romare Bearden.
However, it is not known, and very unlikely, that Bearden completed the intended edition of 75–it was an overwhelming project to match and collage the prints. Mary Lee Corlett in From Process to Print Graphic Works by Romare Bearden describes the overly ambitious production commissioned by Sam Shore, owner of Shorewood Atelier, New York. Shore was a major Bearden collector and donated The Block to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1978. Bearden and his publisher had originally selected 18 collages, and planned three different sets of six for the project. But the artist only made multiples from the first six collages. Swann Galleries sold the only other known complete set at auction on February 27, 2011. Corlett p. 13.
Estimate
$30,000 – $50,000
Romare bearden (1911 - 1988).
Tropical Flowers.
Color etching and aquatint, circa 1971-72. 395x535 mm; 15½x21 inches, full margins. Artist’s proof, aside from the edition of 100. Signed “Romie” and inscribed “St. Maartens” and “For Jerrie & Herb” in pencil, lower margin. Gelburd/Rosenberg GG#79A.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Romare bearden (1911 - 1988)
Sorcerer’s Village (Sorcerer).
Color screenprint, 1972. 417x500 mm; 16⅜x19¾ inches, full margins. Signed, titled and numbered 90/125 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by NYIT Print Workshop, New York, with the blind stamp lower right. Gelburd/Rosenberg GG#32.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Romare bearden (1911 - 1988)
Mother and Child.
Color screenprint, 1972. 500x147 mm; 19¾x16 ⅜ inches, full margins. Signed and numbered 56/200 in pencil, lower margin. Gelburd/Rosenberg GG#59.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
John wilson (1922 - 2015)
Street Children.
Etching on wove paper, 1973. 254x445 mm; 10x17½ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 4/75 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by George Lockwood, with the blindstamp lower left.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Romare bearden (1911 - 1988)
Before the First Whistle (Early Morning).
Color lithograph, 1973. 558x457 mm; 22x18 inches, full margins. Artist’s proof, aside from the edition of 50. Signed, dated and inscribed “for Jean & Jacqueline” in pencil, lower margin. Gelburd/Rosenberg GG#33.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Romare bearden (1911 - 1988)
Prevalence of Ritual.
Set of 5 color screenprints on wove paper, 1974. Four appox. 1016x812 mm; 40x35 inches; one appox. 812x1016 mm; 32x40 inches, full margins. Each hors commerce impressions, aside from the edition of 100. Each signed, dated, inscribed sequentially "P.R. I-V HC" and numbered 25/37 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Sirocco Screenprints, New York. Published by Cordier & Ekstrom, New York, and Ives-Sillman, Inc., New Haven, CT, with the blindstamp.
Provenance: ACA Galley, New York, with the labels on the frame backs; private collection, New York.
The individual titles are: In the Garden * Delilah * Salome * Prolouge to Troy * Noah, Third Day.
Illustrated: From Process to Print Graphic Works by Romare Bearden, essay by Mary Lee Corlett, Pomegranate, San Francisco, 2009, pp. 95-99 (different impressions). Gelburd/Rosenberg GG#71-75.
Estimate
$25,000 – $35,000
Louis b. sloan (1932 - 2008)
Untitled (Storm Approaching Shore).
Oil on linen canvas, 1973. 1117x1842 mm; 44x72½ inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower right.
Provenance: Ms. Roxie Haines, Philadelphia (the artist's sister); thence by descent to the current owner, private collection, Philadelphia.
This monumental landscape is a mid-career painting by Louis B. Sloan, the influential Philadelphia artist and educator. Sloan is best known for his plein air landscape painting with similar dramatic depictions of natural phenomena, including his well known Gathering Storm Over Philadelphia, circa 1961, collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Here Sloan uses the swirling stormy clouds to incorporate a dramatic range of painting handling and colors; using a variety of of brushwork, drips and splatter in a plethora of greys, purples and blues. This is the largest and most significant painting by the artist to come to auction since artist's Self-Portrait, 1956, sold at Swann Galleries on October 8, 2009, now in the collection of the Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Estimate
$10,000 – $15,000
Hughie Lee-Smith
J. Edward Bailey III (1923 - 1982)
Portrait of Hughie Lee-Smith, 1975.
Silver print on Kodak Polycontrast J double-weight paper, 13 1/4 x 11 inches. Purchase, Rex E. Lamoreaux Endowment Fund, 2014, (photography by Tim Thayer).
Permanent art collection of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan.
Hughie lee-smith (1915 - 1999)
Untitled (Urban Landscape).
Oil on linen canvas, circa 1975. 813x660 mm; 32x26 inches. Signed in oil, lower right.
Provenance: private collection, Florida.
This untitled urban landscape is a very fine example of Hughie Lee-Smith’s painting, a transitional work between his “metaphysical phase” of the 1960s and his late period body of work of the 80s and 90s. Despite the painting’s intense, bright light, the subject of a dilapidated Victorian building recalls Lee-Smith’s earlier and darker 1950s paintings. The only sign of a recent human presence is a single blue balloon, also abandoned and left on the street.
Detroit photographer J. Edward Bailey III’s (1923-1982), Portrait of Hughie Lee-Smith, 1975, in the collection of Wayne State University, captures Lee-Smith painting a scene in front of a similar landscape of abandoned houses. Lee-Smith continued to paint urban scenes that harken back not just to Detroit, but his life in Cleveland during the Depression. Here Lee-Smith shows a singular economy and clarity in his vision. With little drama, he evokes the existentialism of the 1970s –the deterioration of America’s historic urban areas and communities during periods of great growth and prosperity in the country at large.
Estimate
$30,000 – $40,000
Hughie lee-smith (1915 - 1999)
Untitled (Still Life with Three Wine Bottles).
Oil on linen canvas, circa 1975. 660x610 mm; 26x20 inches. Signed in oil, lower right.
Provenance: private collection, Florida.
Estimate
$7,000 – $10,000
Hughie lee-smith (1915 - 1999)
Untitled (Still Life with Two Wine Bottles).
Oil on linen canvas, circa 1975. 457x305 mm; 18x12 inches. Signed in oil (twice), upper and lower right.
Provenance: private collection, Florida.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Hughie lee-smith (1915 - 1999)
Untitled (Still Life With Oranges).
Oil on cotton canvas, circa 1975. 229x305 mm; 9x12 inches. Signed in oil, lower right.
Provenance: private collection, Florida.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Inge hardison (1904 - 2016)
Untitled (Study for Sojourner Truth).
Modelling wax, circa 1976. Approximately 229x229x178 mm; 9x9x7 inches.
Provenance: estate of the artist; private collection, New York.
This expressive bust appears to be a preliminary work by Inge Hardison for her 1976 Sojourner Truth, and is, with lot 103 in this auction, the first unique work of artist Inge Hardison to come to auction. Despite a lengthy career as a sculptor and living to the age of 102, Inge Hardison’s work is not widely known today beyond her popular series of small cast busts of historical figures Negro Giants in History in 1963 and Ingenious Americans in the late 1960s.
Born in Portsmouth, VA, Hardison’s family moved to Brooklyn in the 1930s where she pursued many creative interests including acting and dance. Alice Bernstein in her article “Inge Hardison at 100” in the International Review of African American Art wrote how after graduating from high school Hardison landed a role in the 1936 Broadway production of Sweet River, George Abbott’s adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin which won her rave reviews, and also appeared in The Country Wife with Ruth Gordon, and in the 1946 production of Anna Lucasta, co-starring with Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. She later attended Vassar College, majoring in music and creative writing, and later took art classes at the Arts Students League in New York. She also taught with Victor Lowenfeld at Hampton University from 1955-46.
Hardison also made a wide range of figurative sculpture including several large public works, including the life-size 1957 bronze Mother and Child at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan and the 7-foot abstract figure Jubilee at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn. Hardison was only woman founding member of the Black Academy of Arts and Letters (BAAL), an African-American cultural organization created in 1969 for the preservation and promotion of black culture. Hardison’s standing wood figure Sojourner Truth was presented to Nelson Mandela by New York Governor Mario Cuomo in 1990. Her artwork is found today in the collections of the Princeton University Art Museum, the Detroit Historical Museum, the National Woman’s Party, Washington, DC, the New York State Harlem Art Collection, New York, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York. iraaa.museum.hampton.edu; St. James pp. 229-30.
Estimate
$7,000 – $10,000
Inge hardison (1904 - 2016)
Untitled (Mother and Child).
Modelling clay, 1988. Approximately 241x127x76 mm; 9½x5x3 inches. Inscribed signature “Inge” and date at the left rear edge.
Provenance: the artist’s estate; private collection, New York.
This expressively modelled sculpture of a mother and child appears to be a preliminary study by Inge Hardison, and is, with lot 102 in this auction, the first unique works of Hardison to come to auction.
In 1957 Hardison made a life-size bronze Mother and Child which she donated to Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan in gratitude for the hospital’s role in the birth of her daughter, Yolande. The artist’s creation and presentation of the figure to the hospital was covered by The New York Times at the time.
Estimate
$6,000 – $9,000
Anthony barboza (1944 - )
James Baldwin, Writer.
Silver print, 1975. 330x330 mm; 13x13 inches. Signed, titled and dated in ink, lower margin.
Provenance: the estate of Howard C. Daitz, New York.
Estimate
$1,500 – $2,500
Gordon parks (1912 - 2006)
Untitled (Self-Portrait).
Dye gel C-print, 1979. 483x381 mm; 19x15 inches. Signed and dated in ink, lower right.
Provenance: estate of the artist; private collection, New York, acquired at Swann Galleries, February 21, 2008.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Norman lewis (1917 - 1979)
Untitled.
Oil on Arches paper, circa 1970s. 660x1054 mm; 29½x41½ inches.
Provenance: the estate of the artist; Bill Hodges Gallery, New York; Sande Webster Gallery, Philadelphia, with their labels on the frame back; private collection, Pennsylvania.
Illustrated: Norman W. Lewis: Works on Paper, 1935 - 1979, Billl Hodges Gallery, New York, p. 24.
This beautiful abstraction is an excellent and painterly example of Norman Lewis's late career work on paper. This large sheet of Arches is one of the largest formats that the artist used for works on paper in the 1970s. Norman Lewis added more high key and saturated colors in his painting after a visit with his wife Ouida to Jack Whitten's residence in Crete in the summer of 1973. The development of the Seachange series with more abstract compositions of vibrating, concentric circles followed in 1975. That year he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, and the following year in the fall of 1976, Lewis had his first retrospective, with 63 artworks included in Norman Lewis: A Retrospective, at The Graduate School and University Center of City College, New York. Fine pp. 181, 245-46 and 267.
Estimate
$50,000 – $75,000
Norman lewis (1917 - 1979)
Playtime.
Embossing from open-bite etching on cream wove paper, 1972. 405x568 mm; 16x22⅜ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated, and numbered 8/20 in pencil, lower margin.
This scarce print is one of five experimental intaglio prints that Norman Lewis made in 1972 - each were printed without using ink. The other titles are Carnavale, New World A'Coming, Togetherness and Trio; each were printed in an edition of 20. Acton and Fine 29; Fine p. 140.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Norman lewis (1909 - 1979)
Getting It Together.
Etching and relief printed in blue on cream Arches paper, 1975. 450x445 mm; 17¾x17½ inches, full margins. Artist's proof, aside from the edition of 50. Signed, dated, inscribed "Artist's proof" and dedicated "To Irene and Herbie" in pencil, lower margin. Printed at Bob Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop, New York.
This scarce proof is printed on the blank verso side of a text page from the 1972 portfolio Impressions: Our World Volume I - the page was rejected as the artist Eldzier Cortor's name had been misspelled. Acton/Fine 34; Fine p. 142.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Howardena pindell (1943- )
Untitled #57.
