African American Art
Officers
Nigel Freeman
Vice President & Director, African American Art
nfreeman@swanngalleries.com
212 254 4710 ext. 33
Shanell Kitt
Administrator
skitt@swanngalleries.com
(212) 254-4710 ext. 56
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
Harlem Renaissance / Modern
Henry ossawa tanner (1859 - 1937)
Head of a Sheep.
Oil on canvas, mounted on board, circa 1880-81. Approximately 267x254 mm; 10½x10 inches. Signed in oil, lower left recto. With a cropped oil study of a nude on the verso of the board.
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.
Henry Ossawa Tanner painted Head of a Sheep early in his studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts when he cultivated the speciality of painting animals. With the support of his parents and inspiration from the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition, 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
$7,000 – $10,000
Henry ossawa tanner (1859 - 1937)
The Disciples See Christ Walking on the Water.
Etching on cream wove paper, circa 1905-15. 184x244 mm; 7¼x9⅝ inches, full margins. Signed by the artist’s son, Jesse O. Tanner, and numbered 105/120 in ink, verso. With the artist’s estate ink stamp, verso.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
James vanderzee (1886 - 1983)
Mrs. Turner, Lenox, Mass.
Silver print, 1905. 178x140 mm; 7x5½ inches. Signed and numbered I 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)
Native American Couple.
Silver print, 1907. 120x88 mm; 4¾x3½ inches. Signed and dated in pencil, verso.
This scarce and early Vanderzee photograph shows a male and female duo dressed in Indigenous American regalia. Another example of this photograph is in the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
William a. harper (1873 - 1910)
Untitled (French Landscape).
Oil on canvas, mounted on board, circa 1907-08. 330x406 mm; 13x16 inches. Signed in oil, lower right.
Provenance: the Decatur Art Center; Millikan University, Decatur (1969); private collection, Illinois (2020).
William A. Harper painted this beautiful, pastoral landscape on the outskirts of Paris during his second French trip. Like fellow landscape painters Edward M. Bannister and James Bolivar Needham, Harper was born in Canada; his family moved from Ontario to Illinois in 1885. Harper attended the Art Institute of Chicago from 1895 - 1901, working as a nightwatch man and janitor to pay for his tuition. Graduating with honors, he then studied in Paris from 1903 - 1905 at the Académie Julian following in Henry Ossawa Tanner's footsteps, and was greatly influenced by the Barbizon School. In 1905, Harper earned the Municipal Art League's blue ribbon at the Art Institute of Chicago for nine of his paintings. On a return trip to France from 1907-08, Harper studied informally with Tanner and his paintings became more Impressionist. 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. Today, his paintings are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery (The Evans-Tibbs Collection), the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution, the Columbus Museum of Art, the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center, the Flint Institute of Fine Arts, Tuskegee University, the Harmon and Harriet Kelley Foundation for the Arts and the Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art. Barnwell p. 157; Kennedy p. 119.
Estimate
$6,000 – $9,000
Laura wheeler waring (1887 - 1948)
Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, France.
Oil on board, circa 1925. 165x215 mm; 6½x8½ inches. Signed, titled, and inscribed with the artist’s studio address “756 N. 43rd St., Philadelphia, PA” in ink, frame back.
Provenance: private collection, Philadelphia.
Exhibited:Black Matri-Images, Morgan State College Gallery of Art (now known as the James E. Lewis Museum of Art), Baltimore, MD, December 3, 1972 - January 15, 1973, with gallery label on the frame back.
Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, France is an impressionistic painting by Laura Wheeler Waring completed while she was traveling through southwestern France. Completed the same year as The Houses of Semur, 1925, this work is of a hilly and very scenic commune in the Pyrénées foothills. Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port was a popular stop for pilgrims en route to Santiago de Compostela in Spain.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
James vanderzee (1886 - 1983)
Untitled (Portrait of a Boy in a Sailor Suit).
Silver print, 1927. 177x127 mm; 7x5 inches. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed “Copyright 1969 by James VanDerZee All Rights Reserved, Vintage Print, Certified Donna VanDerZee” in pencil with James VanDerZee’s “G.G.G. Photo Studio, Inc., 109 West 135th St.” ink stamp, verso.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
James vanderzee (1886 - 1983)
Couple in Raccoon Coats, 1932 (Couple, Harlem).
Silver print, 1932. 95x119 mm; 3¾x4⅝ inches. Initialed, titled and dated '81 in pencil on the mount. Printed in 1981.
This photograph of a Harlem couple dressed in fur with their Cadillac on West 127th Street is VanDerZee's most iconic image.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Laura wheeler waring (1887 - 1948)
Still Life with Fruit and Flowers.
Oil on linen canvas, circa 1930s. 546x711 mm; 21½x28 inches. Signed in pencil, upper right recto. Inscribed with the artist’s studio address “756 N. 43rd St., Philadelphia, PA” in ink, verso.
Provenance: private collection, Philadelphia.
This modernist still life is a scarce example of Laura Wheeler Waring’s painting from the early 1930s. It displays Waring’s painterly exploration within the bounds of traditional genre painting, and the influence of post-Impressionism on her development. One of her larger and best known works from the period is the exuberant floral painting Still Life, 1928, which was once in the Evan-Tibbs Collection of Washington, DC.
Waring began painting watercolors in her early teens and won several awards before graduating from the Hartford Public High School in 1906 and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, in 1914. Her distinguished career included two periods of study in Paris. The first sojourn was interrupted by the beginning of World War I, and she eventually returned to Paris in June 1924. This second period is widely regarded as a turning point in her style as well as her career. Waring painted portraits until October when she enrolled for a year of painting study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. There she studied with Boutet de Monvel and met Henry Ossawa Tanner and Gwendolyn Bennett - enjoying her “only period of uninterrupted life as an artist with an environment and associates that were a constant stimulus and inspiration. My savings, however, would not allow me to continue this life indefinitely.” In addition to the Harmon Foundation in New York, Waring exhibited at the Pyramid Club in Philadelphia and Howard University through the 1940s. Her paintings today are in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and Howard University. Sharpley-Whiting pp. 86-87.
Estimate
$20,000 – $30,000
Beulah woodard (1895 - 1955)
African Woman.
Oil on cotton canvas, circa 1935. 610x508 mm; 24x20 inches.
Provenance: the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company, Los Angeles, sold at Swann Galleries on October 4, 2007; private collection, Pennsylvania.
Exhibited: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1935.
Beulah Woodard was the first significant African American female artist working on the West Coast. This very rare example of Woodard’s painting was exhibited in her important one-woman show of sculpture and painting at the Los Angeles County Museum in 1935, the first solo exhibition there for an African American. According to Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins, African Woman is likely a portrait of Maudelle Bass Weston, the dancer and model who also posed for the ceramic bust entitled Maudelle. Thousands visited the exhibition, and Los Angeles newspapers and the Associated Press covered the story. Her portraits of African people are noted for their realism and attention to detail; this is one of only a few known paintings.
Estimate
$7,000 – $10,000
Hale woodruff (1900 - 1980)
A Youth.
Linoleum cut on wove paper, 1934. 108x77 mm; 4¼x3⅜ inches, wide margins. Signed and titled in pencil, lower margin. A later impression, printed in the 1970s.
In 1931, Hale Woodruff was hired by Dr. John Hope to found the art department of Atlanta University, teaching undergraduate students at Morehouse College and Spelman College. Between 1931 and the mid 1940s, he also created a series of linoleum block prints that showed the experiences of African Americans and scenes around Atlanta. Another impression of this scarce print, titled Georgia Youth, is in the Kinsey African American Art & History Collection and Foundation.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Samuel joseph brown (1907 - 1994)
Writing Lesson.
Lithograph on cream wove paper, 1937. 219x193 mm; 8⅝x7⅝ inches, full margins. Signed and titled in pencil, lower margin. Published by Works Progress Administration (WPA), Federal Art Project, Philadelphia.
Additional impressions are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Born in Wilmington, NC, Samuel Joseph Brown studied at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts) and received a Master of Arts equivalent degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He began teaching for the Philadelphia public school system in 1938, and was there for over 35 years. Brown participated in the Federal Art Project of the WPA from 1933 - 1948, and his work was praised by Eleanor Roosevelt.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
William e. smith (1913 - 1997)
Pay Day.
Linoleum cut on thin wove paper, 1938. 206x152 mm; 8⅛x6 inches, wide margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 16/20 in pencil, lower margin. A good, dark impression of this scarce, early print.
Smith made another linoleum cut of this subject, with the pose reversed; impressions dated 1941 are in the collections of Hampton University, VA, and Harmon and Harriet Kelley, San Antonio.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Hughie lee-smith (1915 - 1999)
Untitled.
Watercolor on thin Japan paper, 1936. 216x224 mm; 8½x8 7/8 inches. Signed in pencil, lower left.
Provenance: Drs. L. Morris and Adrienne L. Jones; thence by descent, private collection, New Jersey. L. Morris Jones, M.D. (1929 - 2015) and Adrienne Lash Jones, Ph.D. (1935 - 2018) married in 1957 and moved to Cleveland in 1958. Dr. Lash Jones was a tenured professor of Africana studies at Oberlin College, where she became head of the Africana department (formerly known as Black Studies) for 20 years. Lash Jones became a prominent figure in the Cleveland art scene - including being a long time board member of the Cleveland Museum of Art and Karamu House - where she championed countless efforts to support Black art and culture.
Illustrated: Leslie King-Hammond,Hughie Lee-Smith (The David C. Driskell Series of African American Art, Volume VIII, plate 4, p. 4.
This extremely scarce work on paper is the earliest painting we have located that displays Hughie Lee-Smith’s interest in depicting isolated figures in an urban landscape. In 1936, Hughie Lee-Smith was in his second year as a student at the Cleveland School of Art where he was awarded a scholarship by the Gilpin Players at Karamu Theater and Settlement House. As part of his scholarship, he also taught art at Karamu House in Cleveland until 1939, alongside other artists Charles Sallée, Elmer Brown, and William E. Smith. Lee-Smith graduated with honors in 1938, and then won a scholarship to continue studying for a fifth year. Lee-Smith’s noteworthy rise was recognized by his inclusion in Alain Locke’s The Negro in Art, published in 1940.
Estimate
$7,000 – $10,000
Hughie lee-smith (1915 - 1999)
Man Sitting.
Graphite and pencil on buff wove paper, 1938. 305x229 mm; 12x9 inches. Signed and dated in pencil, lower center.
Provenance: the estate of the artist; thence by descent to a private collection.
Estimate
$6,000 – $9,000
Hughie lee-smith (1915 - 1999)
Untitled (Policeman Beating Man and Protestor with Sign).
Pencil on buff wove paper, 1938. 177x133 mm; 7x5¼ inches. Signed and dated in pencil, lower right.
Provenance: the estate of the artist; thence by descent to a private collection.
Exhibited: Stages of Influence: The Universal Theatre of Hughie Lee-Smith, University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, NM, February 6 - June 3, 2001.
Hughie Lee-Smith drew this striking image of the police violently breaking up protests in 1938. His sketchbook included many Depression-era scenes of workers and food lines. That same year, Hughie Lee-Smith graduated with honors from the Cleveland School of Art, and worked for the Federal Arts Project of the Ohio Works Progress Administration as a printmaker from 1938-40. While working for the WPA, Lee-Smith developed his interest in social realism and documented the civic unrest he saw. Lee-Smith incorporated a similar scene in his 1939 lithograph Artist Life #2.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Augusta savage (1892 - 1962)
Lift Every Voice and Sing (The Harp).
Cast white metal painted gold, 1939. Approximately 270x240x100 mm; 10¾x9½x4 inches. Stamped signature and “Worlds Fair 1939” at the base. Published by Augusta Savage Studios, Inc., New York, with the studio printed paper label on the base underside.
Provenance: Daniel Webster Perkins, Esq., Jacksonville, FL; thence by descent, private collection, Florida.
Daniel Webster Perkins (1879 - 1972) was a prominent attorney in Florida and one of the state’s first African American lawyers, having been officially admitted to the Florida Bar in 1914. After practicing law in Knoxville, Tennessee and Tampa, Florida, he settled in Jacksonville in 1919, where he practiced until his death in 1972. Mr. Perkins was a strong proponent of civil rights and a community leader; in 1968, the former Colored Lawyers Association of Jacksonville changed its name to the D.W. Perkins Bar Association in honor of Perkins, who had been a founding member. During a family vacation to the 1939 World’s Fair, Perkins purchased Savage’s souvenir replica.
Exhibited: Through Our Eyes 2000; Lift Every Voice and Sing, the Ritz Theatre LaVilla Museum, Jacksonville, Florida, February 8, 2000.
Augusta (Christine Fells) Savage was born in Green Cove Springs, just south of Jacksonville. After first exhibiting her sculpture in Palm Beach and Jacksonville, Savage moved to New York to study sculpture. She was admitted to the Cooper Union School of Art in 1921, and completed the four year course in three years. In 1929 and 1931, Savage was the recipient of two successive Rosenwald Grants, which enabled her to travel to France and study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. When she returned to New York in 1932, she opened the Savage School of Arts and Crafts in Harlem, where her students included William Artis, Jacob Lawrence and Norman Lewis. In 1935, she was a founding member of the Harlem Artists Guild, and from 1936 - 1937 she worked for the WPA Federal Arts Project as the Director of the Harlem Community Art Center.