Acrylic, watercolor, punched graph papers, gold and computer tape, 1974-75. Approx. 210x318 mm; 8¼x12½ inches; 406x508x38 mm; 16x20x1½ inches (including the mount and Plexiglass box). Signed, titled and dated in pencil, lower right.
Provenance: Rosa Esman Gallery, New York, with the gallery label on the frame back; private collection, New Jersey (1975).
This punched paper assemblage is a beautiful example of the Howardena Pindell’s important, ground breaking work in this innovative medium. Several other examples of this early series, including Untitled #27, #43, #58 and #69 from this period were included in the artist’s 2018 traveling retrospective, Howardena Pindell: What Remains To Be Seen, curated by Naomi Beckwith and Valerie Cassel Oliver, organized at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Estimate
$30,000 – $40,000
Betye saar (1926 - )
Untitled.
Mixed media assemblage, including photogravure copper plate on one side and copper repousse and collage on the other, on a wooden block, 1978. 140x108x13 mm; 5½x4¼x½ inches. Signed and dated in ink on the underside
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, Los Angeles, private collection, California (1997); thence by descent to the current owner, California (2005).
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Benny andrews (1930 - 2006)
Top of the World.
Color etching on cream wove paper, 1977. 451x298 mm; 17¾x11¾ inches, full margins. Artist’s proof, aside from the edition of 100. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed “Artist’s Proof” in pencil, lower margin.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Eldzier cortor (1916 - 2015)
Dance (Dance Composition No. 31).
Color etching and aquatint, 1978. 552x394 mm; 21¾x15½ inches, full margins. Second state impression, aside from the edition of 40. Signed, titled, inscribed “II state impression” and numbered 6/10 in graphite, lower margin.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Romare bearden (1911 - 1988)
The Lantern.
Color lithograph on cream wove paper, 1979. 610x394 mm; 24x15½ inches, full margins. Signed and numbered 55/175 in pencil, lower margin. Gelburd/Rosenberg GG#89.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Romare bearden (1911 - 1988)
Morning.
Color lithograph on wove paper, 1979. 490x635 mm; 19¼x24⅞ inches, full margins. Signed and numbered 21/175 in pencil, lower margin. Gelburg/Rosenberg GG#91.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Romare bearden (1911 - 1988)
Quilting Time.
Color lithograph, 1979. 460x590 mm; 18x23⅛ inches, full margins. Artist’s proof, aside from the edition of 175. Signed, titled, inscribed “AP,” and numbered 11/20 in ink, lower margin. Geldburd/Rosenberg GG#93.
Estimate
$6,000 – $9,000
Richard hunt (1935 - )
Spiral Figure, #2.
Bronze with a dark brown patina, mounted on a wooden base, 1978. Approximately 140x64x64 mm; 5½x2½x2½ inches, not including the base. Number 4 from an edition of 7. Initialed at the base rear edge.
Provenance: Wendell Street Gallery, Cambridge, MA; private collection, Massachusetts (1994).
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Sam gilliam (1933 - )
G.D.S.
Color screenprint, 1978. 612x660 mm; 24⅛x26 inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 31/50 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Sam Gilliam and the Stovall Printmaking Workshop, Washington, DC.
Another impression of this scarce print is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Ed clark (1926 - 2019)
Untitled.
Offset color lithograph, 1979. 609x825 mm; 24x32½ inches, full margins. Artist’s proof, aside from an edition of unknown size. Signed, dated and inscribed “A/P” in pencil, lower margin.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Barkley l. hendricks (1945 - 2017)
Mount Mersey, St. Kitts, West Indies.
Watercolor on wove paper, 1979. 370x500 mm; 14⅝x19¾ inches. Titled in ink on the frame back board.
Provenance: the artist, New London, CT; private collection, Philadelphia. With the artist’s home address ink stamp on the back board.
This cool, atmospheric landscape from St. Kitts is an early example of Barkley Hendricks’ work in watercolor. In 1979, Hendricks had his first solo show of watercolors at Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, CT. He also later exhibited his watercolors of St. Kitts at ACA Galleries in 1982.
Estimate
$10,000 – $15,000
Brandywine Workshop & Archives Collection - lots 120 -143
Paul f. keene, jr. (1920 - 2009)
Late Summer Studio Window.
Oil on linen canvas, 1968. 1828x1333 mm; 72x52½ inches. Signed in oil, lower right recto. Signed and titled in oil, right stretcher bar, verso. From the artist’s Window Series.
Provenance: the estate of the artist.
Exhibited: Dolan Maxwell Gallery, Philadelphia, at the National Black Fine Art Show, New York, 2009.
This large oil is an excellent example of Paul Keene’s 1968 series of paintings of images seen through his studio window. Windows appear again in his later 1980s surreal Sky Window series of paintings, examples of which are in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Born in Philadelphia, Paul Keene studied at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art (Philadelphia College of Art and now University of the Arts), Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, and the Académie Julian in Paris. He studied art abroad in both Paris (1949–51) and Haiti (1952–54) synthesizing both modernism and art of the diaspora. Keene founded the artist cooperative Galerie Huit in Paris with Raymond Hendler, working alongside Al Held, Jules Olitski and Haywood “Bill” Rivers and other artist who came over on the G.I. Bill. He also studied in the studio of Fernand Léger with whom he exhibited at the Salon de Mai. He returned to Philadelphia here he taught at the Philadelphia College of Art and the Tyler School of Art. His work is in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the James A. Michener Museum. Keene returned to Philadelphia where he taught at the Philadelphia College of Art from 1954 to 1968, and then established the art department at Bucks County Community College. His work is in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Woodmere Museum of Art and the James A. Michener Museum.
Estimate
$25,000 – $35,000
Charles white (1918 - 1979)
I Have A Dream Portfolio.
Portfolio of six offset lithographs, with the printed folder, 1969. Each 508x355 mm; 20x14 inches, full margins. Edition of 150. Signed in ink on the dedication page. Published by Heritage Gallery, Los Angeles.
Includes Seed of Heritage * I Have Seen Black Hands * The Wall * The Brother * Nat Turner, Yesterday, Today, And Tomorrow * Vision.
Provenance: private collection, Oakland, acquired from Swann Galleries, February 25, 2010.
Los Angeles: Heritage Galleries, 1969
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Leon n. hicks (1933 - )
New Faces: Series VII #1A.
Color engraving on wove paper, 1970. 685x473 mm; 27x18⅝ inches, full margins. Artist’s proof, aside from an edition of less than 10. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed “AP” in pencil, lower margin.
Provenance: collection of the artist.
Leon Hicks is a celebrated printmaker and scholar - best known for his pioneering work and innovations in engraving. Born in Deerfield, Florida, Hicks’ career spans decades and traverses many boundaries. Hicks received a BFA from Kansas State University in Painting and Sculpture and a MA in painting and a MFA in printmaking from the University of Iowa, where he studied under master printmaker Mauricio Lasansky.
The 1960s were a formative period for Hicks, marked by the emergence of the Black Art Movement and his transition from student of art and art history to professor of art at Florida A&M University in 1964. As an educator, he has held positions at Concord College, Lincoln, Lehigh and Webster University; retiring in 1999, Hicks was appointed Professor Emeritus at Webster University in St. Louis. Hicks’s prints have been exhibited in many notable group shows including Impressional Expressions: Black American Graphics, the Smithsonian Institution and the Studio Museum in Harlem, 11 Black Printmakers, Spelman College, Blacks: US: 1973 at the New York Cultural Center, and The 2nd Annual Atlanta Life National Art Competition. His most recent solo exhibition Leon Hicks: The Ingenious Line in 2018 at Fisk University focused on his early engravings. His prints are many institutional collections including the Saint Louis Art Museum, the University of Florida, Miami, the Oakland Art Museum, the Tuskegee Institute and the Library of Congress.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Leon n. hicks (1933 - )
New Faces: Series IV #3.
Engraving on wove paper, 1970. 330x279 mm; 13x11 inches, full margins. Artist’s proof, aside from an edition of less than 10. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed “Artist’s Proof” in pencil, lower margin.
Provenance: collection of the artist.
Estimate
$1,000 – $1,500
John e. dowell, jr. (1941 - )
L.P.W.S. (Lines Played With Soul).
Color screenprint on wove paper, 1976. 760x560 mm; 30x22 inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 8/22 in pencil, lower edge. Printed and published by the Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia.
Provenance: the Brandywine Workshop Collection, Philadelphia.
Illustrated: Allan L. Edmunds, ed. and Halima Taha. Three Decades of American Printmaking; The Brandywine Worksop Collection fig. 101, p. 73.
Another impression is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.
John E. Dowell, Jr. is a printmaker, etcher, lithographer, painter, and professor emeritus of printmaking at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Philadelphia. Influenced by the improvisation of Abstract Expressionists Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, and Jackson Pollock and modern jazz musicians Miles Davis, Archie Shepp, and Cecil Taylor, Dowell invokes an abstract representation of jazz sheet music.
Philadelphia native and master printmaker John E. Dowell, Jr. studied at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University under the tutelage of ceramist Rudolf Staffel. Dowell has received many awards for his work, including the James VanDerZee Award from the Brandywine Workshop and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Dowell's work is also in the permanent collections of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Worcester Art Museum.
Estimate
$1,200 – $1,800
Stanley whitney (1946 - )
Untitled #1.
Color screenprint on cream wove paper, 1979. 584x905 mm; 23x35⅜ inches. State proof, one of only several state proofs with unique coloring, aside from the edition of 35. Signed (twice), titled, dated, inscribed “to Allan” in pencil, lower edge. Printed and published by the Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia.
Provenance: the collection of Anne & Allan Edmunds.
A very scarce proof impression of the artist’s first editioned print, made under Allan Edmunds’ supervision at Brandywine, while Whitney was teaching at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Richard hunt (1935 - )
Untitled.
Lithograph on Copperplate Deluxe paper, 1974. 596x838 mm; 23½x33 inches. Signed and numbered 40/50 in pencil, lower edge. Printed and published by Lakeside Studio Editions, Lakesidem, MI, with the blindstamp lower right.
Provenance: the collection of Anne & Allan Edmunds.
Another impression of this print is in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Estimate
$1,000 – $1,500
Richard hunt (1935 - )
Untitled.
Color screenprint on handmade paper, circa 1980. 558x774 mm; 22x30 1/2 inches. Signed, and numbered 3/40 in pencil, lower edge. Printed and published by the Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia, with the printer’s blind stamp.
Provenance: the collection of Anne & Allan Edmunds.
Estimate
$1,500 – $2,500
Elizabeth catlett (1915 - 2012)
Blues.
Color offset lithograph on wove paper, 1983. 699x451 mm; 27½x17¾ inches, full margins. Artist's proof, one of 20, aside from the edition of 130. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed "AP" in pencil, lower margin. Printed and published by the Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia.
Provenance: the Brandywine Workshop Collection, Philadelphia.
Illustrated: Allan L. Edmunds, ed. and Halima Taha. Three Decades of American Printmaking; The Brandywine Workshop Collection fig. 171, p. 135.
Another impression was included in the 2010 Beyond The Blues exhibition of the collection of the Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans, and is reproduced on the cover of the catalogue.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Paul f. keene, jr. (1920 - 2009)
The Guitarist (Jazz Icon Series).
Acrylic on paper, 1985. 1054x749 mm; 41¼x29½ inches. Signed and dated in acrylic, lower left.
Provenance: the estate of the artist.
Music and color serve as the compositional key in Paul Keene’s Jazz Icon Series. A master of the manipulation of scale, color, light, and a lifelong jazz music enthusiast brings Keene’s anonymous portraits of jazz musicians to life. His use of a vibrant color palette to express his passion for jazz, characterized by improvisation and an energetic rhythm, reflects his passion for the medium. Music was a large part of Paul Keene’s life, and his strong interest in blues and jazz began as a young boy. As a child, he was inspired by gospel music. As a teenager, he waited with his friends to see jazz musicians playing in the clubs in Philadelphia. Keene felt jazz was a rhythmic and unique language. He believed that to succeed as a fine artist, “…the work must sing out, and the viewer must hear it.” He admired the musician Miles Davis and said he could “create a picture in your mind with his music.” Biography courtesy of the Michener Art Museum.
Estimate
$20,000 – $30,000
Belkis ayón (1967 - 1999)
Temores Infundados.
Collograph on cream wove paper, 1997. 723 mm; 28½ inches diameter (tondo), full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 9/10 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by the artist at the Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia.
Provenance: collection of Anne & Allan Edmunds.
Belkis Ayón (1967-1999) was an Afro-Latina printmaker and professor born in Havana, Cuba. Ayón is best known for her innovations in collagraphy. Ayón studied engraving at the prestigious Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana (ISA) and joined its faculty after graduation. Much of what is being discovered and uncovered of her works are credited to her first US retrospective Nkame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón. The exhibition not only revealed the mystical workings of a African religious society but also the gamut of Ayón’s artistry and investigative skills.
Ayón’s formative years as an artist were plagued by the periodo especial in Cuba which began with the collapse of the Soviet Union. This most difficult era in Cuba was a time when vital resources, let alone art supplies, were not readily accessible. However, this is also the time in which Ayón rose to prominence in the contemporary art world: Ayón’s work was exhibited at the 16th Venice Biennale, the Havana Biennial and the Bharat Bhavan International Biennial of Prints in India. In 1999 she was awarded four residencies including with the Brandywine Workshop, the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, the Bronski Center at the Philadelphia College of Art, and the Bensen Hall Gallery, Rhode Island School of Design. 1999 was also the year Ayón committed suicide, and left behind a body of work that has broken barriers between US-Cuban relations and has pioneered discourses regarding African iconography and influence on Cuban culture and society. Her sister Katia Ayón Manso is the representative of the Estate de Belkis Ayón, located at the Ayón family home in Central Havana where Ayón grew up.
After her untimely death at the age of 32, Belkis Ayón left behind an oeuvre that is important to the history of printmaking, traversing Cuban, contemporary art, and gender boundaries. Her unsettling subjects are typically depicted against stark black patterned backgrounds, as oblong almost shapeless silhouettes with hollow, almond-shaped eyes. Her body of work functions as a reflection on the mysticism and traditions of the secret religious Afro-Cuban brotherhood, Abakuá Secret Society. Described in the United States as “an Afro-Cuban version of Freemasonry,” this fraternity was fathomed in Nigeria and founded by enslaved Africans in Cuba as a society of refuge against the backdrop of the vile institution of slavery. The esoteric practice is composed of the usage of a creolized African language, rituals and ceremonies, and involves many iconographic figures such as princess Sikán whom Ayón used as a vessel to investigate the society. She is quoted as saying, “They said [Abakuá] was a secret society, only for men, and that aroused [her] interest.” That interest was figuratively personified as princess Sikán who is recorded as the only female figure in Abakuá lore. Ayón’s inclusion of egalitarian iconography with the incorporation of princess Sikán not only supplanted the Abakuá Secret Society but refuted societal norms. She is known for having been the only and the most prominent figure with an extensive body of work that traverses and investigates the exclusive Abakuán brotherhood. Belkis Ayón was a master at her craft and a pioneer in the world of large-scale print installations and collographs, a labor-intensive art practice that cemented her place in today both in art history and the art world.
Estimate
$20,000 – $30,000
Belkis ayón (1967 - 1999)
Hay Que Tener Pacienca (You Have To Be Patient).
Collograph on cream wove paper, 1998. 723 mm; 28½ inches diameter (tondo), full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 1/10 in pencil, with the printer’s blind stamp, lower margin. Printed by the artist at the Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia.
Provenance: collection of Anne & Allan Edmunds.
Estimate
$20,000 – $30,000
Camille billops (1933 - 2019)
KKK Boutique II.
Etching and aquatint on cream wove paper, 1996. 533x444 mm; 21x17½ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 22/35 in pencil, lower margin. Printed and published by the Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia.
Provenance: collection of Anne & Allan Edmunds.
The title and subject of this print relate to the satiric film The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just Rednecks, made by Billops and her husband, James Hatch, in the same year. The film addresses the origins, stereotypes, violent histories, and agendas of racism - pressing viewers to confront their own potential for and participation in prejudice toward people who are different from themselves. Other impressions are in the collections of Emory University and the Library of Congress.
Estimate
$1,200 – $1,800
Samella lewis (1924 - )
Together We Stand.
Color lithograph on cream wove paper, 1997. 559x755 mm; 22x29¾ inches, full margins. A unique artist's proof, aside from the edition of 10. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 1/1 in pencil, lower margin. Additionally signed, inscribed "Joy!" and dated "December 14, 1997" by Maya Angelou. Printed and published by the Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia.
Provenance: collection of Anne & Allan Edmunds.
Featuring the poetry of Maya Angelou, Lewis conveys to her audience her feelings about growing up in the Jim Crow South. Inscribed in the plate is a quote from Angelou's poem, written for her friend, Samella Lewis, Our Grandmother:: “However I am perceived and deceived, however my ignorance and conceits, lay aside your fears that I will be undone, for I shall not be moved.”
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
John t. scott (1940 - 2007)
St. George.
Woodcut on laid Japan paper, 1992. 304x228 mm; 12x9 inches, full margins. Signed, titled and numbered 6/20 in pencil, lower margin. Printed and published by the Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia.
Provenance: collection of Anne & Allan Edmunds.
Estimate
$1,000 – $1,500
John t. scott (1940 - 2007)
Waiting at the Station.
Hand-pressed woodcut, 2002. 2006x1219 mm; 79x48 inches, full margins. Edition of 4.
Provenance: collection of Anne & Allan Edmunds.
Exhibited:Culture Quilt: Large Relief Prints by John T. Scott, selected from the John T. Scott Artist Trust and curated by Allan L. Edmunds, Brandwine Workshop and Archives, Philadelphia, PA, February 22 - April 28, 2019.
Illustrated: Culture Quilt: Large Relief Prints by John T. Scott, The Printed Image Gallery, p. 15.
Waiting at the Station is a monumental woodcut from John T. Scott’s series of expressive prints of New Orleans, each carved into a single sheet of plywood with a small chainsaw. Scott completed what would be one of his last series of works in 2003 just a few years before Hurricane Katrina which changed so many peoples’ lives in New Orleans. Allan L. Edmunds writes it “evokes interpretations of the many voices and ever-changing rhythms of life in the city, which Scott knew before Katrina. In some respects, Scott’s monochromatic compositions pay respect to less glorified and colorful aspects of Orleans’ culture - the ‘Quilt’ that binds people together, by preserving strong traditions, embracing the history and learning from the struggles of the past to know that a rebirth was inevitable.” Referring to the practical production of Scott’s woodcut, Susan Stedman writes that he accentuates the grain of the wood by hand-pressing prints with so much pressure that the tool marks are distinguishable upon each impression:
“Scott chose to emphasize the impact of his hand, making recognizable tool marks and lines on the wood’s surface. He described, in comparison, one of his bold experiments carving in wood: ‘I didn’t want my ideas to look facile…It dawned on me that the only time you can have control over anything is when you realize you don’t have control. So, I chose the chain saw. I wanted to give up the facileness that I know I have with tools to get at a combination of material and tool that was not that compatible and not that easy to control.’ [Stunda, 2004]”
Educator, sculptor and printmaker John T. Scott was born in Gentilly, Louisiana in 1940, and raised in New Orlean’s Ninth Ward. His father worked as a restaurant cook and chauffeur while his mother stayed home. He learned embroidery from her that served as his first foray into the visual arts. Having a Catholic New Orleans upbringing, Scott attended the Xavier University in New Orleans receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree. He received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Michigan State University in East Lansing in 1965 where he studied under painter Charles Pollock. Afterward, Scott returned to Xavier where he taught for 40 years. In 1983, Scott received a grant to study under sculptor George Rickey, and in 1992, he was awarded the MacArthur Grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Scott received an honorary Doctor of Humanities from Michigan State University in 1995 and a Doctor of Humanities from Tulane University in New Orleans in 1997. His works are in the permanent collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. Edmunds p. 5; Stedman p. 17.
Estimate
$10,000 – $15,000
Curlee raven holton (1951 - )
Quilt.
Hand-colored etching and collage on Arches paper, 2000. 546x685 mm; 21½x27 inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 17/30 in pencil, lower margin.
Provenance: collection of Anne & Allan Edmunds.
Other impressions are in the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia and the David C. Driskell Center, University of Maryland, College Park.
Master printer, painter, educator and administrator Curlee Raven Holton has developed a thought-provoking practice that confronts the limitations of the lived experience. Holton’s extensive career and decades of experience allow him to address contemporary issues both within his artistic and scholarly work. His prints have been exhibited at Egypt’s 7th International Biennale; Taller de Artes Plásticas Rufino Tamayo, Oaxaca, Mexico; the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cultural and self-reflective, his works are compelling narratives of the past, present, and the overlapping of the two.
Holton is also known for his work with other artists - creating collaborative initiatives to spark productions in printmaking. He founded the Experimental Printmaking Institute (EPI) which focuses on community outreach and supporting student artists in 1996 at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania. The EPI studio allows students to shadow practicing artists such as Faith Ringgold in the production of her print editions. Currently, Holton is the director of the David C. Driskell Center for the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland. Holton is also master printer and director of the fine art press Raven Editions in Easton, Pennsylvania.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Emma amos (1938 - 2020)
How Time Flies.
Color silk aquatint and screenprint with collage on two joined sheets of Rives BFK paper, 2004. 762x1016 mm; 30x40 inches. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 23/50 in pencil, lower edge. Printed by Quentin Mosley and published at the Experimental Printmaking Studio (EPI), Lafayette College, PA.
Provenance: collection of Anne & Allan Edmunds.
Another impression is in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Benny andrews (1930 - 2006)
Untitled (Brown vs. Board of Education).
Color screenprint, 2004. 749x615 mm; 29½x21¾ inches. Printer’s proof, aside from the edition of 50. Signed, dated and inscribed “PP” in pencil, lower edge.
Provenance: collection of Anne & Allan Edmunds.
In 2004 the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., commissioned Andrews to produce an edition of lithographs, titled Education Quest, for their celebration of the 50th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v the Board of Education of Topeka. Benny Andrews said: “This work challenged me to make it clear that though the wall facing African Americans seeking equal education has been broken through, there are still remnants of the wall remaining today”.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
David c. driskell (1931 - 2020)
The Bassist.
Color lithograph, 2006. 760x540 mm; 29¾x21¼ inches, full margins. Printer’s proof, aside from the edition of 80. Signed, titled, dated and numbered “PP1” in white ink, lower edge. Printed and published by the Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia.
Provenance: collection of Anne & Allan Edmunds.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Richard mayhew (1924 - )
Serenade.
Color lithograph with hand coloring in pastel, 2008. 419x635 mm; 16½x25 inches, full margins. Artist’s proof, aside from edition of 80. Signed, tited, and inscribed “AP” in pencil, lower margin. Printed and published by the Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia.
Provenance: collection of Anne & Allan Edmunds.
Another impression of this work is in the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Louis delsarte (1944 - 2020)
Visions of the Future.