A life-size version of Lift Every Voice and Sing was commissioned by the 1939 New York World’s Fair committee in 1937. Savage left the WPA to work on this monumental project, inspired by Jacksonville brothers James Weldon and Rosamund Johnson’s anthem Lift Every Voice. Her iconic sculpture stood almost 16-foot high, in painted, cast plaster on the grounds of the fair. Sadly, the original work was destroyed when the fair was over - it is known today only from photographs and these smaller versions which were cast by the artist to be sold as souvenirs.
Estimate
$8,000 – $12,000
Richmond barthé (1901 - 1989)
Julius.
Painted plaster on a wooden base, circa 1940. 190x114x102 mm; 7½x4½x4 inches (not including base). Incised with the artist's signature, backside of head. A later cast, made in Jamaica in the 1960s.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist in Jamaica, private collection; thence by descent, private collection.
This bust was originally commissioned by the photographer Carl Van Vechten, Richmond Barthé’s friend. The young boy Julius was Van Vechten's housekeeper’s nephew. In October of 1940, Van Vechten photographed the sculpture decorated with a feather headress - images are in the Carl Van Vechten Papers, in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. A bronze cast of Julius is in the collection of the Pennyslyvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Allan rohan crite (1910 - 2007)
The Annunciation.
Brass plaque, with plaster and bronze backing, 1940. 178x140 mm; 7x5½ inches. Inscribed signature and date, lower right recto. With the artist’s typed label on the frame back, signed and numbered (3) in ink.
Provenance: collection of the artist, Boston; the Ness Oleson Trust. The late Frannie Ness and Gary Oleson were the proprietors of Waiting for Godot Books of Hadley, MA, which specialized in rare American and English books, including African American literature.
Estimate
$2,500 – $3,500
Joseph delaney (1904 - 1991)
Portrait of a Woman in Windsor Chair.
Oil on masonite board, circa 1940. 787x597 mm; 31x23½ inches. Signed in oil, lower left.
Provenance: the estate of the artist; private collection.
This striking painting is an excellent, early example of Joseph Delaney’s portraiture. His direct, expressive approach conveys the immediacy of the sitting. The Windsor chair is also the same chair that Georgia O’Keefe used in Beauford Delaney’s portrait.
Estimate
$15,000 – $25,000
Joseph delaney (1904 - 1991)
Untitled (Still Life with Flowers and Chinese Plate).
Oil on canvas board, 1940. 762x559 mm; 30x22 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower left.
Provenance: acquired at Swann Galleries December 15, 2015; private collection, New York.
This unusual still life by Joseph Delaney is a beautiful study in a limited palette. Delaney moved from his native Tennessee to New York in 1930 at the age of 26, where he studied at the Art Students League with Thomas Hart Benton. In 1932, he exhibited in the first Washington Square Outdoor Art Show and continued to work as a sketch artist there. From 1934 to 1940, Delaney worked for the WPA on projects in New York City including the Index of Design for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pier 72 mural, and the Story of the Recorded Word mural at the New York Public Library.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Post-War
John wilson (1912 - 2015)
Interrogation (Study for Lithograph).
Watercolor, ink and crayon on cream wove paper, 1944. 267x178 mm; 10½x7 inches. Signed and dated in pencil, lower right.
Provenance: Sragow Gallery, New York; Patricia and Donald Oresman, New York; private collection, New York.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Elizabeth catlett (1915 - 2012)
Domestic Worker.
Lithograph on cream wove paper, 1946. 546x390 mm; 21½x15⅜ inches, full margins. From a presumed edition of 50. Signed in pencil, lower margin. Published by the Taller de Gráfica Popular, Mexico City.
Provenance: from the estate of Dr. Lewis W. Marshall, Sr., Washington, DC; thence by desent, private collection, Washington, DC.
This very scarce print is the first lithograph Catlett created at the Taller de Gráfica Popular upon her move to Mexico in 1946 and the first lithograph she printed in Mexico. It coincides with her I am the Negro Woman linoleum cut series, 1946 - 1947, which was the print series Catlett began when she arrived in Mexico. Another impression of Domestic Worker is in the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art. This is only the third impression to come to auction.
Estimate
$20,000 – $30,000
Elizabeth catlett (1915 - 2012)
…special houses.
Linoleum cut on cream wove paper, 1946-47. 105x152 mm; 4⅛x6 inches, full margins. A later printing, from the 1989 edition. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 18/20 in pencil, lower margin. From the I am the Black Woman series.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Norman lewis (1909 - 1979)
Untitled (Two Seated Figures)
Pen and ink on cream 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.
Illustrated: Norman W. Lewis: Works on Paper, 1935 - 1979, Bill Hodges Gallery, New York, p. 64.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Norman lewis (1909 - 1979)
Untitled.
Oil on cotton canvas, 1947. 768x406 mm; 30¼x16 inches. Signed and dated “3-47” in oil, lower right.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, private collection, New York; thence by descent, private collection, North Carolina.
This modernist oil painting is a striking and scarce example of the earliest abstraction by Norman Lewis, from his first full year painting completely abstract. By fall 1946, Lewis joined the Marian Willard Gallery in New York, and began a new series of linear abstract paintings in the spring of 1947. Untitled is closely related to his Magenta Haze and Twilight Sounds, collection of the St. Louis Museum of Art, each dated March 1947. Their ground’s distinct color adds atmosphere to each composition. At this time, Norman Lewis was also clearly inspired by jazz and improvisation–Duke Ellington wrote his blues-inflected composition Magenta Haze in 1946. His first solo exhibition at the Willard Gallery in 1949 included six paintings from 1947: Magenta Haze, Spring, Street Scene, Subway, Reflection and Twilight Sounds. Other notable 1947 paintings in are Autumn, collection of the Worcester Art Museum, <Changing Moods, the Mott-Warsh Collection and Meeting, the collection of Raymond J. McGuire.
Estimate
$120,000 – $180,000
Charles sebree (1914 - 1985)
Untitled (Portrait).
Tempera on masonite board, 1947-48. 323x250 mm; 12¾x 9⅞ inches. Signed and dated indistinctly in pencil, verso.
Provenance: collection of the artist; gifted to the artist Harold Cousins, thence by descent to private collection; private collection, New York.
Charles Sebree is best known for his enigmatic depictions of romantic, harlequin-like figures inspired by the theater and the art of Rouault and Picasso. Born in Kentucky, Sebree emerged as a member of the Chicago art scene, working for the Illinois Federal Art Project in the WPA easel painting division from 1936-38. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, and taught at the Southside Community Art Center with Margaret Burroughs and Eldzier Cortor before moving to New York in 1940. Today, his work is found in the collections of the St. Louis Art Museum, Howard University Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Richmond barthé (1901 - 1989)
Toussaint L’Ouverture.
Color pastel and charcoal on thin buff wove paper, 1949. 432x381 mm; 17x15 inches. Signed and dated in pastel, lower right.
Provenance: private collection, New York.
This striking portrait of the Haitian national hero, revolutionary leader and general François-Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture is a significant 1940s drawing by Richmond Barthé - a very scarce study for an important Haitian commission.
In the fall of 1948, Barthé was awarded commissions by Haiti’s president Dumarais Estimé - a new coin with Estimé’s profile and two large public monuments to honor both L’Ouverture and his successor Jean-Jacques Dessalines. The monuments were by far the largest commissions Barthé had taken on - envisioned as part of a grand two hundredth anniversary commemorating Port-au-Prince’s founding as the nation’s capital. For L’Ouverture’s portrait, in 1949, Barthé hired Ural Wilson from Katherine Dunham’s dance company as a model. The artist translated his model dressed in period costume and holding a sword into a larger than life heroic figure. The bronze was cast in New York and shipped to Haiti in 1950, but it was not publicly unveiled until 1954, after Barthé had completed the second monument of Dessalines for the new president Paul Magloire. Vendryes pp. 143, 150-154.
Estimate
$8,000 – $12,000
Marion perkins (1908 - 1961)
Untitled (Head of a King).
Carved marble, mounted on a granite base, circa 1950 -1955. Approximately 330x241x51 mm; 11 3/4x9½x2 inches (not including the base). Incised signature on the backside.
Provenance: private collection, Chicago; private collection, South Carolina; private collection (2012).
This marble carving is an exceptional and extremely scarce work of the great Chicago sculptor Marion Perkins. Born in Marche, Arkansas, at the age of eight, Perkins was sent to live with relatives on the South Side of Chicago in 1916. Marion Perkins attended Wendell Phillips High School, the first Chicago high school where the majority of the students were African American. He soon married Eva Gillon, who became his model and muse; they had three sons and settled in Bronzeville. While interested in theatre and literature, Perkins worked a series of menial jobs to support his family until he acquired a newstand in the late 1930s. Perkins then had the resources and time to create an outdoor studio in his backyard. Not only a talented stone carver, the self-taught artist also carved in wood, and modelled in clay, plaster and steel wire.
Perkins first gained attention in 1940 with two stone works included in the American Negro Exposition. With the opening of the Southside Community Art Center that year, Perkins had an artistic venue where he could both exhibit and teach; he soon became an important figure of the Chicago Renaissance. His first triumph was being invited to exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago’s prestigious Annual Exhibition of American Art in 1942 where he showed his powerful limestone carving John Henry. After participating in several invitational exhibitions, in 1947 the IBM Corporation acquired his Figure at Rest. Then in 1948, his beautiful marble Ethiopia Awakening won the prize in sculpture at the Art Institute’s Annual Exhibition of Artists of Chicago and Vicinity, and Perkins was awarded an esteemed Julius Rosenwald Fund fellowship grant.
Perkins’s direct approach to stone sculpture is epitomized by his iconic 1950 Man of Sorrows. This powerful African American head of Christ with a crown of thorns was the sensation of the 1951 annual Chicago artists invitational at the Art Institute; it was featured in an Ebony magazine profile, and acquired by the museum. Perkins often found such fine materials in vacant lots and abandoned houses on the South Side. With Untitled (Head of a King), Perkins was not deterred by the narrowness of the marble slab - he rendered this regal head in three dimensions by carving the profile in the thin outer edges. This distintictively modern approach, influenced by Brancusi and Modigliani, is also seen in his pair of limestone heads, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, circa 1955. Despite these successes and widespread acclaim in Chicago, Perkins never received national recognition.
His sculptures are found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center, and the National Gallery. Marion Perkins continues to exert his influence on contemporary art today. Kerry James Marshall’s monumental picture, Souvenir III, 1998 includes a homage to the artist in his painting, along with Bob Thompson, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorthy Dandridge, and Augusta Savage. Perkins/Flug/Lusenhop pp. 2-7, 20; Schulman p. 138.
Estimate
$30,000 – $40,000
John wilson (1922 - )
Boulevard de Strasbourg.
Color lithograph on cream wove paper, 1950. 305x432 mm; 12x17 inches, full margins, with the registration marks. Artist’s proof, aside from an edition of an unknown size. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed “Artist Proof” in pencil, lower margin. A good, bright impression of this very extremely scarce print.
In 1947, John Wilson won the James William Paige Traveling Fellowship and moved to Paris, where he worked in Fernand Léger’s studio. Here, Wilson’s use of shapes and forms resemble the rotund, elongated compositions favored by his teacher. By 1950, Wilson earned the John Hay Whitney Fellowship and moved to Mexico City.
Another trial proof of this print is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Jacob lawrence (1917 - 2000)
Westchester Graduation Ball.
Brush and ink on thick cream wove paper, 1951. 232x552 mm; 9⅛x21¾ inches. Signed in ink, lower right.
Provenance: gift from the artist, Rev. Dr. Alger L. and Jesse M. Adams, Hasting-on-Hudson, NY; thence by descent, private collection, New York.
In June 1951, Westchester African American community leaders, Rev. Alger L. Adams and his wife, Jessie, of Hastings-on-Hudson, sponsored a cotillion-styled ball at Sarah Lawrence College for 1,951 of Westchester’s Black high school graduates. Inspired by the notion of a cotillion, they formed a committee of community peers and executed the fête. A long-time family friend of the Adams’, Lawrence was asked to design the cover for the invitation. After the invitations were printed, the original painting was returned to the Adams. Then Lawrence waved away their offer to return the original and instead gifted it to them.
This wonderful, elegant drawing is both a significant example of Jacob Lawrence’s mid-career work on paper, and a notable modern representation of Black social history. In 1951, Lawrence began a series of paintings that explored similar themes of performance - including Vaudeville, collection of the Hirshorn Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Chess on Broadway, exhibited at Twenty Eighth Venice Biennale and Magic on Broadway. He also made two other versions of this illustration that year -Untitled (Dance A) and Untitled (Dance B). All three are illustrated in the artist’s 2000 catalogue raisonnné by Peter Nesbitt & Michelle DuBois.
With– a copy of the June 13, 1951 program with the drawing illustrated on the front and back covers. This is an original copy of the 11 page printed invitation and keep-sake, listing the agenda, dance card and all participants and sponsors. Nesbett/DuBois 51-05.
Estimate
$50,000 – $75,000
John biggers (1924 - 2001)
Untitled (Study for the Word).
Conté crayon on cream wove paper, 1951. 355x508 mm; 14x20 inches. Signed and dated in pencil, lower left.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, private collection, Texas.
Exhibited: Private Treasure, Public View, San Antonio Museum of Art, Texas, February 2 - March 14, 1985.
This scarce study was created by Biggers as a preparatory work for the figures he used in two murals: The Contributions of Negro Women to American Life and Education, for the Blue Triangle Community Center, Houston, TX, 1954 and The History of Negro Education in Morris County, Naples, TX, 1955. The lithograph, The Word, 1965 also features these two men, who symbolize advancement and education for African Americans.
Estimate
$8,000 – $12,000
John wilson (1922 - 2015)
Mother and Child.