Offset color lithograph with hand-coloring in pastel, 2015. 749x546 mm; 29½x21½ inches. Unique hand-colored proof, aside from an unknown edition. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 1/1 in pencil, lower edge. Printed and published by the Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia.
Provenance: collection of Anne & Allan Edmunds.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Floyd newsum (1950 - )
Yellow Sky at Midnight.
Gouache on wove paper, 2006-10. 177x266 mm; 7x10½ inches. Signed and dated in ink, lower edge.
Provenance: collection of the artist.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Floyd newsum (1950 - )
Dreams Beyond 3.
Gouache with collage elements on wove paper, 2020. 762x571 mm; 30x22½ inches. Signed and dated in ink, lower left corner.
Provenance: collection of the artist.
Since the beginning of Floyd Newsum’s career, he has painted on paper. His painterly approach is to create tactile surfaces and colors of paint on multiple papers forming one composition. Refining several systems of cultural and abstract symbols in his work, Newsum reflects on his background and history - his latest works show the influence of West African art. Newsum has said “I want to to provoke thought or conjecture from the viewer. My paintings are a collection of thoughts in a single composition, with the power to present more than one interpretation.”
A native of Memphis, Tennessee, Floyd Newsum graduated from Memphis College of Art with a BFA in 1973 and from Temple University, Philadelphia with an MFA in 1975. A painter and printmaker, he has taught art for 38 years at the University of Houston, and has exhibited his work in more than 78 solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries across the country. Newsum has also created five public art projects, four of which are in Houston and one in Fort Worth. His works are in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Estimate
$12,000 – $18,000
20th Century Contemporary
Stanley whitney (1946 - )
Untitled.
Oil monotype on buff Arches paper, circa 1980. 762x1118 mm; 30x44 inches. Signed in pencil, lower right.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; private collection, Pennsylvania.
Estimate
$10,000 – $15,000
Mcarthur binion (1946 - )
Untitled.
Color lithograph on wove paper, 1980. 584x762 mm; 23x30 inches (sheet). Signed, dated and numbered 30/50 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by the Hollaender Press, New York. Published by the artist and Hollaender Press, New York.
Estimate
$1,500 – $2,500
Howardena pindell (1943 - )
Kyoto (Positive/Negative).
Color lithograph and etching on dyed Japan paper with five sheets of laminated Kinwashi paper, 1980. 673x521 mm; 26½x20½ inches. Printer’s proof, aside from the edtion of 30. Signed and dated in pencil, lower right. Inscribed “P.P. 2” in pencil, lower left.
Other impressions of this scarce print are in the collections of the National Gallery of Art and the University of Michigan Museum of Art.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
David driskell (1931 - 2020)
The Ghost.
Oil and oil monotype on thin wove paper, 1980. 196x152 mm; 7¾x6 inches. Signed in oil, upper left.
Provenance: private collection, New Jersery.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Elizabeth catlett (1915 - 2012)
Triangular Woman.
Bronze with a polished brass patina on a wooden base, 1980. 635x330×483 mm; 25x13x9 inches. Incised initials and dated on the back side edge.
Provenance: Chi-Wara Gallery, Atlanta, GA; private collection (1981); thence by descent, private collection, Arizona.
Elizabeth Catlett made several versions of this distinctive figure sculpture between 1979 and 1997, including bronze, polychromed mahogany and amber onyx.
Estimate
$10,000 – $15,000
Elizabeth catlett (1915 - 2012)
Madonna.
Lithograph on wove paper, 1982. 530x405 mm; 21x16 inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 69/180 in pencil, lower margin.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Romare bearden (1911 - 1988)
Two Women.
Color screenprint, 1981-82. 585x363 mm; 23x14¼ inches, full margins. Signed, titled and numbered 24/120 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by NYIT Print Workshop, New York, with the blind stamp lower right. Gelburd/Rosenberg GG#62.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Romare bearden (1911 - 1988)
Obeah Woman with her daughter (La Sorcière avec sa fille)..
Watercolor on wove paper, circa 1984. 762x560 mm; 30x22 inches. Signed in faint watercolor and re-signed in pencil, lower left recto. Titled in pencil, lower right verso.
Provenance: Seth Taffae Fine Art, New York; private collection, Michigan; the estate of Allan O. Hunter, Jr., acquired at Swann Galleries, October 5, 2018
Romare Bearden’s Obeah watercolors are an important series in the artist’s late career. They represent both a culmination of his artistic freedom and expression in the medium, and his awareness of the traditions of his second home on the Caribbean island of St. Martin. The role of the Obeah is a well-known part of Afro-Caribbean communities and cultural history - typically, a woman who practices spiritual, herbal and mystical healing in her villlage.
Estimate
$20,000 – $30,000
Jacob lawrence (1917 - 2000)
Hiroshima.
Bound volume with complete text and 8 color screenprints, 1983. 317x240 mm; 12½x9½ inches (sheets), full margins.
One of 1500 numbered copies. Signed by John Hersey, Robert Penn Warren and Lawrence and numbered 259 in pencil on the justification page. Printed at The Studio Heinrici Ltd., New York. Published by the Limited Editions Club, New York.
Original black aniline leather binding and cloth slipcase. Nesbett L83-1.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Faith ringgold (1930 - )
No More War.
Color intaglio on wove paper, circa 1984-85. 603x895 mm; 23¾x35¼ inches, full margins. Signed and numbered 4/5 in pencil, lower margin. An excellent impression of this very scarce, large print.
Provenance: Peg Alston Fine Arts, New York; private collection, New York.
This large print is an interpretation of the central image of Faith Ringgold's 1985 Part I story quilt. Unlike the typically painted images of her story quilts, both parts of her No More War Story Quilts include intaglio-printed images in the central panel, creating an abstraction of fallen bodies in conflict.
In 1984, Ringgold first made a series of intaglio prints entitled The Death of Apartheid and Women, Power, Poverty and Love. She then continued printmaking as a Visiting Artist at Bob Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop in New York where she developed a technique for etching on canvas that would be used to make the No More War Story Quilts the following year. Farrington p. 108.
Estimate
$6,000 – $9,000
David hammons (1943 - )
The Man Nobody Killed.
Stencilled paint and collage printed on commercially printed cardboard, 1986. 280x216 mm; 11x8½ inches. Edition of 160/200. From Cobalt Myth Mechanics, 1986/1987, Eye Magazine, #14. Published by Eye Publications, New York.
While from an edition, each printing of The Man Nobody Killed is a unique variation. Each also were printed on different found cardboard material, sometimes with additional printed surfaces or collaged material. Another impression is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The subject of the work is Michael Stewart, a New York artist who died as a result of injuries sustained while in police custody following an arrest by the New York City Transit Police.
The artist Michael Stewart and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painting The Death of Michael Stewart (Defacement) were the subject of the recent exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Basquiat’s “Defacement”: the Untold Story, June 21 - November 6, 2019. The exhibition included The MoMA impression of this print alongside artworks by Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, George Condo and Lyle Ashton Harris. It was organized by guest curator Chaédria LaBouvier - the first African American curator of an exhibition at the museum.
Estimate
$8,000 – $12,000
Barkley l. hendricks (1945 - 2017)
Sacrifice of the Watermelon Virgin or Shirt Off Her Back.
Color offset lithograph, 1987. 552x756 mm; 21¾x29¾ inches. Signed, dated, titled and numbered 70/85 in pencil, lower edge. Printed and published by Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia.
Another impression is in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Robert neal (1916 - 1987)
Street People.
Oil on cotton canvas, 1986. 889x787 mm; 35x31 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower right recto. Titled in pencil, verso.
Provenance: the estate of the artist; private collection, Ohio.
Robert Neal’s powerful and beautiful painting of homeless men on the street in a snow storm is poignant painting of modern American life. Like Neal’s 1984 painting Cheese and Butter Line, it is a reminder of how poverty affects the lives of many different Americans.
A native of Atlanta, Robert Neal was a student of Hale Woodruff’s and became his studio assistant at Spelman College, working on the Talladega College Amistad murals in 1939. At the same time, Neal exhibited his own paintings and was included in the 1939 Baltimore Museum of Art’s Contemporary Negro Art, the first museum group exhibition of African-American artists, and the 1940 Exhibition of the Art of the American Negro (1851-1940) at the Tanner Galleries in Chicago, the largest survey of African-American art at the time. Neal is also mentioned in Alain Locke’s 1940 The Negro in Art: A Pictorial Record of The Negro Artist and of The Negro Theme In Art, and James A. Porter’s 1943 Modern Negro Art.
Robert Neal moved to Dayton, Ohio in the 1940s and continued painting; unfortunately, little is recorded about his latter life or career. His paintings are now in the collections of the High Museum and the Columbus Museum of Art. Heydt pp. 80, 132.
Estimate
$20,000 – $30,000
Ernest crichlow (1914 - 2005)
Lady.
Color etching and aquatint on Arches paper, 1987. 552x425 mm; 24x17¾ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 22/57 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Bob Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop, New York, with the blind stamp lower right.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Sam gilliam (1933 - )
Red Rouge.
Acrylic on canvas and primed aluminum construction, with wood support structure, 1989. 1689x1854x533 mm; 66½x73½x21 inches. Signed, dated and titled in ink on the mount, verso.
Provenance: purchased directly from the artist; private collection, Maryland.
This significant construction by Sam Gilliam epitomizes his trailblazing blending of abstract painting and sculpture in the late 1980s. Similarly constructed works by Gilliam from 1989 include Fine as a Cobweb, the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, and Waking Up in the Hallmark Art Collection. At the same time, Gilliam began utilizing similar three-dimensional constructions for his public commissions, including the 1989 work CAAM Hues at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles. From 1985-1989, Sam Gilliam was also teaching as a professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. Binstock pp. 165-166.
Estimate
$50,000 – $70,000
Sam gilliam (1933 - )
Pretty Boxes.
Color screenprint and offset lithograph with collage on Arches paper, 1993. 756x1086 mm; 29¾x42¾ inches. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 70/86 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by the Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia. Published by the Brodsky Center for Innovative Print and Paper, Rutgers University.
Illustrated: Allan L. Edmunds, ed. and Halima Taha. Three Decades of American Printmaking; The Brandywine Worksop Collection fig. 219, p. 177.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
William t. williams (1942 - )
Caravan.
Color lithograph on cream wove paper, 1991. 984x666 mm; 38¾x26¼ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 10/19 in pencil, lower margin. Printed and published by the Oberon Press Inc., New York.
Another impression is in the permanent collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Sam middleton (1927 - 2015)
Composition.
Mixed paper collage, gouache, and ink on paper, 1992. 775x1067 mm; 30½x42 inches. Signed and dated in ink, lower right.
Provenance: private collection, Netherlands.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Ann tanksley (1934 - )
Planting Seeds.
Oil on masonite board, 1990. 610x457mm; 24x18 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower left.
Provenance: Dorsey’s Art Gallery, Brooklyn; private collection, New York.
Estimate
$6,000 – $9,000
John biggers (1924 - 2001)
Family Arc (Middle Panel).
Offset lithograph, center panel of the triptych, 1992. 736x546 mm; 29x21½ inches. Proof, aside from the edition of 100. Signed in pencil, lower right, recto. Signed and dated in pencil, lower right, verso. Printed and published by the Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia.
Estimate
$1,000 – $1,500
Emma amos (1938 - 2020)
Polka Dots.
Color monotype, color pastels and stencil on thick cream wove paper, circa 1990. 597x394 mm; 23½x15½ inches. Unique artist’s proof, aside from an unknown edition. Signed, titled and inscribed “AP” lower edge in pencil.
Estimate
$8,000 – $12,000
Elizabeth catlett (1915 - 2012)
All the People.
Color lithograph on cream wove paper, 1992. 397x346 mm; 15⅝x13⅝ inches, full margins. Signed, titled and dated in pencil, lower margin. Printed by J. K. Fine Art Editions, Union City, NJ. Published by The Limited Editions Club, New York. From the For My People portfolio.
Estimate
$1,000 – $1,500
Hughie lee-smith (1915 - 1999)
Curtain Call.
Oil on linen canvas, 1989. 914x1016 mm; 36x40 inches. Signed in oil, lower right.
Provenance: the estate of the artist; thence by descent to the current owner, California.
Exhibited: June Kelly Gallery, New York; Anderson Gallery, Buffalo, NY, with the labels on the frame back.
Curtain Call is a wonderful example from the artist’s late series of paintings depicting musicians or actors in a staged environment. The year before, in 1988, Hughie Lee-Smith had his first retrospective at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton. Other Lee-Smith paintings from this series include End of Act One, 1984, and Temptation, 1991.
These imagined scenes recall Lee-Smith’s early experiences of dance and theater while working at the Playhouse Settlement (named Karamu House in 1941) during the WPA period in Cleveland. Lee-Smith taught art at Karamu House in the late 1930s in return for the full scholarship to the Cleveland School of Art (now the Art Institute of Cleveland) that the Gilpin Players awarded him in 1935. Inspired by the Gilpin Players, a black acting troupe, Lee-Smith also founded an inter-racial modern dance troupe there.
Estimate
$40,000 – $60,000
Hughie lee-smith (1915 - 1999)
The Latecomer.
Watercolor on wove paper, 1994. 349x495 mm; 13¾x19½ inches, full margins. Signed in watercolor, lower right.
Provenance: estate of the artist; thence by descent, private collection, California; private collection, Maryland (2012), acquired at Swann Galleries, October 18, 2012.
Estimate
$20,000 – $30,000
Hughie lee-smith (1915 - 1999)
Untitled (Portrait of a Woman).
Watercolor and pencil on wove paper, 1993-94. 178x203 mm; 7x8 inches. Signed in ink, lower right.
Provenance: estate of the artist; thence by descent to the current owner.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Hughie lee-smith (1915 - 1999)
Untitled (Man Playing the Flute).
Watercolor and pencil on wove paper, 1993-94. 178x254 mm; 7x10 inches. Signed in red ink, lower right.
Provenance: estate of the artist; thence by descent to the current owner.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Jacob lawrence (1917 - 2000)
Contemplation.
Color screenprint on Bainbridge Two Ply Rag paper, 1993. 724x470 mm; 28½x18½ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated, and numbered 21/120 in pencil, lower margin. From The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture series. Nesbett L93-2.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Jacob lawrence (1917 - 2000)
St. Marc.
Color screenprint on Bainbridge Two Ply Rag paper, 1994. 724x470 mm; 28½x18½ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated, and numbered 36/120 in pencil, lower margin. From The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture series. Nesbett L94-3.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Jacob lawrence (1917 - 2000)
Artist in Studio (Studio).
Color lithograph on Rives BFK paper, 1994. 664x499 mm; 26⅛x19⅝ inches. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 49/50 in pencil, lower edge. Printed by Kent Lovelace, Stone Press Editions, Seattle, with the blind stamp lower right. Published by the University of Washington, School of Art, Seattle. Nesbett L94-1.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Elizabeth catlett (1915 - 2012)
Nude Torso.
Black marble on a wooden base, circa 1994. 345x190x102 mm; 14x7½x4¼ inches high (not including the base). Incised with the artist's initials, left leg rear edge.
Provenance: private collection, Georgia.
Illustrated; (another example) Lucinda H. Gedeon. Elizabeth Catlett Sculpture: A Fifty-Year Retrospective, Neuberger Museum of Art, p. 98.
An impressive late-career work in luminous black marble, Nude Torso is an iconic work by Elizabeth Catlett - one of her most recognizable forms that typifies her representation of women. This beautiful and highly polished black marble embodies Catlett's extensive mid- to late body of work - her later figures are more simplified and abstract, with distinctively strong forms and poses.
In Nude Torso, Catlett transforms the traditional contrapposto pose of classical nudes to now convey the confidence of a strong, modern woman. Catlett creates a perfect balance in describing a curvaceous figure that is as powerful as it is sensuous. In Melanie Herzog's Elizabeth Catlett: An American Artist in Mexico, Catlett describes her work as representations of women, black women and herself - "I am a black woman. I use my body in working. When I am bathing or dressing, I see and feel how my body looks and moves. I never do sculpture from a nude model...Mostly watch women."
The distinctively highly finished sculpture also conveys sensuality and natural movement. Catlett makes the most of the natural qualities of the black marble by highly polishing the surface; Catlett stated "I like to finish sculpture to the maximum beauty attainable from the material from which it is created." Elizabeth Catlett made several versions of this distinctive figure between 1970 and 1998 in various media, including orange onyx, in the collection of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, orange marble and bronze. Herzog p. 154.
Estimate
$75,000 – $100,000
Elizabeth catlett (1915 - 2012)
The Immortal.
Bronze with a dark brown patina, mounted on a wooden base, circa 1994. Approximately 394 mm; 15½ inches high, not including the base. Edition size unknown. Published by the Associated Black Charities.
Provenance: private collection, New York.
The first of these bronze awards was presented to Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee by the Associated Black Charities in 1994, and has since been presented to BCA awardees annually.
Estimate
$7,000 – $10,000
Lorna simpson (1960 - )
Untitled [What Should Fit Here Is An Oblique Story…].
Photogravure and screenprint with hand coloring in watercolor, 1993. 890x1160 mm; 35⅜×45⅝ inches (sheet); 730x546 mm; 28¾×21½ inches (left image); 730x406 mm; 28¾×16 inches (right image). Signed, titled, dated and numbered 18/53 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Deli Sacilotto, with the printer’s blindstamp lower left. Published by Brooke Alexander Editions, New York.
Provenance: the estate of Patricia Dowd Whitman, New York. Patricia Dowd Whitman was an admired staff member at The MoMA from 1974 until she retired in 2007. She was responsible for building relationships with donors and artists such as Dorothea Rockburne, Tom Otterness, and Jeanne-Claude and Christo. From 1990 until her retirement, she was the Director of the Contemporary Arts Council at MoMA.
Additional impressions are in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Lyle ashton harris (1965 - )
Embrace.
Cibachrome print, 1993. 1219x762 mm; 48x30 inches. Artist’s proof, aside from an edition of 6. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed “artist’s proof” in ink, lower edge verso.
Embrace is a photograph that visualizes two black men holding each other tenderly in the nude. The lighting, shadow, and composition of the image act in the moment to illuminate the affection of these two individuals. Photographer Iké Udé wrote in “On Lyle’s Case: Mask and Embrace in the Work of Lyle Ashton Harris,”THRESHOLDS: Viewing Culture: “The Embrace, that could be read as a steel/feathery caress. This picture is of such improbable compactness, superbly cropped, oozing sensuality, robed in warm supple tints of light. All the senses are in a revel: there’s the convergence of thighs, the teasing of the groin, the knees begin to buckle, all sensations seem to melt under the feet, unabsorbable, repeating ad infinitum.”
Spanning a 30 year career, Lyle Ashton Harris’s oeuvre bridges multiple media. Trained as a photographer while working in collage, installation and performance art, he has pushed the boundaries of black male representation. His body of work critiques the societal norms of sexuality and race while exploring his identity as a queer, black man.
Harris received a Vanguard Award from Visual Aids (2018), a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2016) and the David C. Driskell Prize from the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2014) among other awards and honors. He is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem.
Born in the Bronx, New York, he spent two of his formative years living in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Harris obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from Wesleyan University, a Master of Fine Arts degree from the California Institute of the Arts, and attended the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. Harris is currently a Professor of Art at New York University and lives in New York.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Renee cox (1960 - )
Atlas.
Silver print, 1995. 254x254 mm; 10x10 inches. Edition of 50. Signed, titled and dated in pencil lower edge verso.
The inspiration for Atlas stems from Renee Cox’s analysis of a black Adam figure to explain the origin of mankind. In this image and throughout her practice, Cox uses photography to question the systems of power, gender, and race to explore black identity and displace the white-centric paradigm.
Born in 1960, in Colgate, Jamaica, then, later settling in Scarsdale, New York, Renee Cox received a BA in Film Studies from Syracuse University, received an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York in 1992, and attended the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program in 1992. Recent solo exhibitions include Renee Cox: Soul Culture, Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina, December 15, 2017 - April 22, 2018; Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Gallery, Columbia University, New York, October 24, 2018 - February 10, 2019; Half The Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, August 23, 2018 - March 31, 2019.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Carrie mae weems (1953 - )
Untitled (See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil).
Three chromogenic prints on Kodak Professional photo paper, 1995. 175x465 mm; 6⅞x18 inches overall. 508x610 mm; 20x24 inches (sheet). Edition of 200. Signed and dated ink on the verso.
Another print from this edition is in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
The original triptych was comprised of individual Polaroid photographs. In 1990, Carrie Mae Weems was invited by Polaroid to use their mammoth 20-by-24-inch camera. It was Weem’s first use of color in her work. The first Polaroid of the triptych See No Evil is in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Fred wilson (1954 - )
Old Salem: A Family of Strangers.
C-print mounted on Sintra, 1995. 501x400 mm; 19¾x15¾ inches. Numbered 1 of 5, on the gallery label on the frame back.
Provenance: Metro Pictures, New York; private collection, New York.
Exhibited: Collectibles, Metro Pictures, New York, December 2, 1995 - January 6, 1996.
Another photograph from this series in the collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Glenn ligon (1960 - )
Untitled (My Fear is Your Fear).
Screenprint on black wove paper, 1995. 308x232 mm; 12⅛x9⅛ inches, full margins. Signed and numbered 158/325 in pencil, lower margin with original folder and gallery label. Published by Max Protech Gallery, New York.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Kara walker (1969 - )
Freedom, A Fable: A Curious Interpretation of the Wit of a Negress in Troubled Times.
Bound pop-up book, with offset lithographs and five laser-cut, pop-up silhouettes on wove paper, 1997. 238x213 mm; 9⅜x8⅜ inches, full red leather binding as issued. Edition of 4000.
Each year, the Peter Norton family commissions an art edition to celebrate the Christmas season and holidays. The book was privately published and gifted to friends. Another copy of this book is in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Through the use of a pop-up book, Kara Walker takes a medium typically relegated to young children’s entertainment, and writes of a “soon-to-be emancipated 19th century Negress.” What begins as a seemingly hopeful tale of a free life written in the mode of a fairy tale, Walker’s prose quickly mimics her dark and provocative imagery, detailing the racial and sexual horrors that awaited a young African-American woman in the 19th century.
Estimate
$2,500 – $3,500
Betye saar (1926 - )
Women with Flowers & Umbrella.
Mixed media collage on paper, 1997. 102x152 mm; 4x6 inches. Titled and dated in ink, verso.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, Los Angeles, private collection, California (1997); thence by descent to the current owner, California (2005).
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Emma amos (1938 - 2020)
On Top of the World.
Silk aquatint with textile chine-colléon Arches paper, 1996. 762x568 mm; 30x22⅜ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 8/60 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by the artist and Kathy Caraccio at the K. Caraccio Studio, New York.
Emma Amos was commissioned by the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games in 1996 to create an original painting from which an official Olympic poster and a limited edition print were created.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Jonathan green (1955 - )
Mullet Friday.
Color lithograph on Somerset Satin paper, 1997. 431x330 mm; 762x1003 mm; 30x39½ inches, full margins. Signed and numbered 55/99 in pencil, lower margin. Printed and published by Mojo Portfolio, Union City, NJ, with the blindstamp, lower left.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Jacob lawrence (1917 - 2000)
Play.