Lithograph on wove paper, 1952. 533x469 mm; 21x18½ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 20/50 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by José Sanchez and published by the Taller de Gráfica Popular, Mexico City.
John Wilson’s Mother and Child, a study for the 1952 mural, now destroyed, The Incident, is one of his most impressive lithographs. This is the larger and earlier of the two versions of this print. In addition to some differences in the drawing, in this version, the artist’s signature and date are also added in the stone, lower left. Other impressions are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Birmingham Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Charles white (1918 - 1979)
Folk Singer.
Linoleum cut on artificial Japan paper, 1957. 907x455 mm; 35¾x18 inches, full margins. Edition of 30. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed “Ed/30” in pencil, lower margin.
In this wonderfully expressive linoleum cut, Charles White reinterprets his iconic 1957 ink drawing Folk Singer (Voice of Jericho: Portait of Harry Belafonte).
Harry Belafonte was a important figure to Charles White - a friend, patron, collaborator and inspiration. In the late 1950s, White made musicians, singers and actors the subjects of his work–from the famous to the anonymous. While they had met in the early 1950s through their membership in the Committee for the Negro Arts, White and Belafonte became close friends and collaborated often once White moved to California. Andrea Barnwell describes how “with a generous gift from their dear friend Harry Belafonte,” Frances and White rented a house from friends on Summit Avenue in Pasadena in 1956, before they moved to nearby Altadena. Belafonte also wrote the introduction to White’s 1958 ACA Gallery exhibition catalogue when he first exhibited Folk Singer, and the foreword to the 1967 book Images of Dignity: The Drawings of Charles White. In the latter, Belafonte describes the profound connection he made to the work of Charles White: “You are enriched by the experience of having known Charles White’s people, who are like characters from a great novel that remain with you long after the pages of the book have been closed.” Through White’s hand, we become familiar with this great singer.
This is a very scarce print and only the second to appear at auction. While the intended edition was inscribed as 30, Lucinda Gedeon noted an edition of 25. We know the location of only a few other impressions of Folk Singer. An impression, titled Voice of Jericho and dated 1958, in the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art was exhibited in the recent travelling exhibition Charles White: A Retrospective. Oehler/Adler pl. 79, cat. 59; Barnwell p. 61; Gedeon Eb 12; Horowitz p. 1.
Estimate
$20,000 – $30,000
Aaron douglas (1899 - 1979)
Untitled (Landscape).
Etching on cream wove paper, circa 1952-56. 114x254 mm; 4½x10 inches, full margins. Artist’s proof, aside from an unknown edition. Signed, titled (illegible) and inscribed “a/p” in pencil, lower margin.
This small but expansive landscape was executed after Aaron Douglas achieved his second Carnegie Foundation grant through the Improvment of Teaching Project in 1952 and spent the summer traveling the American West. Earle p. 220.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Hughie lee-smith (1915 - 1999)
Untitled (Woman with Pearl Choker).
Oil on masonite board, 1954. 300x222 mm; 11 3/4x7 3/4 inches. Signed and dated in oil, upper right.
Provenance: Anna L. Werbe Gallery, Detroit; private collection, Michigan.
Hughie Lee-Smith had a solo exhibition at the Anna L. Werbe Gallery in 1954, and exhibited there through the 1950s.
This elegant and enigmatic portrait shows the growing influence of surrealism on the mid-1950s paintings of Hughie Lee-Smith.
Estimate
$20,000 – $30,000
Harold cousins (1916 - 1992)
Viking.
Welded steel, mounted on a wooden base, 1952. Approximately 787x533x203 mm; 31x21x8 inches. Incised signature, mid-center.
Provenance: the estate of the artist; Marc Cousins, New York, private collection (2006).
Exhibited: on loan and view at the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama, 2013-2022.
This significant steel sculpture by Harold Cousins comes from an important early body of modernist work, made during his first decade in Paris. Born and raised in Washington DC, Cousins attended Howard University and served in the Coast Guard during World War II. Cousins then moved to New York, enrolled at the Art Students League and focused on creating sculpture. While there, Cousins studied under William Zorach, Will Barnet and Reginald Marsh, and also met his wife Peggy Thomas. They moved to Paris in October of 1949. Cousins first studied with Ossip Zadkine, and became close friends with artists Karel Appel and Shinkichi Tajiri, a fellow student of Zadkine’s. Cousins also joined a community of expatriate African American artists in Paris including Ed Clark, Beauford Delaney, Herbert Gentry and Larry Potter. With funding from the GI Bill, many American artists moved to Paris to be at the forefront of the post-war art world.
Viking is an iconic example of Cousins’s mature postwar practice in Paris. Inspired by the Spanish modernist Julio Gonzalez, the first artist of the era to explore a new technique of welding steel, Cousins created delicate, expressive sculptures, which brought him great acclaim in Europe. Viking is similar to Cousins’s La Reine, 1952, in the collection of the Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University - its dynamic form takes on strikingly different shapes from different view points. The first major exhibition of these steel sculptures was at Galerie Raymond Creuse in Paris in 1954.
A group of these early works were reunited in 1996, and included in the Studio Museum in Harlem traveling exhibition Explorations in the City of Light: African-American Artists in Paris, 1945-1965. Early 1950s steel sculptures by Cousins are in several museum collections today, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Yale University Art Gallery. Holman-Conwill pp. 62-63.
Estimate
$30,000 – $40,000
Emilio cruz (1938 - 2004)
Untitled (Abstraction in Red).
Color pastels on cream wove paper, 1953. 635x800 mm; 25x32½ inches. Signed and dated “10-24-53” in pencil, lower right.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, private collection, New York.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Norman lewis (1909 - 1979)
Joiners.
Watercolor and ink on wove paper, 1954. 457x610 mm; 18x24 inches. Signed in ink, lower right recto. Titled and dated in pencil, upper left verso.
Provenance: the estate of the artist; Bill Hodges Gallery, New York, with the label on the frame back; private collection.
Estimate
$30,000 – $40,000
Norman lewis (1909 - 1979)
Untitled.
Ink on buff handmade Japan paper, 1958. 482x662 mm; 19x24½ inches. Signed and dated in ink, lower right.
Provenance: Bill Hodges Gallery, New York; private collection.
Estimate
$12,000 – $18,000
Hale woodruff (1900 - 1980)
Vertical Motion.
Sepia and black inks on textured wove paper, circa 1955. 400x502 mm; 15¾x19¾ inches. Signed in ink, lower left. Titled in graphite on a fragment of the previous frame’s backing paper.
Provenance: Earl B. and Kathryn Dickerson, Chicago; thence by descent, private collection.
Earl Dickerson (1891 - 1986) was a prominent African American attorney. Known as “the dean of Chicago’s Black lawyers,” Dickerson in 1933 became the first African American appointed as Illinois Assistant Attorney General. He also was counsel and the eventual president and CEO of the Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company. Famously, Dickerson successfully argued before the U. S. Supreme Court in the landmark Hansberry v. Lee case. Kathryn Dickerson (1905 - 1980) studied fashion at the Art Institute of Chicago. She later served as a founding officer of the South Side Community Art Center, and was one of the organizers of the American Negro Exposition of 1940. Both Dickersons were avid patrons of the arts in Chicago.
This Hale Woodruff abstraction is a scarce example of a mid-career work on paper by the artist.
Estimate
$8,000 – $12,000
Felrath hines (1913 - 1993)
Bouquet.
Oil on burlap canvas, 1957. 787x1187 mm; 31x46¾ inches. Signed in oil, lower right recto. Signed, titled and dated in oil, center verso.
Provenance: Park Avenue Gallery, Mount Kisco, NY; private collection, Connecticut (1960); private collection (2016), acquired from Swann Galleries, April 7, 2016.
Bouquet is a significant mid-century painting by Felrath Hines - a scarce large canvas from his first abstract period. Born in Indianapolis, Hines studied painting and design at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he befriended artist Charles Sebree. Inspired by Sebree, Hines moved from Chicago to New York in 1946. In the 1950s, he quietly developed an organic abstraction idiom while working in the shop of master framer Robert M. Kulicke. Through this close contact with the art world, Hines was both introduced to many other artists and his future career in art conservation.
Hines achieved critical recognition for these beautiful, painterly abstractions of nature with two solo exhibitions at Parma Gallery in 1957 and 1959, and his inclusion in group exhibitions at the John Heller Gallery and Parma Gallery in New York and the Barnett Aden Gallery in Washington, DC in the 1950s. In the late 1950s, Hines also met Romare Bearden, with whom he would later become a founding member of the Spiral Group in 1963. Several paintings from this breakthrough period of abstraction are now in institutional collections; including Transition, 1953, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Hanging Garden, 1954, SFMOMA, Untitled (Abstraction), circa 1960, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and Untitled, 1960, Indianapolis Museum of Art.
Estimate
$30,000 – $40,000
Norman lewis (1909 - 1979)
Untitled (Processional Composition Study.)
Oil and graphite on cream wove paper, circa 1955-60. 610x483 mm; 24x19 inches.
Provenance: the estate of the artist; Bill Hodges Gallery, New York, with the label on the frame back; private collection.
Illustrated: Norman W. Lewis: Works on Paper, 1935 - 1979, Bill Hodges Gallery, New York, p. 56.
Estimate
$10,000 – $15,000
Earl hooks (1927 - 2005)
Untitled.
Thrown and hand-built glazed stoneware, 1957. Approximately 431x203x216 mm; 17x8x8½ inches. Signed and dated in pencil on the underside.
Provenance: private collection, New York.
This large, modernist vessel featuring wonderful biomorphic shapes epitomizes Earl Hooks’s mid-career work in ceramics. It displays his commitment to exploring the relationships between design, balance, and form. Hooks rose to prominence due to his application of naturally occurring shapes to functional sculptures. His works take on bulbous shapes with intentional ceramic inclusions and a matte glaze that scatters reflected light in dispersed directions.
Hooks was one of the most significant Black ceramic artists of the 20th Century and the founder of Studio A, one of the country’s first Black-owned and operated fine arts galleries in Gary, Indiana. Born August 2, 1927, in Baltimore, Hooks received a BA degree from Howard University in 1949, attended Catholic University in Washington, DC, from 1949-51, and then received graduate certificates from both the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1954 and the School of American Craftsman in New York in ceramics in 1955. He served as both professor and chair of the art department at Fisk University from 1961-67.
Estimate
$10,000 – $15,000
Romare bearden (1911 - 1988)
Wine Star.
Oil on linen canvas, 1959. 1473x1067 mm; 58x42 inches. Signed in oil, upper left recto. Titled in oil, upper left verso.
Provenance: the artist; Michael Warren Gallery, New York; private collection, France (circa 1965); private collection, New York (2006); private collection (2015), acquired at Swann Galleries, December 15, 2015.
Exhibited: Michael Warren Gallery, New York, January 20 - February 19, 1960, with a fragment of the gallery label on the frame back; Abstract Romare Bearden, DC Moore Gallery, New York, February 13 - July 13, 2020; Romare Bearden: Abstraction, traveling exhibition, organized by the American Federation of Art and curator Dr. Tracy Fitzpatrick of the Neuberger Museum of Art, Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC, October 15, 2021 – January 9, 2022, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI February 5 – May 15, 2022.
Michael Warren Gallery was later renamed Daniel Cordier and Michael Warren Gallery, Inc. in 1961 before becoming Cordier and Ekstrom in 1962. This painting was included in a group of late 1950s abstract canvases exhibited in this solo exhibiton.
Illustrated: Roberta Smith, “Romare Bearden’s Seen Abstract Side”, The New York Times, March 19, 2020.
Wine Star is an excellent and significant example from Romare Bearden’s period of abstract color field painting of the late 1950s. Bearden’s development of abstraction was influenced by non-Western intuitive approaches to imagery. In the mid-1950s, Bearden had an interest in Zen Buddhism and studied calligraphy and Chinese landscape painting with a Chinese calligrapher. His late 1950s works display less of an interest in the activity of action painting of expressionism, as described by his friend the writer Harry Henderson in a 1989 interview - “He found a rationale by studying Zen philosophy. His works were always serene and lacked the tremendous physical involvement employed by the Abstract Expressionists.” Sharon Patton also described a “mystical elegance” in these abstract works, and the influence of Chinese painting is found in their asymmetry and an entry point into the painting. Patton illustrates this phase with Bearden’s Blue is the Smoke of War, White the Bones of Men, circa 1960, from the Harry B. Henderson collection and sold at Swann Galleries on September 15, 2005.
Bearden’s abstract painting impresses with its vital fluidity and technical virtuosity. Roberta Smith’s rave review of the 2020 DC Moore exhibition of Abstract Romare Bearden posits his abstract painting’s significance; “they effortlessly claim a place in the history of American postwar abstraction, stain painting division.” These beautiful paintings embrace accident, staining and the canvas through a technique of pouring, staining, dispersion and dripping. While Bearden’s period of experimental painting is later than the mid-1950s celebrated color field painting of Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler, his experimentation was independent; as Smith put it simply, “Bearden developed it on his own”. This notable chapter in his development has been largely overlooked until recently. The abstraction of Bearden is now the subject of a national traveling museum exhibition organized at the Neuberger Museum of Art by its director Tracy Fitzpatrick. Fine p. 222; Gelburd/Rosenberg p. 40; Patton p. 173.
Estimate
$150,000 – $250,000
Beauford delaney (1901 - 1979)
Ciel.
Color screenprint, 1960. 494x491 mm; 19x17⅜ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated, and numbered 22/36 in pencil, lower margin.
Illustrated: Patricia Sue Canterbury, Beauford Delaney: From New York to Paris, The Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, University of Washington Press, 2004 pl. 36, p. 111 (another impression).
Another impression of this scarce print is in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
Estimate
$10,000 – $15,000
Norman lewis (1909 - 1979)
Untitled.
Oil on cream wove paper, 1960. 508x762 mm; 20x30 inches. Signed and dated “2-16-60” in ink, lower left.
Provenance: McCarty Gallery, Chestnut Hill, PA; private collection, Pennsylvania.
This beautiful color field abstraction is an excellent example of Norman Lewis’ mid-career work on paper. The sheet has the printed Inkweed Arts illustrations on the verso - found on many of Lewis’ works on paper from the late 1950s and 1960s.
Estimate
$30,000 – $40,000
Charles alston (1907 - 1977)
Black and White #3 (Astral #3).
Oil on linen canvas, 1961. 1270x1016 mm; 50x40 inches. Signed in oil, upper right recto. Titled Black and White #3, dated and inscribed “50x40” in ink on the upper stretcher bar, verso; titled Astral #3, dated and inscribed “50x40” in ink on a notecard, thumb-tacked to the upper stretcher bar, verso; tilted Black and White #3 in ink on paper, taped to the lower stretcher bar.
Provenance: the estate of the artist; thence by descent, private collection.
Exhibited: Charles Alston, Dunbarton Galleries, Boston, MA, March 24 - April 26, 1962; Charles Alston, The Gallery of Modern Art, New York, NY, December 3, 1968 - January 5, 1969. This retrospective, sponsored by Farleigh Dickinson University, included 53 paintings and 3 sculptures by Alston, including all eight of the Black and White paintings. They were exhibited alongside his other important series African Theme,Blues Singer and Family from the 1950s and 60s in the new New York museum designed by Edward Durell Stone at 2 Columbus Circle. In their chapter on Charles Alston, Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson wrote that Alston “considered the black and white abstractions in the retrospective of 1968 to be amongst his most important he had done.”
Black and White #3 is a striking and beautiful abstraction by Alston, a significant work from his important series of eight abstract paintings between 1959 and 1961. By 1960, Alston achieved wide recognition for his post war painting, including the Emily Lowe Memorial award for An Ancient Place, and a solo exhibition at Feingarten Galleries, New York that year. Like his friend Norman Lewis, Alston found the limited palette of black and white provided both aesthetic and narrative themes that enabled his abstraction to reflect a social and political consciousness. Alston and Lewis both effectively gave the color black new meaning at the height of the Civil Rights era struggles. In Black and White #3, Alston masterfully creates a dynamic composition through a great variety of applications of black paint on the white ground - from impastoed strokes to thin wash. His experimental approach includes dispersal, blotting and monotype.
Another painting from this series, Black and White II, circa 1960 is in the collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Two other known paintings from this series are illustrated in Alvia J. Wardlaw’s Charles Alston monograph, Black and White #1, 1959 and Black and White #7, 1961, which was also included in the Brooklyn Museum 2015 traveling exhibition Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties. Black and White #8 was sold at Swann Galleries on December 12, 2020.
The Black and White series also laid the foundation for Alston’s work in Spiral. As a founding member of the artist’s group in the summer of 1963, Alston, alongside the other abstract painters Lewis, Merton Simpson and Hale Woodruff, advocated for an art that could address Black identity and the social and political issues confronting African Americans during the Civil Rights struggle. The Spiral group’s first and only exhibition First Group Showing: Works in Black and White, May 14 - June 5, 1965, continued his monochromatic theme. Bearden/Henderson, Jr., p. 269; Wardlaw p. 91 and 93.
Estimate
$100,000 – $150,000
Sam middleton (1927 - 2015)
Untitled (Black and White).
Gouache and ink on cream wove paper, 1961. 457x609 mm; 18x24 inches. Signed and dated in ink, lower right.
Provenance: private collection, Netherlands.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Sam middleton (1927 - 2015)
Untitled (Black and White).
Gouache and ink on buff wove paper, 1962. 457x609 mm; 18x24 inches. Signed and dated in ink, lower right.
Provenance: private collection, Netherlands.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Sam middleton (1927 - 2015)
Paris.
Collage, gouache and ink on cream wove paper, 1964. 533x762 mm; 21x30 inches. Signed and dated in ink, lower right.
Provenance: private collection, Netherlands.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Betye saar (1926 - )
Lo, the Pensive Peninsula.
Etching printed in brown and black ink on cream wove paper, 1961. 380x500 mm; 15x19 inches, wide margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 9/20 in pencil, lower margin. Printed and published by the artist.
This extremely scarce etching is the first artwork that Betye Saar formally exhibited. The print (another impression) was included in her first group show at the Palos Verdes Library Gallery in 1961. This early print not only shows the very beginning of the artist’s practice, but Saar’s interest in the spiritualism found in landscape. Lo, the Pensive Peninsula dates from the final year of her graduate studies in experimental printmaking at California State University, Los Angeles.
Another impression is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and was included in the recent exhibition The Legends of Black Girl’s Window, October 21, 2019 – January 4, 2020.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Betye saar (1926 - )
Flight.
Color screenprint on heavy cream wove paper, 1963. 380x500 mm; 14x18 inches, full margins. Intended edition of 14 (12 known impressions). Printed and published by the artist. Signed, titled and dated in pencil, lower margin.
This extremely scarce print is one of only a few early screenprints by Betye Saar. This print dates from the year after Saar finished her graduate studies in experimental printmaking at California State University, Los Angeles. Flight and two other sceenprints, Anticipation, 1961 and In the Sunflower Patch, 1963, share the theme of motherhood - Saar gave birth to her three daughters, Alison, Lesley, and Tracye, while in grad school.
Other impressions of this print are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Detroit Institute of Art. An impression was also included in the recent MoMA exhibition The Legends of Black Girl’s Window, October 21, 2019 – January 4, 2020.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
James lesesne wells (1902 - 1993)
Carousel.
Oil on linen canvas, 1962. 406x559 mm; 16x22 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower right.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, private collection, Washington, DC (1967); hence by descent, private collection.
This impastoed, colorful canvas shows James Lesesne Wells continued experimentation and increased expressionism with oil painting in the postwar period. Wells also made an earlier, untitled linoleum cut of the same composition - an impression dated circa 1949 is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Estimate
$10,000 – $15,000
Calvin burnett (1921 - 2007)
Study for Self Portrait as a Teenage Girl.
Graphite and pencil on wove paper, circa 1961. 603x357 mm; 23⅝x14⅜ inches. Signed and inscribed “From studies for a ‘Self Portrait as a Teenage Girl’” in pencil, lower right.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; private collection (1969); private collection.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Charles searles (1937 - 2004)
Reclining Nude.
Gouache, watercolor, pen and ink on cream wove paper, circa 1964. 455x610 mm; 17⅞x24 inches. Signed in pen and ink, lower left.
Provenance: private collection, New Jersey.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Emilio cruz (1938 - 2004)
Untitled (Nudes).
Color pastels on tan wove paper, 1966. 482x626 mm; 19x24⅝ inches. Signed and dated in pastel, lower right.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, private collection, New York.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Charles white (1918 - 1979)
Nude.
Watercolor, pen and sepia ink on cream illustration board, 1965. 352x204 mm; 13⅞x8⅛ inches. Signed and dated in ink, lower right.
Provenance: Heritage Gallery, Los Angeles, with the gallery label on the frame back; private collection, California; private collection, New York.
Estimate
$10,000 – $15,000
Charles white (1918 - 1979)
Juba.
Lithograph on cream Arches paper, 1965. 425x630 mm; 16⅝x24¾ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 27/35 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Joe Funk, Los Angeles, with printer’s blindstamp lower left. Gedeon Ea18.
Estimate
$7,000 – $10,000
John biggers (1924 - 2001)
The Word.
Lithograph on buff wove paper, 1965. 381x508 mm; 15x20 inches, full margins. Proof, aside from the first edition. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed “proof 1st Ed” and “From Marian Anderson’s People” in pencil, lower margin.
Illustrated: A Life on Paper: The Drawings and Lithographs of John Thomas Biggers, Olive Jensen Theisen, University of North Texas Press, Denton, Texas, 1984, fig. 50, p. 67.
This scarce print, dating from the artist’s first body of work in lithography, is a first edition proof for Marian Anderson’s People.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Kermit oliver (1943 - )
Burnt Church.
Lacquer and Japanese oil glaze on wood panel, circa 1965. 229x356 mm; 9x14 inches. Signed in oil, lower right.
Provenance: private collection, Texas.
This haunting nocturne, depicting the silhouette of a burned out church under moonlight, is a fascinating, early painting by Kermit Oliver. The powerful subject matter is an unusual direct response by the Texan artist to the unrest of the mid-1960s, and a condemnation of the violent campaigns of terror, including the bombing of Black churches, during the Civil Rights period. Oliver continued to paint nocturnal subjects in the 1970s. This painting is also one of the earliest works of Oliver to come to auction.
From a young age, growing up in Refugio, Texas, Kermit Oliver had a passion for depicting his rural surroundings through painting and drawing. Oliver’s father was an African American cowboy who worked on cattle ranches. He attended Texas Southern University in 1960, where his professor John Biggers inspired him to stay “true to your own message, your own language.” After graduating from TSU, Oliver rose to prominence as an artist in Houston in the 1970s. When the DuBose Gallery began to represent him in 1971, he became the first African American artist in Houston to be represented by a commercial gallery. Oliver and his family moved to Waco in 1984 where, despite the fame from his many Hermès scarf commissions, he retreated from the art world. Oliver was honored with a retrospective exhibition of his work at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 2005, and at the Art Center of Waco in 2021. His paintings are in many museum collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Southern University, Houston, the Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC.
Estimate
$7,000 – $10,000
Samella lewis (1924 - 2022)
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; 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
Elizabeth catlett (1915 - 2012)
Rebozos.
Lithograph on cream wove paper, 1968. 342x254 mm; 13½x10 inches, full margins. First edition (of 2). Signed, titled, dated and numbered 38/50 in pencil lower margin. Printed and published by the artist at the Taller de Gráfica Popular, Mexico City.
Another impression is in the collection of the LaSalle University Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
William e. artis (1914 - 1977)
Untitled (Vessel).
Glazed earthenware, circa 1960s. 393x228x127 mm; 15½x9x5 inches. Signed in glaze on the underside.
Provenance: collection of the artist; gifted to the collection of Jim and Jeannette Cantrell; private collection. The artist traded this vessel for a painting by his friend, Jim Cantrell. William Artis was teaching at Chadron State College in Nebraska, and Cantrell was teaching at Sidney public school, Nebraska, 1964 - 1966.
Born in Washington, NC, William E. Artis moved to New York during the Harlem Renaissance like fellow North Carolina native artists Charles Alston and Romare Bearden. Artis took private sculpture lessons with Augusta Savage and studied with Robert Laurent at the Art Students League with a Harmon Foundation scholarship. After service in the air force during World War II, Artis studied at the New York State College of Ceramics. He exhibited at the Syracuse Ceramic Nationals in 1940, and 1947 through 1951. He was awarded the Rosenwald Fund fellowship in 1946 and collaborated with the Croatian sculptor Ivan Mestrovic (1883- 1962).
William Artis moved to the Midwest in the early 1950s to teach art and to study the Sioux Indian culture - he taught at the Holy Rosary (now Red Cloud) School on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. Then he joined the Chadron State College faculty as an assistant instructor in 1954 - then named Nebraska State Teachers College. Artis was professor of sculpture and ceramics at Chadron State College until 1965. He then was an associate professor at Mankato State College in Mankato, Minnesota until 1975. Artis received a retrospective at Fisk University in 1971. William Artis’s artwork today is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Museum of Art, the Museum of Nebraska Art, the Schein-Joseph International Museum of Ceramic Art, New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University and Chadron State College. Schulman p. 134; Nolting pp. 58-59, 89.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Norman lewis (1909 - 1979)
Untitled (Abstraction in Orange).
Oil on linen canvas, 1967. 1460x965 mm; 57½x38 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower left.
Provenance: private collection, New York; thence by descent, private collection, New York.
This bright and energetic abstraction is an excellent example of Norman Lewis’s late 1960s period. Between 1966 and 1969, Norman Lewis painted a series of paintings, each with brightly colored grounds and underlying figuration typically in black and primary colors. This untitled painting is closely related in color and composition to his Masquerade, private collection, from the same year, which was included in his 2016-17 retrospective Procession: the Art of Norman Lewis. Other known examples from the series are Players, Players Four and Playtime; each are from 1966 and reference jazz musicians, a familiar subject of Lewis’. This fascinating group of work shows the artist making a decided turn, back to more abstract figuration in his painting. These paintings represent an important period, coming between his black and white Civil Rights and Klan paintings of the early to mid-1960s, and the larger scale paintings and Sea Change series to come in the 1970s.
Estimate
$400,000 – $600,000
Hale woodruff (1900 - 1979)
Landscape.
Oil on linen canvas, 1967. 775x1073 mm; 30½x42¼ inches. Signed in oil, lower right recto. With a small sketch in oil, verso.
Provenance: collection of the artist, New York; Johnson Publishing Company, Inc., Chicago (1970); private collection.
Exhibited: Retrospective Exhibition: Hale Woodruff, Leob Gallery, New York University, New York, May 15 - June 8, 1967 (held in conjunction with Woodruff’s retirement from NYU); Hale A. Woodruff: Paintings, Prints and Watercolors, Carl Murphy Fine Arts Center, Morgan State College, Baltimore, MD, May 21 - June 14, 1968; Afro-American Artists,1800-1969, the Division of Art Education, School District of Philadelphia with the Philadelphia Civic Center Museum, Philadelphia, PA, December 5 - 29, 1969; Five Famous Black Artists, the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Art, Roxbury, MA, February 9 - March 10, 1970.