Color screenprint on Rising Two Ply Rag paper, 1999. 473x721 mm; 18⅝x28⅜ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 46/135 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Lou Stovall at the Workshop, Inc., Washington, DC, with the blind stamp, lower left. Published by Spradling-Ames Corporation in collaboration with the Hampton University Museum. Nesbett L99-1.
Estimate
$6,000 – $9,000
Wadsworth jarrell (1929 - )
Lionel Hampton.
Pencil on cream wover paper, circa 1980. 178x127 mm; 7x5 inches. Signed in pencil, lower right, and titled in pencil on the mat, lower right.
Provenance: private collection, Massachusetts.
Estimate
$1,500 – $2,500
Wadsworth jarrell (1929 - )
Little Jazz at the Strand.
Acrylic on cotton canvas, 1998. 203x254 mm; 8x10 inches. Signed in acrylic, lower right recto. Titled in ink on the upper stretcher bar, verso.
Provenance: Sande Webster Gallery, Philadelphia, with the gallery label on the frame back; private collection, Philadelphia.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Evangeline j. montgomery (1930 - )
Sea Grass.
Offset color lithograph, 1998. 762x546 mm; 30x21½ inches. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 21/25 in pencil, lower edge. Printed and published by the Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia.
An impression is in the collection of the Saint Louis Art Museum; another was included in the 2017 traveling exhibition Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri.
Throughout her life Montgomery has dedicated herself to the arts - whether by executing works in enamel, metalwork, fiber art, acrylic, oil, and print, or by serving tirelessly as a curator and in various roles of arts advocacy. Her work in etching, lithography, and monoprint represents an abstract exploration of color, form, and nature presented in a wide range of media.
Evangeline Montgomery was born in New York City in 1933. In 1955, she moved to Los Angeles where she worked for Thomas Usher, an African American jewelry designer. She attended Los Angeles City College and went on to earn a BFA from the California College of Arts & Crafts where she specialized in metallurgy. In 1967, Montgomery began working as an independent curator - throughout her career, she has organized more than 150 exhibitions in museums, university galleries, and art centers. She served as the curator for the Rainbow Sign Gallery in Berkeley, California. Later, as Black Arts Consultant for the Oakland Museum, she curated an important retrospective of Sargent Johnson, the exhibtion California Black Craftsmen and built their collection of African American art. Between 1976 and 1979, she served as the San Francisco Art Commissioner. She moved to Washington D.C. in 1980 to pursue a career with the Department of State as a program development officer for Arts America.
Estimate
$1,500 – $2,500
Melvin edwards (1937 - )
Untitled.
Color lithograph on wove paper, 1998. 753x539 mm; 29⅝x21¼ inches. Signed, dated and numbered 12/80 in pencil, lower edge.
Provenance: Sande Webster Gallery, Philadelphia, with the gallery label on the frame back; private collection, Pennsylvania.
Estimate
$1,000 – $1,500
Wosene worke kosrof (1950 - )
Addis Zemen, II.
Acrylic on cotton canvas, 1999. 711x762 mm; 28x30 inches. Signed and dated in acrylic, lower right recto. Signed, dated, titled, and inscribed “28”x 30”, Acrylic/Canvas” in ink, verso.
Provenance: Stella Jones Gallery, New Orleans; private collection, New York.
Exhibited: Alphabets of Color: Tayo Adenaike and Wosene Worke Korsrof, Stella Jones Gallery, New Orleans, September, 1999.
Estimate
$10,000 – $15,000
21st Century Contemporary
Ed clark (1926 - 2019)
Untitled.
Color lithograph on wove paper, 2000. 876x914 mm; 34½x36 inches, full margin. Signed and numbered 7/25 in pencil, lower margin.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Kenneth victor young (1933 - 2017)
Untitled.
Acrylic on cotton canvas, 2001. 406x508 mm; 16x20 inches. Signed, dated and inscribed “to the Bush’s” in ink, lower right verso.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, private collection, New York.
Estimate
$15,000 – $25,000
Kenneth victor young (1933 - 2017)
After Monet, Water.
Acrylic on cotton canvas, 2001. 304x304 mm; 12x12 inches. Signed, titled and dated in pencil, center verso.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, private collection, New York.
Estimate
$6,000 – $9,000
Sam gilliam (1933 - )
Sam.
Collage and relief print on fabric and paper, 2001. 572x394 mm; 22½x15½ inches. Signed, dated, titled and numbered 12/50 in ink, lower edge.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Sam gilliam (1933 - )
Lincoln Center Festival.
Color screenprint on wove paper, 2001. 711x899 mm; 28x35 inches, full magins. The deluxe edition of 108, before letters, aside from the poster edition of 500. Signed, dated and numbered 82/108 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Brand X Editions, NY. Published by Lincoln Center List Poster and Print Program, New York.
Estimate
$2,500 – $3,500
Noah purifoy (1917 - 2004)
The Flag.
Cloth assemblage, 2001. Approximately 850x635mm; 33½x25 inches; 1035x831 mm; 40¾x32¾ inches (framed under acrylic). Signed and dated in ink, lower right on the mount.
Provenance: collection of the artist; private collection, California.
This assemblage is made of deconstructed strips of the American flag; according to the owner, Noah Purifoy stated this artwork was his response to the attack on 9/11 and the spirit of unity that brought the nation together afterward.
Estimate
$15,000 – $25,000
Alvin d. loving, jr. (1935 - 2005)
Mara A.
Color offset lithograph, 2003. 702x535 mm; 27⅞x21⅜ inches. Artist’s proof, aside from the edition of 20. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed “A/P” in pencil, lower edge. Printed and published by the Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Alvin d. loving, jr. (1935 - 2005)
Mara, Mara.
Color offset lithograph, 2003. 711x540 mm; 28x21¼ inches. Artist’s proof, aside from the edition of 20. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed “Artist’s Proof” in pencil, lower edge. Printed and published by the Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Lou stovall (1937 - )
The Sixth Movement II.
Color screenprint, 2005. 374x711 mm; 14¾x28 inches. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 18/20 in pencil, lower edge. Printed and published by Lou Stovall and the Workshop, Inc., Washington, DC.
Another impression is in the collection of the Art in Embassies, U.S. Department of State, U.S. Embassy in Cameroon, Yaounde.
Inspired by Sergei Rachmaninov’s music, The Sixth Movement II, The Sixth Movement, and Suite for Sergei are Lou Stovall's homage to the maestro. Stovall echoes Rachmaninov's The Four Piano Concertos,, best known by the iconic performances of Vladimir Ashkenazy with the Concertgebouw Orchestra and conducted by Bernard Haitink, in the fluctuating motion reminiscent of sheet music while referencing the motion of a baton wielded by an orchestral conductor. The concertos are arguably the most beautiful and complicated pieces of music to perform.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Sir frank bowling, obe ra (1934 - )
Mother Approaching Sixty.
Color photo-etching, soft-ground and spite bite aquatint on paper, 2003. 882x774 mm; 34¾x30½ inches, full margins. Signed, dated and numbered 10/40 in pencil, lower margin. Published by the Brodsky Center for Innovative Prints and Paper, Rutgers University, with collaborating Master Printer Randy Hemminghaus.
This print was commissioned as a benefit print for Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, New Jersey, which staged a retrospective of Bowling’s work in 2003. Another impression is in the permanent collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
Mother Approaching Sixty is Bowling’s sole photographic and figurative portrait of his career. The neatly drawn circular trace overlaid on the portrait appears first in a 1983 painting entitled Sand Circle and again in a series begun in 2000, evoking the daybreak. In addition, a sharp line crossing the picture plane in Bowling’s paintings conjures the horizon and, at once, the liminal zone where figure, ground, and viewer converge. Through photographic and printmaking processes, this close-up of the artist’s mother, smiling at life’s long sunset, is rendered through variation in tones and colors that emphasize her face as color, volume, and surface.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
David c. driskell (1931 - 2020)
The Young Herbalist.
Color lithograph on wove paper, 2000. 610x457 mm; 24x18 inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 43/60 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Randy Hemminghaus. Published by the Brodsky Center for Innovative Print and Paper, Rutgers University, with the blind stamp lower left.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Jonathan green (1955 - )
Ride.
Oil on linen canvas, 2002. 203x254 mm; 8x10 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower right.
Provenance: private collection, New Jersey.
Estimate
$7,000 – $10,000
Carrie mae weems (1953 - )
Untitled (Woman As Napoleon Riding Atop A Man).
Archival pigment print, 2003. 441x609 mm; 17⅝x24 inches, full margins. Artist’s proof, aside from the edition of 50. Signed, dated and inscribed “Artist’s Proof” in pencil, lower edge verso. From the artist’s The Louisiana Project series.
In 2003, the Newcomb Art Gallery at Tulane University commissioned Carrie Mae Weems to create a work in response to the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase. Consisting of more than seventy separate photographs and screenprints, a video, and a live performance by the artist at its debut, The Louisiana Project examines both the distant past of slaveholding, antebellum Louisiana and the state’s recent present, characterized by the economic crisis and racial segregation. The Louisiana Project juxtaposes the secrecy that surrounds the Rex Ball, an exclusive event attended by members of New Orleans’s white upper class, and the not-so-secret sexual liaisons had by the male scions of these elite families with African American women from the adjacent community of the gens du coleur throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Simone leigh (1967 - )
Untitled (Vessel).
Glazed terra cotta stoneware, circa 2004. Approximately 483x558x558 mm; 19x22x22 inches.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; private collection.
This vessel is an excellent, early example of the Leigh's work in salt-fired stoneware in which she explores the imagery of the black female body, the romanticization of primitivism and fertility. Leigh has often explored the experiences and social histories of black women through ceramics for over 25 years. Her work in ceramic makes multi-layered references to African traditions, feminism, ethnographic research, postcolonial theory and racial politics.
Simone Leigh created a related vessel in black, entitled Pitch, pictured in the data base of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. A similar vessel in white was sold at Sotheby's New York on September 26, 2019.
Estimate
$75,000 – $100,000
Glenn ligon (1960 - )
Boy on a Tire.
Color screenprint on wove paper, 2004. 1054x806 mm; 41¼×31¾ inches, full margins. Signed and numbered 61/108 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Brand X Editions, New York. Published by The Lincoln Center/List Poster and Print Program, New York.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Elizabeth catlett (1915 - 2012)
Black Girl.
Lithograph on cream wove paper, 2004. 558x387 mm; 22x15¼ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 73/90 in pencil, lower margin. Printed and published by J K Fine Art Editions Co./Mojo Portfolio, New Jersey, with printer’s blindstamp lower left.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Elizabeth catlett (1915 - 2012)
Young Douglass.
Linoleum cut on wove paper, 2004. 298x260 mm; 11¾x10¼ inches, full margins. Artist’s proof, aside from the edition of 90. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed “AP VII” in pencil, lower margin.
Estimate
$2,500 – $3,500
Elizabeth catlett (1915 - 2012)
Gossip.
Color photolithograph and digital print on Somerset wove paper, 2005. 394x457 mm; 15½x18 inches, full margins. Artist’s proof, aside from the edition of 200. Signed, titled, dated, inscribed “AP” and numbered 20/20 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by the Brodsky Center for Innovative Print and Paper, Rutgers University, with the blind stamp lower left. Published by the New York Print Club.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Faith ringgold (1930 - )
Somebody Stole my Broken Heart.
Color screenprint on wove paper, 2004. 572x762 mm; 22½x30 inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated, and numbered 94/100 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by the Brodsky Center for Innovative Print and Paper, Rutgers University
Another impression of this print is in the collection of Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Faith ringgold (1930 - )
Aunt Emmy.