Illustrated: Randall J. Craig. Afro-American Artists 1800-1969, p. 22; Edmund Barry Gaither, Five Famous Black Artists, p. 7.
This vibrant canvas is an excellent example of Hale Woodruff’s postwar painting in which he described landscape and natural phenomena within the idiom of Abstract Expressionism. This significant and striking canvas shows Woodruff’s continued evolution as an abstract painter through the 1960s. In addition to continuing his Celestial Gate series, Woodruff created some of his most abstract painting as landscapes. Landscape is typical of Woodruff’s late 1960s compositions with bold, horizontal strokes over layers of both earthy and jewel-like colors. Other significant 1967 paintings are in institutional collections, including Ancestral Memory, the Detroit Institute of the Arts and Figure, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Estimate
$150,000 – $250,000
Mavis pusey (1928 - 2019)
Dissolution of X.
Color screenprint on wove paper, circa 1970. 730x572 mm; 28¾x22½ inches, full margins. Proof, aside from an edition of 30. Signed, titled and inscribed “Proof” in pencil, lower margin.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Mavis pusey (1928 - 2019)
The City of Distracting Images.
Color screenprint, circa 1970. 736x584 mm; 29x23 inches, full margins. Artist’s proof, aside from an edition of 30. Signed, titled and inscribed “Artist’s Proof” in pencil, lower margin.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Ruth g. waddy (1909 - 2003)
Untitled #2.
Linoleum cut on thin cream Japan paper, 1968. 355x406 mm; 14x16 inches, wide margins. Signed, titled, dated, inscribed “Lino-cut” and numbered 3/20 in ink, lower margin.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Ruth g. waddy (1909 - 2003)
The Key.
Linoleum cut on thin Japan paper, 1969. 273x483 mm; 10¾x19 inches, wide (full?) margins. Signed, titled, dated, inscribed “Lino-cut” and numbered 14/25 in ink, lower left.
A good impression of this very scarce print - this linoleum cut by Ruth Waddy has been described as “one of the most important and influential pieces to come out of the Black Arts movement.” Another impression is illustrated in Samella Lewis and Ruth Waddy’s 1969 survey Black Artists on Art, Volume I. Waddy also edited the influential survey Prints by American Negro Artists published in 1965. De Graaf/Mulroy/Taylor p. 236; Lewis/Waddy p. 118.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Herman kofi bailey (1931 - 1981)
Untitled (Portrait in Green).
Mixed media on illustration board, circa 1968. 660x508 mm; 26x20 inches. Signed in brown ink, lower right.
Provenance: private collection, California; acquired from Swann Galleries on October 5, 2017, private collection, NY.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Mavis pusey (1928 - 2019)
Bridge Workers.
Color screenprint on Arches paper, 1968. 234x336 mm; 9¼x13¼ inches, full margins. Signed, titled and numbered 10/17 in pencil, lower margin.
Estimate
$1,500 – $2,500
Lev mills (1938 - 2021)
Contamination.
Color etching and aquatint on cream wove paper, 1968. 596x488 mm; 23½x19¼ inches, full margins. Artist's proof, aside from an unknown edition. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed "A/Proof" in pencil, lower margin. Printed by the artist at the University of Wisconsin.
Part of Lev Mills' masters thesis in printmaking, Contamination is an extremely scarce print. Born in Tallahassee, Florida, Mills lived and worked in Atlanta, Georgia. 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. Mills' career was 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. His work is included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the British Museum, London, and MOCA Georgia.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Cliff joseph (1922 - 2020)
Rise People Rise.
Oil on linen canvas, 1970. 1378x1835 mm; 54¼x72¼ inches. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed "oil/canvas 4'x6'" in ink, verso. Signed, titled and dated in ink on the upper stretcher bar, verso.
Provenance: the estate of the artist; private collection.
Rise People Rise. is an important mid-career painting by artist, activist and art therapist Cliff Joseph. It is a powerful political and artistic statement created at the height of the Black Arts movement. As a founding member of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition in New York, Joseph was working at the vanguard of a transformative moment in African American art and history.
Born in 1922 in Panama City where his father was employed in the construction of the Panama Canal, Joseph's family emigrated to the United States the following year, settling in Harlem. Following military service in the Army artillery and WWII, he studied at the Pratt Institute in New York, receiving a degree in illustration in 1952.
Cliff Joseph best described his practice of painting: "the power of the art belongs to the people." By 1968, both his painting and activism were reaching new heights. That year, Joseph painted one of his best known works, My Country Right or Wrong, a powerful anti-war statement. In 1968, Joseph also co-founded the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC) with Benny Andrews, Henri Ghent, Reggie Gammon, Mahler Ryde and Edward Taylor. Faith Ringgold also became a member of BECC. Its founding was a direct response to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's controversial exhibition Harlem on My Mind which did not include any Black painters or sculpture. Its goal was to increase the representation of Black artists in New York galleries and museums. Joseph and the BECC went on to also protest the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition Contemporary Black Artists in America, and organized the exhibition Rebuttal to Whitney Museum Exhibition at the Acts of Art Gallery in Manhattan.
Joseph was also one of the first African Americans to join the professional practice of art therapy, and the first African American to join the American Art Therapy Association. He practiced art therapy at Lincoln Hospital and was on staff at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.
Joseph's iconic Blackboard, 1969, with its vision of an Afro-centric education, was recently included in the important traveling exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power organized by curators Mark Godfrey and Zoe Whitely at the Tate Modern, London. Rise People Rise is the most significant and largest painting of Cliff Joseph to come to auction to date.
Estimate
$35,000 – $50,000
Alvin hollingsworth (1928 - 2000)
Untitled (Cityscape with Figure).
Oil and acrylic, with sand and letter transfer, on cotton canvas, circa 1970s. 609x914 mm; 24x36 inches. Signed in oil, lower left.
Provenance: private collection, New York.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Jacob lawrence (1917 - 2000)
Chess Players.
Lithograph on German Cooperplate paper, 1970. 355x482 mm; 13⅞x18⅞ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 20/30 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by the School of Art, University of Washington, Seattle. Published by the artist while a visiting artist at the University of Washington.
Provenance: acquired from G. R. N’Namdi Gallery, Birmingham, MI, with the label on the frame back; private collection, Michigan.
Another impression of this scarce print is in the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Nesbett L70-1.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Hughie lee-smith (1915 - 1999)
Untitled (Portrait).
Gouache, pen, ink and graphite on cream wove paper, circa 1970. 305x229 mm; 12x9 inches. Signed in graphite, lower right.
Provenance: private collection, New York.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Hughie lee-smith (1915 - 1999)
Apples and Bananas.
Oil on linen canvas, 1970. 304x508 mm; 12x20 inches. Signed in oil, lower left.
Provenance: the estate of the artist; thence by descent to the current owner, private collection.
Estimate
$15,000 – $25,000
Louis sloan (1932 - 2008)
The Red Sea.
Oil on linen canvas, circa 1971-74. 1219x1254 mm; 48x60 inches.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, private collection, AZ, thence by descent private collection, AZ.
The Red Sea is a monumental landscape by Louis B. Sloan that is inspired by the crossing of the Red Sea, an episode in the biblical narrative of The Exodus. Here, Sloan uses a variety of brushwork, drips, and splatter in a plethora of greys, white and blue to compose mountain-like waves and a shadow of figures crossing the Red Sea. The power and drama of the painting are akin to 19th Century depictions of the biblical event. 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, in the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia.
Estimate
$10,000 – $15,000
Louis sloan (1932 - 2008)
The Fishermen.
Oil on board, 1973. 330x609 mm; 13x24 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower left.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, private collection, AZ; thence by descent, private collection, AZ.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Contemporary - 1st Generation
Frank wimberley (1926 - )
Untitled.
Color screenprint on cream wove paper, 1971. 711x609 mm; 28x24 inches, full margins. Signed and numbered 31/75 in pencil, lower edge.
Estimate
$1,500 – $2,500
Frank wimberley (1926 - )
Edythe.
Color screenprint on cream wove paper, 1971. 838x609 mm; 33x24 inches, full margins. Signed, titled and numbered 68/110 in pencil, lower margin.
Estimate
$1,500 – $2,500
Sam gilliam (1933 - 2022)
Untitled.
Watercolor on folded and distressed handmade paper, 1971. 596x450 mm; 23½x17¾ inches. Signed in ink, verso.
Provenance: private collection, MA.
Estimate
$20,000 – $30,000
Norman lewis (1909 - 1979)
The Red Umbrella.
Etching printed in orange on a bluish-grey chine-collé, 1972. 300x400 mm; 11¾x15¾ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated, dedicated and numbered 2/25 in pencil, lower margin. A very good impression of this scarce print.
Other impressions are in the collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem and the David C. Driskell Collection. Fine 31.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Victor seach (1918 - 1991)
Untitled.
Acrylic on linen canvas, 1973. 914x636 mm; 36x25⅝ inches. Signed and dated in acrylic, lower right recto. Signed, dated and inscribed “acrylique” in ink, on the stretcher bars verso.
Provenance: the estate of the artist, Brussels, Belgium; private collection Brussels, Belgium; private collection, Boston (1995).
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Elaine crossley (1925 - 1996)
Untitled (Abstraction).
Oil on cotton canvas, 1975. 762x1016 mm; 30x40 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower right.
Provenance: estate of the artist; private collection, MA.
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Elaine Crossley was creative and intellectually curious. Before becoming a painter for nearly fifty years, Crossley engaged her creative side by writing poetry and practicing drawing. Bound to her pragmatic parents, Crossley wanted to major in art and study at the Cincinnati Art Academy but was persuaded to pursue home economics at the University of Cincinnati, continuing to draw and paint. Crossley later enrolled in courses at the Art Institute of Chicago while living in Chicago with her husband, Frank Crossley, from 1952 to 1966. He was a metallurgical engineer who minored in fine art himself and encouraged his partner’s artistic interests. After moving to California, she studied ceramics and jewelry making.
Crossley’s expressions explore composition, color, space, and balance. Her designs consist of geometric and architectural forms, or landscapes with sensuous, undulating shapes. Most are outlined in black, emulating the range of human emotions. Inspired by artists of previous generations, Crossley identified the core of her artwork:
“[It comes from an] ancient art form, originating in Sudan, and used in much of ceremonial and ritual design in African artifacts. Although I am often identified as a cubist, I consider my style very personal and unique—an expression of myself. As an abstract painter, I am strongly influenced by African geometric designs. Here I must explain that I did not ‘lift’ a style from Africa but extended the expression of an established form. Abstract art is prevalent in Oceanic art, the islands of the Pacific, where Black people remain today producing the same designs for wall coverings, clothing, fabrics, and crafts…We, as Black people, owe it to our posterity to salvage our culture. We can do this only by becoming informed about those things that depict us as a people. We must not limit our scope and eclipse our diverse and abundant contributions. I do not paint the Black experience. I am a Black woman who paints what she feels, thus expressing and sharing her Black experience.”
After living in Illinois, the Crossleys relocated to Palo Alto, California, then to Granite Bay (near Sacramento) in 1986. She exhibited extensively in Californian venues including the Triton Museum, Santa Clara, Fine Arts Gallery, Mountain View, Arts Associates West, San Francisco, Berkeley Museum, the Center for the Visual Arts in Oakland, and the University of Indiana. Crossley was artist-in-residence at the Berkeley Plaza Gallery and the Ebony Museum of Art, both in Oakland, where her works were often on display over several decades. She lectured on art and exhibited at the University of California-Berkeley and in Sacramento. Butler p. 30.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Romare bearden (1911 - 1988)
Carolina Blue (Interior).
Color screenprint with collage elements on cream wove paper, 1970. 605x455 mm; 23⅞x17⅞ inches, full margins. Signed and numbered 62/100 in ink, lower right. Published by Ives-Sillman, New Haven. Gelburd/Rosenberg GG#21.
In Carolina Blue (Interior), Bearden merges his printmaking and collage processes into a cohesive whole, making an editioned collage with screenprint and printed papers.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Romare bearden (1911 - 1988)
Carolina Memories (Tidings).
Color screenprint on cream wove paper, 1970-1972. 736x559 mm; 29x22 inches, full margins. Artist’s proof, aside from the edition of 125. Signed and inscribed “AP” in pencil, lower margin. Published by Ives-Sillman, Inc., New Haven, CT.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Benny andrews (1930 - 2006)
Circle Study #30.
Pen and India ink on wove paper, 1972. 305x457 mm; 12x18 inches. Signed and dated “Nov 22, 1972” in ink, lower right recto. Signed and titled in ink, lower right verso.
Provenance: private collection, New York.
This pen and ink study is related to the final composition of Benny Andrews’ 1973 Circle, his monumental 10x24 foot painting of 12 joined canvases with oil and collage.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Camille billops (1933 - 2019)
Saying it to You.
Etching on cream wove paper, 1972. 196x212 mm; 7¾x8¾ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 5/21 in pencil, lower margin. Printed and published by the Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia.
Provenance: collection of Anne & Allan Edmunds.
Consigned to support the Brandywine Workshop in Philadelphia and its legacy endowment campaign.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Nathaniel (sonny) bustion (1942 - )
Untitled.
Oil on two joined pieces of cotton canvas, 1972. 1727x1372 mm; 68x54 inches. Signed and dated in spray paint and signed again in red ink, verso.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, private collection, California.
This expressive and experimental painting is the largest and most significant artwork of Nathaniel Bustion to come to auction. The same year Bustion’s work was included in the important exhibition Los Angeles 1972: A Panorama of Black Artists at LACMA. He was also included in Samella Lewis and Ruth Waddy’s 1972 survey Black Artists on Art, Volume 2. Bustion is known for his diverse work in painting, sculpture and ceramics, often using mixed media in clay, concrete, wood, and copper, and printmaking.
Born in Gadsden, Alabama, he attended Colorado State University, Belgium Antwerp Academy of Art and the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. An active presence in the Los Angeles area, Bustion had a solo exhibition of his paintings, ceramics and drawings in 1971 at the Brockman Gallery, a two person 1975 exhibition at Loyola Marymount University with Stanley C. Wilson and a 1976 four person exhibition at the University of Southern California with Alonzo Davis, Betye Saar and Stanley C. Wilson. He taught at the Otis Institute, Los Angeles City College, and Pomona College. More recently, Bustion was included in the important 2008 exhibition at Jack Tilton Gallery L.A. Object and David Hammons Body Prints, and the subsequent catalogue, published in 2011. Lewis/Waddy p. 114 and 135; Tilton/Charwood pp. 312-15, 403, 408 and 409.
Estimate
$6,000 – $9,000
Romare bearden (1911 - 1988)
Prevalence of Ritual.
Set of 5 color screenprints on wove paper, 1974. Four appoximately 1016x812 mm; 40x35 inches; one appoximately 812x1016 mm; 32x40 inches, full margins. A set of 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, lower right.
Titles include: Noah, The Third Day * In the Garden * Salome * Delilah * Prologue to Troy*. Gelburd/Rosenburg GG# 71 - 75.
Estimate
$20,000 – $30,000
Romare bearden (1911 - 1988)
Salome.
Color screenprint, 1974. 723x901 mm; 28½x35½ inches, full margins. A hors commerce impression, aside from the edition of 100. Signed, dated, inscribed “P.R. III H/C” and numbered 5/37 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 lower right. From the Prevalence of Ritual series.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Romare bearden (1911 - 1988)
Baptism.
Color screenprint, 1975. 813x1140 mm; 32x45 inches, full margins. Signed, titled and numbered 35/50 in pencil, lower margin.
This monumental screenprint is Romare Bearden’s largest print, and is based on his 1974 collage Of the Blues: Carolina Shout. Gelburd/Rosenberg GG#6.
Estimate
$15,000 – $25,000
George l. wilson (1930 - 2003)
Youthful Session.
Oil on linen canvas, 1972. 609x762 mm; 24x30 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower left.
Provenance: private collection, Washington, DC; thence by descent, private collection.
A New York figurative painter, George Wilson is best known for his sensitive depictions of children from the 1970s. Born in Windsor, NC, he lived and worked in the Bronx, New York. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including Contemporary Afro-American Arts at the Brooklyn Museum in 1968, Harlem Artists ‘69 at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1969, and the Third Annual Atlanta Life Open in 1983. He also frequently exhibited at the Spiral Gallery and the Dorsey Gallery, both in Brooklyn, NY. His paintings are in the collections of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, and the Howard University Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Estimate
$7,000 – $10,000
Joseph holston (1944 - )
Untitled (Boy in a Cap).
Gouache and pastel on tan paper, circa 1975. 590x742 mm; 23¼x29¼ inches. Signed and dated in ink, lower right.
Provenance: private collection, VA.
Joseph Holston’s artwork was recently featured in the group exhibition Seeing Differently: The Phillips Collects for a New Century, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, March 6 - September 12, 2021. His works are in many museum collections, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, Howard University, the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Anthony barboza (1944 - )
James Baldwin - Writer.
Silver print, 1975. 368x368 mm; 14¼x14¼ inches. Signed, titled and dated in ink, lower margin. From the Black Borders series.
Other prints of this photograph are in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum and the Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Anthony barboza (1944 - )
James Vanderzee - Photographer.
Silver print, 1980. 349x368 mm; 13¾x14½ inches. Signed, titled and dated in ink, lower margin. From the Black Borders series.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Richard mayhew (1924 - )
Moody Space Blues.
Etching printed in brown on cream wove paper, 1975. 406x558 mm; 16x22 inches, full margins. Signed, titled and numbered 44/50 in pencil, lower margin. Printed at Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Studio, New York.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Barkley l. hendricks (1945 - 2017)
Untitled (Cape Coast, Ghana).
Watercolor on wove paper, 1978. 254x355 mm; 10x14 inches. Signed in watercolor, lower right recto. Titled and dated 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 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.
Estimate
$10,000 – $15,000
Romare bearden (1911 - 1988)
The Family.
Color aquatint and photo engraving, 1975. 500x663 mm; 19½x25 inches, full margins. Printer’s proof, aside from the edition of 175. Signed and inscribed “For Printmaking Workshop” in pencil, lower edge. Printed by the Printmaking Workshop, New York. Published by Transworld Art, New York. From An American Portrait, 1776-1976. Gelburd/Rosenberg GG#55A.
Estimate
$6,000 – $9,000
Romare bearden (1911 - 1988)
Come Sunday (Mother and Child).
Color lithograph on cream wove paper, 1975. 702x546 mm; 27⅝x21½ inches. Signed, dated, numbered 60/75 and inscribed “©” in pencil, lower left. Printed by Paul Narkiewicz. Published by Special Projects Group, Chicago, with the blindstamp lower right. From the 1776 USA 1976 Bicentennial Prints portfolio.
Other impressions of this print can be found in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gelburd/Rosenberg GG#57.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Eldzier cortor (1916 - 2015)
Dance (Dance Composition No. 31).
Etching and aquatint with handcoloring on wove paper, 1978. 552x394 mm; 21¾x15½ inches, full margins. Artist’s proof, aside from the edition of 50. Signed, titled, inscribed “AP” and numbered 5/10 in pencil, lower margin.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Jacob lawrence (1917 - 2000)
The Library.
Color screenprint on heavy cream wove paper, 1978. 260x384 mm; 10½x15¼ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated, and numbered 6/100 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by the Screen Workshop, East Hampton, NY. Published by Five Towns Music and Art Foundation, Woodmere, NY.
This print is based on Jacob Lawrence’s 1966 gouache painting, which shares the theme of libraries with his paintings The Libraries Are Appreciated, 1943, from the Harlem Series, and Library II and Library III, both 1960. Nesbett L78-1.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Romare bearden (1911 - 1988)
Pilate.
Color lithograph on wove paper, 1979. 515x380 mm; 20¼x15 inches, full margins. Signed and numbered 130/300 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Atelier Ettinger, New York, with the blind stamp lower right. Published by Transworld, London. Gelburd/Rosenberg GG#82.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Ernest crichlow (1914 - 2005)
Young Lady in a Yellow Dress.
Color etching and aquatint on wove paper, 1979. 552x425 mm; 21¾x16¾ inches, full margins. Signed, titled and numbered 55/100 in pencil, lower margin.
This lithograph is made after the painting of the same subject Woman in Yellow Dress, 1980 in the collection of the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts and Culture, Charlotte, NC.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Emma amos (1937 - 2020)
Woman With Hat.
Color softground etching on wove paper, 1979. 762x565 mm; 30x22¼ inches, full margins. Signed, titled and numbered 19/35 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by the artist and Kathy Caraccio at K. Caraccio Studio, New York.
Estimate
$6,000 – $9,000
Nelson stevens (1938 - 2022)
Untitled (Women in Profile).
Mixed media on illustration board, 1979. 660x542 mm; 26⅞x21<3/8> inches. Signed and dated in pencil, lower right.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, private collection, Massachusetts (1996).
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Nelson Stevens received his BFA (painting) from Ohio University in Athens, OH. He then received a MFA in 1969 from Kent State University in Kent, OH. After brief teaching stints in Cleveland, Stevens was hired as Assistant Professor of Art at Northern Illinois University where he taught from 1969 to 1971. It was at this time that Stevens was invited to join the newly formed art collective AfriCOBRA - the group was founded by Chicago artists Jeff Donaldson, Jae Jarrell, Wadsworth Jarrell, Barbara Jones-Hogu, and Gerald Williams. His work was featured in every AfriCOBRA exhibition since AfriCOBRA II at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1971. Stevens’ work was included in exhibitions at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Fisk University Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Cleveland Museum of Art, and others. Well known indoor and outdoor murals by Stevens include installations at the United Community Construction Workers Labor Temple in Roxbury, MA (1973) and at Tuskegee University’s administration building (1979-80).
His teaching career continued in 1972 at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he was first an associate professor and then Professor of Art in the Departments of Art and African American Studies. He remained there until his retirement. His artwork was also included in the important traveling museum exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power organized by the Tate Modern, London. Works by Nelson Stevens are in many institutional collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Smithsonian Institution.
Estimate
$12,000 – $18,000
Barkley hendricks (1945 - 2017)
Salvation Army Joyce on 78 Speed.
Collage, crayon and various inks and stamps on Fabriano paper, 1979. 565x762 mm; 22⅜x30 inches. Signed in ink, lower right recto. Signed and dated in ink, verso.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, private collection, Massachusetts (1998).
Estimate
$8,000 – $12,000
James little (1952 - )
Untitled.
Gouache and polymer on Arches paper, 1979. 432x660 mm; 17x26 inches. Signed and dated “2-79” in pencil, verso.
Provenance: estate of C. Arnold Hart; private collection.
Painter James Little has been painting abstract and non-objective works since the 1970s. Born in Memphis, Little earned a BFA from the Memphis Academy of Arts in 1974 and an MFA from Syracuse University in 1976. His paintings are in the collections of the New Jersey State Museum, the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, and the Paul R. Jones Collection, Atlanta. He received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in Painting in 2009 and the Pollock-Krasner Award in 2000. In 2016, Little was commissioned by the Metropolitan Transit Authority to create a public artwork for the Long Island Rail Road’s new Brooklyn-bound platform at Jamaica Station - an installation of 33 colored glass windows, unveiled in February 2020. Little was featured as a participating artist in the 2022 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Frank w. wimberley (1926 - )
Untitled.
Collage and mixed media on heavy wove paper, 1979. 266x342 mm; 10½x13½ inches. Signed and dated in pencil, lower edge.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, private collection, New York.
Born in Pleasantville, NJ, Frank W. Wimberley has produced a significant body of work in abstraction with paint and collage. Wimberley studied art with James A. Porter, Loïs Mailou Jones, and James Lesesne Wells at Howard University. While a student, he also played jazz and later developed friendships with musicians such as Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, and Ron Carter in New York, who also informed his creative sensibility. The artist expressed that his use of found papers, objects and torn paper was influenced by the physical qualities of collage by Pablo Picasso and Antoni Tàpies utilized in their works of the late 1960s and 70s. The artist has infused the formal qualities of abstraction with tension from the torn edges of the paper and cardboard.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Ed clark (1926 - 2019)
Untitled.
Offset color lithograph, 1979. 600x800 mm; 23x31½ inches, full margins. Signed, dated and numberd 173/200 in pencil, lower margin.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Ed clark (1926 - 2019)
Untitled.
Monoprint in oil on thick cream wove paper, 1982. 694x939 mm; 27⅜x37 inches, full margins. Signed, dated and inscribed "monoprint" in pencil, lower right.
Provenance: acquired from G. R. N'Namdi Gallery, Birmingham, MI; private collection, Michigan (1992).
Estimate
$15,000 – $20,000
Moe brooker (1940 - 2022)
This One’s For You, Musa.
Color screenprint on wove paper, 1982. 755x552 mm; 29¾x21¾ inches. Printer’s proof, aside from the edition of 34. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed “P/P” in pencil, lower margin. Printed and published by the Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia.
Illustrated: Allan L. Edmunds, ed. and Halima Taha. Three Decades of American Printmaking; The Brandywine Workshop Collection fig. 114, p. 84.
Abstract painter and educator Moe Brooker earned a BFA and MFA from Philadelphia’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University and certification from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He has won several lifetime achievement awards, including the Governor’s Award for Artist of the Year from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the Medal of Achievement from the Philadelphia Art Alliance. Brooker was a faculty member at the Cleveland Institute of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, as well as the first Bob Fox Distinguished Professor at Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia. Brooker’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Studio Museum in Harlem, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, The Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Consigned to support the Brandywine Workshop in Philadelphia and its legacy endowment campaign.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
John dowell (1941 - )
To Move To Yesterday.
Watercolor, ink and colored pencils on hand-made paper, 1984. 762x571 mm; 30x22½ inches. Signed, titled, and dated in pencil, lower edge.
Provenance: McDonald’s Corporate Art Collection, Oakbrook, IL (deaccessioned); private collection.
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
$2,500 – $3,500
Romare bearden (1911 - 1988)
Morning of the Rooster.
Color lithograph on Arches paper, 1980. 598x460 mm; 23½x18 inches, full margins. Artist’s proof, aside from the edition of 175. Signed, titled, inscribed “A/P” and numbered XI/XII in pencil, lower margin. Gelburd/Rosenberg GG#99.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Romare bearden (1911 - 1988)
Two Women.
Color screenprint, 1981-82. 585x363 mm; 23x14¼ inches, full margins. Artist’s proof, aside from the edition of 120. Signed, titled, inscribed “APS IV” and numbered 27/120 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
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 1340 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
Nefertiti goodman (1950 - )
The Aftermath.
Linoleum cut on cream wove paper, 1982. 927x708 mm; 36½x27⅞ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 35/125 in pencil, lower margin.