Color lithograph on cream wove paper, 2005. 762x559 mm; 30x22 inches, full margins. Signed, dated, and numbered 45/50 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Segura Art Studios, Notre Dame Center for Arts & Culture, with the blind stamp lower left.
Based on the 2005 same-titled quit from Faith Ringgold’s Coming to Jones Road #7.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Faith ringgold (1930 - )
Under a Blood Red Sky, # 7.
Color lithograph on cream wove paper, 2006. 762x1067 mm; 30x42 inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 16/50 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Segura Art Studios, Notre Dame Center for Arts & Cuture, with the blind stamp lower left.
Based on the 2005 same-titled quit from Faith Ringgold’s Coming to Jones Road #7 series.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Brett cook-dizney (1968 - )
King and Shabazz.
Ink on acetate, 2004. 355x279 mm; 14x11 inches.
Provenance: PPOW Gallery, New York, with their label affixed to the backing board; private collection.
Brett Cook-Dizney’s portraits of Civil Rights leaders are an homage to their legacies in the form of intimate drawings. For over two decades, artist and educator Brett Cook-Dizney has produced installations, exhibitions, curricula, and events across the United States. In 1991 he received a BFA in Fine Arts and Education from the University of California at Berkeley. A former artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem Cook-Dizney is best known for billboard-style portrait paintings located throughout New York that often touch on socio-political themes. His subjects are the residents of the neighborhoods where his work appears.
Estimate
$1,200 – $1,800
Kehinde wiley (1977 - )
St. Francis of Adelaide.
Cast marble, dust and resin, 2006. 305x254x140 mm; 12x10x5½ inches. Signed, dated, and numbered 9/250 in black ink on the underside. Published by Cerealart, Philadelphia.
This neoclassical-style bust was influenced by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s stained-glass window, Saint Francis of Adelaide in the Chapel of Saint Ferdinand, Paris. The strong, proud, athletic young man is dressed in street attire and holding a bible, orb and sceptre.
Estimate
$8,000 – $12,000
Fred wilson (1954 - )
X.
Digital C-print on Duratrans© film, 2005. 533x508 mm; 21x20 inches, full margins. The Bon à Tirer proof, for the edition of 50. Signed, inscribed “B.A.T.” and numbered 1/1 in white ink, lower margin. Printed at Pamplemousse Press, New York. Published by Exit Art, New York.
There is a lighting system in the frame that allows the transparent work to be illuminated. Additional impressions are in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Pennsylvania Academy of of Fine Art, Pennsylvania, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, and the Yale University Art Gallery.
X juxtaposes a 1964 photograph of Civil Rights activist Malcolm X by photographer Marion S. Trikosko with the 1884 painting Madame X by John Singer Sargent. The photograph captures Malcolm X in a contemplative moment at a press conference for Martin Luther King, Jr. Obscuring the spatial relationship between the two figures, Wilson superimposed Sargent’s rendition of Parisian socialite Madame Gautreau so that her hand appears draped over Malcolm X’s shoulder. The combined image is then inverted in color; both figures are depicted as negative images. Wilson’s work raises the issues of representation in art: the idea of a traditionally accepted “canon” of art and how the technical processes used to produce works of photography impact representation as well as contrasting matters of identity, politics, and power.
Estimate
$1,500 – $2,500
Leslie hewitt (1977 - )
Riffs on Real Time (2 of 10).
Chromogenic print, 2006-09. 753x596 mm; 29⅝x23½ inches. Numbered 2/5 on the gallery label on the frame back.
Provenance: D’ Amelio Terras Gallery, New York; private collection, New York.
In Riffs on Real Time, a series of ten color photographs, Leslie Hewitt sets up a dynamic between personal archival images and stock images from newspapers and magazines. Influenced by her grandmother’s method of arrangement of their family photos in albums, Hewitt’s production of the series follows a set compositional order. The foreground of the image of a living room, a candid shot of a family barbecue in the backyard—suggests a personal iconography. The second layer evokes circulated material culture: a snapshot of a 1960s civil rights march harkens back to Hewitt’s childhood and her parent’s involvement in the movement and can be found in either layer. The third layer is a background of flooring that reveals various dings, scrapes, or gouges resulting from everyday use. Within this third, seemingly domesticated layer, Hewitt allows the sense of myriad public and private selves to collide and converse.
Born in 1977 in Saint Albans, New York, Leslie Hewitt earned a BFA from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, in 2000, and an MFA in sculpture from Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, in 2004. From 2001 to 2003, she was a Clark Fellow in Africana studies and cultural studies at New York University. Hewitt has had solo exhibitions at The Kitchen, New York (2010), Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2011); and Contemporary Art Museum of Saint Louis (2012). Her work has been a part of many group exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial, New York (2008), New Photography 2009, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2009); Human Nature: Contemporary Art from the Collection, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2011); <i.Under Another Name,</i> Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2014); and Photo-Poetics: An Anthology, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2015). Hewitt lives and works in New York.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Whitfield lovell (1959 - )
Three drawings (Card Series).
After the Card Series II, 2006 * After the Round Series V, 2014. After the Card Series V, 2014. Each charcoal with a collaged playing card on buff wove paper. Each 310x228 mm; 12x9 inches. Each signed, titled and dated in pencil, verso.
Provenance: the first acquired from DC Moore Gallery, New York, with the gallery label on the frame back; the other two acquired directly from the artist, private collection, New York.
The first drawing was made after Whitfield Lovell's first series of card drawings, his 2003-06 Card Series in which he drew 54 portraits to accompany 54 (a deck of 52 with 2 jokers) rectangular playing cards. The artist exhibited an installation of this series at DC Moore Gallery in his 2006 solo exhibition. The the second and third drawing are 2014 variations after that first series and his 2006-2011 Card Series II: The Rounds a deck of round cards which is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC.
These drawings are excellent examples of Whitfield Lovell's portraiture--images drawn from a personal archive of approximately 600 studio photographs of anonymous African Americans, most dating from the Emancipation Proclamation to the Civil Rights movement. Lovell often combines them with everyday found objects like playing cards, fabric fragments and other vintage objects that examine narratives and themes about family, identity, gender, love, loss, and the passage of time. Lovell first used such drawings on wood panels in a series of large installations, which gained national acclaim. His work is found in numerous institutional collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC, the Seattle Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Yale University Art Gallery.
Estimate
$15,000 – $25,000
Kori newkirk (1970 - )
Untitled (Male Head).
Bleach on blue paper, 2009. 495x647 mm; 19½x25½ inches. Signed and dated in pencil, verso.
Provenance: collection of the artist; private collection, New York; private collection.
Exhibited: The Project, New York, Feburary - March 2009.
Born in the Bronx in 1970 and raised in Cortland, New York, Kori Newkirk fuses art education with childhood memories, social and political commentary, and popular culture to create multimedia paintings, sculptural installations, and photographs that explore the formal properties of materials, the politics of identity, and the artist’s personal history. He received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1993, an MFA from the University of California, Irvine in 1997, and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1997. Since then, he has lived and worked in Southern California. From his signature lanscape works composed of plastic hair beads to the insertion of his body in social spaces and natural environments, his work reminds viewers of the isolation experienced by urban youth, the over-consumption of popular culture, and the experiences of African-American culture and life.
Estimate
$1,500 – $2,500
Eric mack (1976 - )
OOT-1528.
Mixed media on paper, 2004. 301x301 mm; 11⅞x11⅞ inches. Signed and dated in ink, lower right.
Provenance: the collection of Robert Pearlstein, with the estate stamp on the back of the frame, acquired from Fay Gold Gallery, Atlanta; private collection, New York.
OOT-1528 is an excellent example of Eric Mack’s ongoing body of work utilizing multi-media, complex compositions centered around urban design. Using a grid as a framework to create his compositons, Mack creates intricate collages from graphic images before handcoloring. This early work of Mack shows how he investigates multi-media as the springboard for his practice.
Today Eric Mack creates mathematically based renderings with a distinctly post-modern approach. His multimedia artworks are informed with superimposed grids, patterns, and portals. Layered surfaces are created with paint, found objects, natural fibers, and synthetic substrates that explore the systems of our visual world. In 1998 Mack received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration from the Atlanta College of Art which was absorbed by Savannah College of Art and Design in 2006. His recent exhibitions include Impossible Architectures, 2016, Stone Center, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Resurfaced+Restructured, 2015, Reginald Ingraham Gallery, Los Angeles, New grounds, 2016, International Institute of Art and Theory, Romania and Transatlantic Exhibition of art in the Southeast, 2016, Goethe Institute: Atlanta & North Carolina Zeitgeist Foundation, Atlanta, Georgia.
Estimate
$1,000 – $1,500
Sam gilliam (1933 - )
Seedling II.
Acrylic on three hinged asymetric birch panels, 2007. 609x1168 mm; 24x48 inches. Signed, titled and dated in ink, verso.
Provenance: 20x20, Coldwell Banker Art17 Space, Washington, DC (2008); Marsha Mateyka Gallery, Washington, DC (2009); private collection.
Exhibited: 20x20, Coldwell Banker Art17 Space, Washington, DC, October, 2008.
Estimate
$20,000 – $30,000
Simone leigh (1967 - )
Untitled.
Glazed terra cotta stoneware, circa 2011-12. 216x381x178 mm; 8½x15x7 inches.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; private collection, New York.
Simone Leigh's cowrie shell is an excellent example of one of her signature sculptural forms. Each of her cowrie shells is unique - this work is covered in raised black dots of glaze with a golden iridescent glaze from the salt added to the kiln. The tactile surface is only disrupted by the jagged opening to the interior of this evocative form.
Simone Leigh began making these cowrie shells in 2011. They have been both exhibited as individual works and part of larger sculptures and installations. These forms were first publicly exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem during Simone Leigh's 2010-11 residency, then again in her 2011 solo exhibition You Don’t Know Where Her Mouth Has Been at the Kitchen, New York. The exhibition featured the same-titled installation of 65 cowrie shells hanging by wire as a chandelier.
Estimate
$30,000 – $40,000
Emma amos (1938 - 2020)
Toy Boy.
Mixed media collage and watercolor on cream wove paper, 2007. 254x177 mm; 10x7 inches. Signed, titled and dated in pencil, lower edge.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; private collection, New York (2007).
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Faith ringgold (1930 - )
Big Black.
Color lithograph on Rives BFK wove paper, 2010. 752x265 mm; 29⅞x22¼ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 6/125 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Segura Art Studios, Notre Dame Center for Arts & Culture, with the blind stamp lower left.
Based on Faith Ringgold’s 1967 oil painting Black Light Series #1: Big Black 1967.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Derrick adams ( 1970 - )
Head Study (Figure plate No. 5)
Mixed media collage on wove paper, 2011. 330x279 mm; 13x11 inches. Signed, titled and dated in ink, lower right verso.
Provenance: gift from the artist, private collection.
Derrick Adams is a Baltimore-born New York-based artist whose work spans painting, collage, sculpture, performance, video, and sound installations. It probes the influence of popular culture on the formation of self-image and the relationship between man and monuments as they coexist and embody one another. Adams questions the intersection of Art History and Black American iconography and consumerism. His practice is rooted in Deconstructivist philosophies related to the fragmentation and manipulation of structure and surface, and the marriage of complex and improbable forms.
Adams received his BFA from Pratt Institute and his MFA from Columbia University. He is also an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation’s Studio Program. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency (2019), a Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship (2018), a Studio Museum Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize (2016), and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award (2009). He has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including Where I’m From — Derrick Adams (2019) at The Gallery in Baltimore City Hall; Derrick Adams: Sanctuary (2018) at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; and Derrick Adams: Transmission (2018) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver. His work is in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Birmingham Museum of Art.