A painter, printmaker and designer, Nefertiti earned her Master of Fine Arts degree at the Rhode Island School of Design. Describing her unique approach to the relief print, art critic Dr. Richard Powell of Duke University described her work as follows: "Embellishing the linoleum's surface with virtually every kind of possible cut, yet leaving areas for visual oasis, (Nefertiti Goodman takes) linoleum cut the most basic of relief mediums over new ground, and to loftier heights."<br><br>
Nefertiti completed five paintings and seven intricate hand-painted ceramic tile panels which were permanently installed for the new Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia during the late 90's. This commission project was under the auspices of the Philadelphia Per Cent for Art Program. Nefertiti is also a past recipient of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship for printmaking. Her works have been exhibited in parts of the US, Canada, Eastern Europe, South America and Southeast Asia; including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, DeCordova Museum, Montclair Art Museum, Smithsonian (SITES), the Studio Museum in Harlem, Taipei Museum of Fine Arts, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and other noted institutional and corporate collections.
Estimate
$1,000 – $1,500
Elizabeth catlett (1915 - 2012)
Survivor.
Linoleum cut on cream wove paper, 1983. 242x187 mm; 9½x7⅛ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 127/1000 in pencil, lower margin.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Margaret burroughs (1915 - 2010)
Mahalia.
Linoleum cut on cream wove paper, 1984. 356x276 mm; 14x10⅞ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 4/5 in pencil, lower margin.
A scarce impression of this portrait of the famous gospel singer Mahalia Jackson.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Romare bearden (1911 - 1988)
High Priestess.
Watercolor on wove paper, circa 1984. 762x514 mm; 30x20¼ inches. Signed in ink, center right. From the Obeah Series.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; private collection; private collection, Massachusetts (2014) acquired at Swann Galleries on February 11, 2014.
This watercolor is from Romare Bearden’s Obeah series, an overlooked but important body of work 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.
Estimate
$12,000 – $18,000
Romare bearden (1911 - 1988)
Obeah.
Watercolor on wove paper, circa 1984. 762x560 mm; 30x22 inches. Signed in ink, lower left. From the Obeah series.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; private collection, Connecticut; private collection, Massachusetts (2014), acquired at Swann Galleries on June 10, 2014.
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. The Obeah also continues Bearden’s depiction of female figures, from the Southern Conjur Woman to Maudell Sleet. Bearden’s watercolors embrace ideas of myth, superstition and the unknown that are outside of the Western tradition in a striking and lush expressionism. Garcia pp. 35-36.
Estimate
$12,000 – $18,000
John biggers (1924 - 2001)
Untitled (Study of a Gourd.).
Conté crayon with watercolor on smooth wove paper, circa 1985. 279x355 mm; 11x14 inches. Signed in conté crayon, upper left.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, private collection, Texas.
The gourd is a familiar object in African culture and John Biggers's art. It is one of the many everyday objects Biggers used to symoblize African heritage and Black culture in his paintings and murals.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
George rogers (1930 - 2002)
Untitled (Sculptural Fabric Collage Composition).
Collaged fabric and acrylic on board, 1984. 457x609 mm; 18x24 inches. Signed in acrylic, lower right.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist’s estate, private collection, Michigan.
Sculptor, printmaker, and clay modeler George Rogers fabricated a printmaking process he called “sculpturegraphs.” Inspired by his sculptural and clay molding practices, they take shape as biomorphic figures in different colored inks. As a variation of relief printmaking, Rogers used found materials, hand-cut sinuous shapes, then printed in a single color. In many of them, overlays were applied to produce gradations of colors and enhanced images.
George Rogers was born in Alabama and was active in the Detroit area. Rogers attended the Columbus School of Art, 1952-53, the Cleveland Institute of Art 1955-59, and the Cranbrook Academy of Art, 1959-61. He was the first Black clay modeler for the Ford Motor Company and designed the Mustang 2. His sculptures are installed around the Detroit area and included in the collection of the Renaissance Center. He was also a co-founder of Gallery Seven in Detroit which represented, Black abstract artists and developed a summer program for children.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
George rogers (1930 - 2002)
Sculpturegraph #4.
Color sculpturegraph, 1984. 444x603 mm; 17½x23¾ inches, full margins. Artist’s proof, aside from an edition of 7. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed “A/P” in pencil, lower margin.
The term “sculpturegraph” was created by George Rogers to describe his 1984 series of hybrid prints. These colorful, abstract compositions are made from an accumulation of printed layers with differently shaped block matrices.
Estimate
$1,000 – $1,500
Charles searles (1937 - 2004)
Untitled (Sculpture Study).
Brush and ink on cream wove paper, circa 1980s. 508x359 mm; 20x14⅛ inches.
Provenance: private collection, New Jersey.
Estimate
$1,000 – $1,500
Charles searles (1937 - 2004)
Untitled (Sculpture Study).
Acrylic with pen, ink and gouache on thin wove paper, circa 1980s. 217x355 mm; 8½x14 inches.
Provenance: private collection, New Jersey.
Estimate
$1,500 – $2,500
Sylvia snowden (1942 - )
Diptych.
Mixed media with acrylic and paper collage on wove paper, 1988. (Left) 311x254 mm; 12¼x10 inches. (Right) 260x311 mm; 10¼x12¼ inches. Both signed and dated in ink, lower right.
Provenance: private collection, Maryland; private collection, New York.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Sam gilliam (1933 - 2022)
After Smoke.
Color screenprint on Arches paper, 1985. 711x812; 28x32 inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 22/73 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Lou Stovall at the Workshop, Inc., Washington, DC, with the blind stamp lower left.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Sam middleton (1927 - 2015)
Music.
Collage, gouache and ink on cream wove paper, 1985. 462x622 mm; 18½x24½ inches. Signed and dated in ink, lower right.
Provenance: private collection, Netherlands.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Elizabeth catlett (1915 - 2012)
Pensive.
Lithograph, 1985. 260x203 mm; 10¼x8 inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 11/50 in pencil, lower margin.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Elizabeth catlett (1915 - 2012)
On the Subway.
Offset lithograph on cream wove paper, 1986. 420x285 mm; 16½x11⅛ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 149/300 in pencil, lower right.
Estimate
$1,500 – $2,500
Elizabeth catlett (1915 - 2012)
Cartas.
Lithograph on Arches wove paper, 1986. 660x508 mm; 26x20 inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed 15/80 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by the Printmaking Workshop, New York, with the blind stamp lower right.
Catlett was commissioned to make Celie, Virginia and Cartas for the opening of the film The Color Purple.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Jacob lawrence (1917 - 2000)
Schomburg Library.
Color lithograph on Arches paper, 1986. 660x508 mm; 26x20 inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 147/200 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by J. K. Fine Art Editions, New York, with the blind stamp lower left. Published by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York. Nesbett L87-1.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Jacob lawrence (1917 - 2000)
The Birth of Toussaint.
Color screenprint on Bainbridge Two Play Rag Paper, 1986. 724x470 mm; 28½x18½ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 80/100 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Lou Stovall, the Workshop, Inc., Washington, DC, with the blindstamp lower left. Published by the Amistad Research Center, New Orleans, and Spradling Ames, Key West, Florida. Nesbett L86-1.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Jacob lawrence (1917 - 2000)
The Capture.
Color screenprint on Bainbridge Two Ply Rag paper, 1987. 816x559 mm; 32 ⅛x22 inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 104/120 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Lou Stovall, Workshop, Inc., The Washington, DC, with the blind stamp lower left. Based on the image from The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture series. Nesbett L87-2.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Jacob lawrence (1917 - 2000)
To Preserve Their Freedom.
Color screenprint on Bainbridge Two Ply Rag paper, 1988. 470x730 mm; 18½x28¾ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 59/99 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Lou Stovall, the Workshop, Inc., Washington, DC, with the blindstamp lower left. Published by the Amistad Research Center, New Orleans, and Spradling Ames, Key West, Florida. Nesbett L88-2.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Jacob lawrence (1917 - 2000)
Dondon.
Color screenprint on Bainbridge Two Ply Rag paper, 1992. 467x718 mm; 18 ⅜x28¼ inches, full margins. Artist’s proof, aside from an edition of 124. Signed, titled, inscribed “AP” and numbered 10/15 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by the Stovall Printmaking Workshop, Washington, DC, with the blind stamp lower left. Published by the Amistad Research Center, New Orleans, and Spradling-Ames, Key West, Florida. From The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture series. Nesbett L92-2.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Contemporary - 2nd Generation
Frederick j. brown (1945 - 2012)
Father Forgive Them.
Watercolor and pencil on wove paper, 1988. 495x368 mm; 19½x14½ inches. Signed and dated in pencil, lower right recto. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed “For Howard thanks a million and God bless. Best of Luck !” in pencil, on the frame back.
Provenance: gift from the artist, private collection, New York.
Frederick J. Brown was a Chicago-born, New York-based artist who is known best for his expressive, figurative painting of the 1980s. He was raised near the steel mills on Chicago’s Southside and was exposed to the blues through musicians in the neighborhood such as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Memphis Slim. In 1970, Brown moved to New York and began to collaborate on multi-media projects with other artists including jazz musicians. During the 1980s, he focused much of his work on creating portraits of jazz and blues musicians, including popular artists such as Ornette Coleman, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and Lionel Hampton in addition to less well-known jazz and blues artists.
In 1988, Brown became the first artist to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of the Chinese Revolution at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China. A touring retrospective of his work, Brown: Portraits in Jazz, Blues, and Other Icons, originated at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City in 2002. Today, his paintings are found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Jonathan green (1955 - )
Lady Sun Bathers.
Acrylic on masonite board, 1989. 889x660 mm; 35x26 inches. Signed and dated in acrylic, lower left.
Provenance: private collection, Philadelphia; thence by descent, private collection.
Exhibited: From Deep Roots to New Ground: The Gullah Landscapes of Jonathan Green, McKissick Museum, the University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, April 3 - August 15, 1993, with the label on the frame back.
Lady Sun Bathers. is an early example of the vibrant painting of Jonathan Green. Celebrated for his depiction of Gullah people of the Sea Islands of South Carolina, Green is one of the best known contemporary artists painting the Southern experience. Work, family celebrations, prayer, storytelling, and a variety of recreational activities are all documented in Green’s paintings.
Estimate
$20,000 – $30,000
Jonathan green (1955 - )
The Reception.
Color lithograph on Arches paper, 1989. 584x584 mm; 23x23 inches, full margins. Artist’s proof, aside from the edition of 100. Signed, titled and inscribed “IV/XXV” in pencil, lower margin. Printed and published by J. K. Fine Art Editions, New York, with the blind stamp, lower left.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Hughie lee-smith (1915 - 1999)
The Promise.
Color lithograph on cream wove paper, 1989. 590x432 mm; 23¼x17 inches, full margins. A hors commerce print, aside from the edition of 100. Signed and inscribed “HC 17/25” in pencil, lower margin. Printed by J. K. Fine Art Editions, New York, with the blind stamp, lower left.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Lorraine o’grady (1934 - )
Group of 4 Photographs (From Rivers, First Draft).
Four digital C-prints from Kodachrome 35mm slides, 1982. Each 406x508 mm; 16x20 inches. Each signed, dated and numbered 5/8 in pencil, verso. Printed in 2015.
Their flirtation begins * The Debauchees dance to New Wave music with the Woman in Red following * The Woman in White eats coconut and looks away from the action * The Debauchees dance down the hill, the Woman in Red falls further behind.
Rivers, First Draft was a single, unique performance created by Lorraine O’Grady for “Art Across the Park,” curated by Gilbert Coker and Horace Brockington. It was performed in the Loch, a northern section of Central Park, on August 18, 1982, and was a “collage-in-space,” with different actions taking place simultaneously on two sides of the stream and further up the hill. The narratives being told were competing for attention, simultaneously uniting two different heritages, the Caribbean and New England, and three different ages and aspects of the self, a young girl, a teenager, and an adult woman. It was a three-ring circus of movement and sound that, unlike the randomness of Futurists attempting to shout each other down, played more like a unitary dream.
The pivotal moment of Rivers, First Draft occurs after the Woman in Red has been ejected by the Black Male Artists from their closed studio: she descends to the stream bank where she sees a white stove and claims it by painting it red. The figures are actively guided by the male New England figure, the Nantucket Memorial statue, while the female Caribbean figure, the Woman in White, continues to endlessly grate coconut, calmly indifferent to the scene unfolding below. The performance was seen by a small invited audience, mostly friends from Just Above Midtown, and occasional pedestrians walking through the seldom visited Loch.
Summary courtesy of the artist's website.
Estimate
$8,000 – $12,000
Carrie mae weems (1953 - )
Untitled (Woman and Daughter with Makeup).
Silver print, 1990. 254x248 mm; 10x9¾ inches. Second edition (of 2). Signed, dated and numbered 98/100 in pencil, verso. Printed in 2010 by Griffin Editions, NY. Published by Light Work as part of the 2011 Master Print Edition, Syracuse, NY. From the Kitchen Table Series.
Estimate
$6,000 – $9,000
Emma amos (1937 - 2020)
Howardena.
Silk aquatint printed in brown on cream wove paper, 1991. 342x254 mm; 13½x10 inches, full margins. Artist's proof, possibly unique, with no recorded edition in the artist's archives. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed "Artist's Proof" in pencil, lower margin.
This image is incorporated into Emma Amos's print Howardena's Frame, etching, aquatint, monotype, chine-collé‚ and African fabric collage, 1991, from her Falling Figures series. Emma Amos made a number of works that include portraits of artists and friends whom she admired, including Faith Ringgold, May Stevens, Kay Walkingstick, and Pindell. A different portrait of Pindell is also included in the assemblage Women and Children First: Howardena’s Portrait 1990.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Margaret burroughs (1915 - 2010)
African Mask.