Estimate
$10,000 – $15,000
Kerry james marshall (1955 - )
Keeping the Culture.
Color linoleum cut and screenprint on Arches, 2011. 445x711 mm; 17½x28 inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 75/100 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Thomas Lucas at Hummingbird Press, Chicago.
Estimate
$7,000 – $10,000
Willie cole (1955 - )
The Ogun Sisters.
Color screenprint with solar plates and glazing on BFK Rives, 2012. 762x562 mm; 30x22¼ inches. Artist’s proof, aside from the edition of 75. Signed, titled, dated, numbered 8/20 and inscribed “A/P” in pencil, lower margin. Printed and published by The Experimental Print Institute, Lafayette College, Easton, PA, in collaboration with Hummingbird Press Editions, Massachusetts.
Estimate
$1,500 – $2,500
Michael a. cummings (1945 - )
Naomi Sims, Unforgettable.
Color etching and aquatint on wove paper, 2011. 559x651 mm; 22⅜x25⅝ inches, full margins. Proof, aside from the edition of 40. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed “state print” in pencil, lower margin.
The series was commissioned by the Hatch/Billops collection in support of an endowment for Emory University.
Naomi Ruth Sims (1948 - 2009) was an American model, businesswoman, and author, She was the first African-American model to appear on the cover of Ladies’ Home Journal, in November of 1968, and is widely credited as being the first African American supermodel.
Known as a consummate quilter since the 1970s, Michael Cummings began his artistic career as a painter. A Los Angeles native, he moved to New York City in 1970 became a part of a New York circle of artists, which included Norman Lewis, Camille Billops, Romare Bearden, and his wife Nanette Rohan.
The Hatch-Billops Collection is a group of books, publications, and other printed materials gathered by James V. Hatch and Camille Billops in response to the lack of scholarship and publication on African American art and culture. Over the span of forty years, they complied works, artist interviews and amassed a collection that was originally housed in their SoHo loft that also acted as a salon for artist and collectors. Their collection was donated and founded the Camille Billops and James V. Hatch archives at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books Library at Emory University. Audiotaped interviews were alos gifted to create the Hatch-Billops Oral History at the City College of New York, CUNY.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Michael a. cummings (1945 - )
Obama vs. Romney.
Quilt with appliqué, including African fabrics and buttons, 2013. 1600x1778 mm; 63x70 inches. Signed and dated in ink, lower left recto. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed “63x70” in ink on a fabric label, verso. From the artist’s Obama series of quilts.
Provenance: collection of the artist, New York.
Obama vs. Romney is a striking work by quilt artist Michael Cummings from his Obama series of five quilts. His 2010 President Obama is in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum, and his 2009 Young Obama is in the collection of the International Quilt Museum, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The artist made the following statement about Obama vs. Romney:
” I was so captivated by his election and personal history that I created this series during his second year term. This related to his debate with Mitt Romney during 2012 presidential campaign on television. I added text to the surface with famous title of Langston Hughes poem titled “I too am America” since fake news kept saying Obama was not a citizen.”
Michael Cummings is widely regarded as one of the nation’s leading African-American quilters. A Los Angeles native, he moved to New York City in 1970 and became friends with Romare Bearden. He experimented with collage in various media, and by 1975, had moved strictly to fabric. Today, he lives and works in Harlem. Other quilts by Michael Cummings are in the permanent collections of the American Craft Museum, New York, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the California African-American Museum, Atlanta Life Insurance, Renwick Gallery, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Museum of Art and Design, New York. Cummings has also been commissioned by the Art in Embassies, Absolut Vodka, the City of Knoxville, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, the PerCent for Art, NYC Dept of Cultural Affairs and HBO.
Estimate
$10,000 – $15,000
Glenn ligon (1960 - )
Detail.
Screenprint on Coventry Rag paper, 2014. 230x303 mm; 9x12 inches, full margins. Signed and numbered 35/50 in pencil, lower margin. Published by the Camden Arts Centre, London.
This limited edition was derived from Ligon’s series of large paintings based on the 1966 seminal taped-speech work, Come Out, by Minimalist composer Steve Reich, and exhibited at the Camden Arts Centre, London, October 10, 2014 – January 11, 2015. Come Out is drawn from the testimony of six black youths, known as the “Harlem Six” arrested for a murder during the Little Fruit Stand Riot in 1964.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Danny simmons (1953 - )
Confluence of Grievances.
Oil on cotton canvas, 2012. 1524x1219 mm; 60x48 inches. Signed, titled and dated in ink, upper left verso.
Provenance: private collection.
This vibrant canvas by Danny Simmons epitomizes his bold and expressive abstraction. Simmons has shown extensively in museum and gallery exhibitions over the past 20 years. His paintings are found in many institutional collections including the Brooklyn Museum, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art, the United Nations, Montclair State Museum, the New Jersey State Museum, the Anacostia Museum, the Hampton University Museum and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Simmons was the co-founder of the Def Poetry Jam performance series and the Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation.
Estimate
$10,000 – $15,000
Shinique smith (1971 - )
A Single Breath.
Ink, acrylic and collage on paper, 2014. 247x196 mm; 9¾x7¾ inches. Signed and titled in pencil, lower edge.
Provenance: purchased from James Cohan Gallery, New York with gallery label on verso; collection of Martina Yamin; private collection.
This multimedia study by Shinique Smith displays both her knowledge of Japanese calligraphy and abstraction and the influence of artists in the Baltimore graffiti scene. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Smith’s artistic training began in childhood, encouraged toward the creative arts by her mother, a fashion editor. She earned her BFA degree at Maryland Institute College of Art then worked as a customer and props assistant in the film industry. Smith returned to her studies and earned a Master of Arts degree in Education from Tufts University in 2000 and a MFA degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2003.
In 2003, Smith moved to New York and participated in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s artist studio residency, where she began making sculptures and installations. Blending fine art media, text, and found textiles from thrift stores, she creates monumental yet graceful sculptures that investigate the interconnectivity of a global society and the transience of emotion.
Shinique Smith’s artworks have been exhibited by and are in the permanent collections of many institutions; including the Baltimore Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Denver Art Museum, the Frist Center for Visual Arts, the Minneapolis Art Institute, MoMA PS1, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the National Portrait Gallery, the New Museum, the Studio Museum of Harlem and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Shinique Smith received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award in 2013, The Maryland Institute College of Art’s Alumni Medal of Honor in 2012, and a Joan Mitchell Prize in 2008.
Estimate
$1,500 – $2,500
Victor davson (1948 - )
Flash.
Archival pigment print with sequins on thick wove paper, 2015. 304x321 mm; 12x12⅝ inches, full margins.. Artist’s proof, one of 10 artist’s proofs, aside from the edition of 30. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed “A/P” in pencil, lower margin.
This print reproduces Victor Davsons’s Dub Factor: Heroes (Flash) from his 2015 series of paintings on long playing vinyl record album covers - this work was painted on Aretha Franklin’s 1986 album Aretha which was designed by Andy Warhol.
Victor Davson was born in Georgetown, Guyana and received a BFA degree from Pratt Institute (1980), Brooklyn, New York. He was the co-founder of Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art, with artist Carl E. Hazlewood in Newark, NJ, in 1983, and served as its founding director until 2016. His work is heavily influenced by the anti-colonial politics of the Caribbean, and by the intellectual powerhouses of that period. These include extraordinary writers and activists like Martin Carter, Frantz Fanon and Walter Rodney. Since 1996, his series of paintings and drawings, including this series of paintings on album covers, are his attempt as an artist to negotiate the roots of identity in a terrain of loss and desire. He lives and works in West Orange, NJ.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Sanford biggers (1970 - )
Untitled.
Archival digital print, 2017. 245x254 mm; 9⅞x10 inches, full margins. Signed, dated, and numbered 20/30 in pencil, lower margin. From A Portfolio of 10 Limited Edition Prints in Honor of Victor L. Davson, published by Judith K. Brodsky, in honor of Davson, executive director of Aljira, A Center for Contemporary Art, Newark.
Born in Los Angeles, Sanford Biggers lives and works in New York. He received a BA from Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999, and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1998. He has received numerous prestigious awards including the Rome Prize in Visual Arts in 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in 2018, the Savannah College of Art & Design’s deFINE Art Award in 2019 and the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020.
Biggers’ recent solo museum exhibition entitled Codeswitch, a survey of over 50 quilt-based artworks, debuted at The Bronx Museum of the Arts in September of 2021, and traveled to The California African American Museum, Los Angeles where it will be on exhibit through January, 2022. In the summer of 2021, he also exhibited Oracle, a monumental bronze Chimera sculpture along with a multimedia public art installation at Rockefeller Center. Biggers’ work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Walker Art Center, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, among many others. (Bio courtesy of the artist’s website.)
Estimate
$1,000 – $1,500
Steve a. prince (1968 - )
Rosa Sparks.
Linoleum cut on thick wove paper, 2017. 1008x1320 mm; 39⅜x52⅜ inches, full margins. Edition of 40. Signed, titled, and dated in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Segura Art Studios, Notre Dame Center for Arts & Culture, with the blind stamp lower left.
Steve A. Prince’s drawings and prints are composed of gestural and emotive Black figures, layered in a subjective narrative with a spiritual core at the essence of each artwork. Prince is a mixed media artist, master printmaker, lecturer, educator, and art evangelist. A native of New Orleans, he currently works and resides in Williamsburg, Virginia. Prince received his BFA from Xavier University of Louisiana and his MFA in Printmaking and Sculpture from Michigan State University.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Carrie mae weems (1953 - )
All the Boys.
Offset lithograph on Somerset paper, 2017. 700x962 mm; 27½x37⅞ inches. Signed, dated and numbered 15/30 in pencil, verso. Printed by Derriere L’Etoile Studios, Long Island City, New York. Published by Segura Arts Studio, Notre Dame Center for Arts & Culture, with the blind stamp lower left.
Other impressions of this print are in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC and the Snite Museum of Art, the University of Notre Dame.
Estimate
$6,000 – $9,000
Nona faustine (1977 - )
Like a Pregnant Corpse The Ship Expelled Her Into The Patriarchy.
Digital C-print, 2018. 279x431 mm; 11x17 inches. Signed and numbered 1/3 in pencil, verso. From the artist’s White Shoes series.
Provenance: collection of the artist; private collection, New York (2018), purchased from the 2018 No Longer Empty Benefit Auction.
Engaging the known and unknown histories of New York City, Nona Faustine examines site-specific historic locations of the transatlantic slave trade that today bare no markings or the city’s role in it. Like a Pregnant Corpse The Ship Expelled Her Into The Patriarchy places Faustine at a 17th-century landing spot for slave ships on the Brooklyn coast of the Atlantic ocean. Splayed across the jagged rocks, her body acts as a memorial for the lives lost and a reminder of the trauma that occurred and was lost at that site.
Nona Faustine’s White Shoes series portrays the history of slavery in New York through a series of self-portraits taken in the nude at locations that are related to the slave trade. Faustine’s research for the series led to the rediscovery of the history of slavery in the five boroughs of New York, including slave burial grounds, slave markets, slave-owning farms, and the landing spots of slave ships. The performative aspect of her white shoes references how African Americans are forced to deal with white acceptance.
Born in Brooklyn, NY, Nona Faustine is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts in New York, NY and The International Center of Photography at Bard College MFA program (2013). Faustine’s work has been exhibited at Harvard University, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the African American Museum in Philadelphia, Schomburg Center for Black Research in Harlem, the International Center of Photography and Saint John’s Divine Cathedral, among other institutions. Her work is in the collections of the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In January 2020, she was part of the inaugural class of Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock Senegal Residency in Dakar, Senegal.