Linoleum cut on cream wove paper, 1990. 378x283 mm; 14⅞x11⅛ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 2/10 in ink, lower margin.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
John t. scott (1940 - 2007)
Storm’s Coming #2.
Woodcut on laid Japan paper, 1992. 228x152 mm; 9x6 inches, full margins. Signed, titled and numbered 7/10 in pencil, lower margin. Printed and published by the Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia.
Provenance: collection of Anne & Allan Edmunds.
Consigned to support the Brandywine Workshop in Philadelphia and its legacy endowment campaign.
Estimate
$1,000 – $1,500
John biggers (1924 - 2001)
Family Ark.
Offset color lithograph triptych, 1992. Overall 758x1257 mm; 29⅜x49½ inches. Left panel, 758x352 mm; 29⅜x 13⅞ inches; center panel, 758x555 mm; 29⅜x21⅞ inches; right panel, 758x352 mm; 29⅜x13⅞ inches. Signed, dated and numbered 17/100 in pencil, lower right. Printed and published by the Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia.
Provenance: the collection of Anne & Allan Edmunds.
Illustrated: Allan L. Edmunds, ed. and Halima Taha. Three Decades of American Printmaking: The Brandywine Workshop Collection pl. 150, p. 117.
Another impression of this triptych is in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Painter, muralist, printmaker and educator John Biggers elevated the importance of understanding and addressing one’s heritage in his narrative art. He conveyed this consciousness to generations of his students at Hampton University and Texas Southern University. In this composition, filled with symbols and objects from African and African American history, art, and religion, Biggers presents a family united in prayer in a triptych format resembling an altarpiece. The head wrap on the woman with outstretched arms at the center evokes the horned headdress of Hathor, the Egyptian goddess of love and protection.
Consigned to support the Brandywine Workshop in Philadelphia and its legacy endowment campaign.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Elizabeth catlett (1915 - 2012)
For My People.
Set of six color lithographs on Arches paper, 1992. Each 400x349 mm; 15¾x13¾ inches, full margins. Artist’s proofs, aside from the edition of 99. Each signed, titled, dated and inscribed “A/P” in pencil, lower margin. Printed by J. K. Fine Art Editions, New York. Published by the Limited Editions Club, New York.
This set of 6 lithographs was commissioned by the Limited Editions Club to illustrate Margaret Walker’s 1937 poem For My People. Walker (1915-1998) and Catlett became friends and roommates at the University of Iowa in the 1940s while both were pursuing MFA degrees. Walker published her first book of poems also titled For My People in 1942. It won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award; Walker was the first Black woman to receive this prize.
A bound volume of For My People was also published in an edition of 400. For My People is in the collection of numerous institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Titles include: Singing their Songs * Playmates * To Marry * Walking Blindly * All the People * A Second Generation.
Estimate
$10,000 – $15,000
Elizabeth catlett (1915 - 2012)
Playmates.
Color lithograph on cream wove paper, 1992. 400x349 mm; 15¾x13¾ inches, full margins. Signed, dated and numbered 50/99 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by J. K. Fine Art Editions, New York. Published by the Limited Editions Club, New York. From For My People, a set of 6 lithographs illustrating poems by Margaret Walker.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
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 (2006).
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
Hughie lee-smith (1915 - 1999)
Woman In Green Blouse with Two Abstract Masks.
Watercolor and pencil on wove paper, 1993-94. 254x317 mm; 10x12½ inches. Signed in ink, lower right.
Provenance: the estate of the artist; thence by descent to the current owner, private collection.
Estimate
$7,000 – $10,000
Hughie lee-smith (1915 - 1999)
Woman’s Profile with Mask in Abstract Ground.
Watercolor and pencil on wove paper, 1993-94. 206x356 mm; 10¼x14⅛ inches. Signed in ink, lower right.
Provenance: the estate of the artist; thence by descent to the current owner, private collection.
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 9/53 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Deli Sacilotto, with the printer’s blindstamp lower left. Published by Brooke Alexander Editions, with gallery label on the frame back, New York.
Additional impressions are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
Estimate
$6,000 – $9,000
Lorna simpson (1960 - )
Untitled.
Color electrostatic heat transfer on wool felt, 1995. 222x311 mm; 8¾x12¼ inches, full margins. Signed, dated and numbered 13/250 in ink, lower margin. Printed by Jeffrey Ryan, 21 Steps Editions, Albuquerque. Published by SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Estimate
$1,000 – $1,500
Merton d. simpson (1928 - 2013)
#1 Performer.
Oil with Mali hunting cloth on canvas, 1991. 558x711 mm; 22x28 inches. Initialed and dated in oil, lower right recto. Signed, titled and dated in ink, verso.
Provenance: the estate of Merton D. Simpson; private collection.
Exhibited: Ancestral Improvisation, Galerie Noir d’Ivoire, Paris, March 27 - April 11, 1992, then traveled to: Tambaran Gallery, New York, September 18 - October 15, 1993.
Illustrated: Merton D. Simpson: Ancestral Improvisation, essay by Allan Stone, Galerie Noir d’Ivoire, Paris, p. 8.
#1 Performer, along with thirty other works in the Ancestral Improvisation series, are Simpson’s search for “self-knowledge” and “psychological portraits.” Inspired by jazz, primordial ancestry and Cubism, Simpons’ use of cloth and oil to create abstract portraits allowed him to explore memory in a subtle and modern manner. Stone p. 2.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Al loving (1935 - 2005)
Untitled.
Acrylic and rag paper on Plexiglass, 1991. Approximately 419x276 mm; 16½x10⅞ inches. Signed and dated in ink, verso.
Provenance: private collection, New York.
In 1991, Al Loving was a visiting artist at the Triangle International Workshop in Maputo, Mozambique.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Sam gilliam (1933 - 2022)
Pretty Boxes.
Color screenprint and offset lithograph with collage on Arches paper, 1993. 756x1086 mm; 29¾x42¾ inches. Printer’s proof, aside from the edition of 86. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed “PP” in pencil, lower edge. 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 Workshop Collection fig. 219, p. 177.
Consigned to support the Brandywine Workshop in Philadelphia and its legacy endowment campaign.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Sam gilliam (1933 - 2022)
Florida 1.
Color screenprint and monoprint with collage on stitched rag paper, 1994. Approximately 863x732 mm; 33⅞x28⅝ inches, irregular sheet. Edition of 22. Signed, titled and dated in pencil, lower edge. Inscribed “Series A” and numbered #1 in pencil, verso. Printed and published by Lois Berghoff and Dorothy Cowden of Berghoff-Cowden Editions, Florida, with the printer’s blindstamp lower left.
From a series of 22 unique hand pulled screenprint monoprints.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Sam gilliam (1933 - 2022)
Hav-A-Tampa 16.
Color screenprint and monoprint with collage on stitched rag paper, 1995. Approximately 967x732 mm; 38⅛x28⅞ inches, irregular sheet. Edition of 20. Signed, titled and dated in ink, lower edge. Inscribed “Series C” and numbered #16, in pencil, verso. Printed and published by Lois Berghoff and Dorothy Cowden of Berghoff-Cowden Editions, Florida, with the printer’s blindstamp, lower left.
From a series of 20 unique hand pulled screenprint monoprints.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Sam gilliam (1933 - 2022)
Dakota Beach.
Color screenprint and monoprint with collage on stitched rag paper, 1994. Approximately 863x732 mm; 34x28 ⅞ inches, irregular sheet. Edition of 15. Signed, titled and dated in pencil, lower edge. Initialed, titled, and numbered #9-94 in pencil, verso. Printed and published by Lois Berghoff and Dorothy Cowden of Berghoff-Cowden Editions, Florida, with the printer’s blindstamp lower left.
From a series of 15 unique hand pulled screenprint monoprints.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Loïs mailou jones (1905 - 1998)
Route de Civadier.
Offset color screenprint, 1994. 546x736 mm; 21½x29 inches. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 16/100 in pencil, lower edge. Printed and published by the Brandwine Workshop, Philadelphia.
Consigned to support the Brandywine Workshop in Philadelphia and its legacy endowment campaign.
Estimate
$1,500 – $2,500
Samella lewis (1924 - 2022)
Creole Mules.
Color screenprint on cream wove paper, 1995. 381x502 mm; 15x19¾ inches, full margins. Artist’s proof, aside from an edition of 60. Signed, titled, inscribed “A/P IV” and dated in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Wasserman Studio, Santa Monica with the blind stamp, lower right.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Samella lewis (1923 - 2022)
Cleo.
Offset color lithograph, 1996. 698x514 mm; 27½x20¼ inches, full margins. Printer’s proof, aside from the edition of 100. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed “PP1” in pencil, lower margin. Printed and published by the Brandywine Workshop, Philladelphia.
Illustrated: Allan L. Edmunds, ed. and Halima Taha. Three Decades of American Printmaking; The Brandywine Workshop Collection fig. 126, p. 96.
Consigned to support the Brandywine Workshop in Philadelphia and its legacy endowment campaign.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Noah purifoy (1917 - 2004)
Untitled (30 Cans).
Assemblage of 30 oil cans in a wooden box, 1995. 1225x622x69 mm; 48¼x24½x2¾ inches. Engraved signature and date on a metal plaque, lower right. Signed and dated in ink, frame back.
Provenance: gift from the artist, the Xavier Cázares Cortéz Family Collection.
Used oil cans are the essential component of this striking assemblage by Noah Purifoy. This modernist construction epitomizes the bold spirit of Purifoy’s Junk Dada vision. Purifoy utilized found objects to convey messages to people in the world, both reflecting our material world and the art within it. At the time of his 2015 LACMA retrospective, Noah Purifoy - Junk DadaPurifoy described in an interview with C. Ian White the primacy of the found object in his practice, and the influence of Duchamp. According to Purifoy, Duchamp left us “with the idea that the found object was OK like it was. We didn’t have to do much to it to make it a part of the creative process, so because of Duchamp, I maintained the intergrity of the piece, the object I work with, and enable the piece to maintain its originality. You can tell that this is a broom handle, this is a skillet, or this is a coffepot.” Sirmans/Lipschutz p. 107.
Estimate
$25,000 – $35,000
Noah purifoy (1917 - 2004)
Untitled.
Assemblage of wood and other found objects encased in a metal and glass container, 1994. Approximately 660x444x152 mm; 26x17½x6 inches. Engraved signature and date on a metal plaque, lower right.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, private collection, Arizona.
Exhibited: Desert Tombstone Exhibition, Rachel Lozzi Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, May - June 1995.
Estimate
$12,000 – $18,000
Noah purifoy (1917 - 2004)
Untitled (Domino Toaster).
Assemblage of tiled white dominoes on a toaster, 1996. Approximately 194x222x146 mm; 7⅞x9½x5¾ inches. Engraved signature and date on a white metal plaque, on the side with the temperature control. Signed and dated in ink on the underside.
Provenance: gift from the artist, the Xavier Cázares Cortéz Family Collection.
This assemblage by Noah Purifoy is from his Domino Toaster series, where Puriofy reused Proctor-Silex toasters and tiles them with dominos to give new meaning. Championing a Duchampian approach, Purifoy recycled and assembled discarded, everyday items, making ordinary, utilitarian objects into works of fine art.
Estimate
$7,000 – $10,000
Faith ringgold (1930 - )
The Sunflower’s Quilting Bee at Aries.
Color screenprint, 1997. 559x762 mm; 28x30 inches, full margins. Artist’s proof, aside from the edition of 425. Signed, dated, titled, inscribed “AP” and numbered 9/50 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Lynne Allen and published at the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions, New Brunswick, NJ.
Additional impressions are in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, United Kingdom and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Emma amos (1938 - 2020)
On Top of the World.
Silk aquatint with textile chine-collé on Arches paper, 1996. 762x568 mm; 30x22⅜ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 48/60 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
Melvin w. clark (1944 - )
Study for Enchanted Dreams Mural.
Casein on board, 1991. 533x812 mm; 21x32 inches. Signed and dated in casein, lower right.
Provenance: collection of the artist; private collection.
This fully developed study from Melvin Clark was painted to produce the large mosaic mural he created for Brooklyn’s Public School 152 in 1996. Submitted to New York City Percent for Art in 1991, the work consists of two mosaic tile murals. Enchanted Dreams is a surreal composition comprised of semi-abstract musicians and animals in various modes of dance and expression. The other panel, Sun Bird, focuses on a large abstract bird serenaded under a bright sun by an equally abstract horn player. Both panels are fabricated with colorful mosaic tiles. Clark’s works are found today in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Modern African Arts Gallery, Amsterdam, the Printmaking Workshop, New York, the Lower East Side Printshop, New York, the Detroit Board of Education and the Pehl Collection, Eldersburg, MD.
Estimate
$6,000 – $8,000
Nanette carter (1954 - )
Point-Counterpoint #6.
Oil on canvas with collage, 1996. 482x419 mm; 19x16½ inches. Signed in pencil, verso.
Provenance: acquired from June Kelly Gallery, NY, with the gallery label on the frame back, private collection, New York.
Nanette Carter uses abstraction as a means to an end; she expresses socio-political ideas through a non-objective vocabulary. Color, line, and geometry give her a means to express her concern for humanity. Using technology, architecture, and composition, Carter has a decades-long career analyzing shifts in our society and self-expression.
Artist and educator Nanette Carter attained a BA from Oberlin College in 1976, studied at Accademia Belle Arti, Perugia, IT, 1975, and gained an MFA from Pratt Institute of Art in 1978. Recent exhibitions include Shape Shifting, Berry Campbell, NYC, 2022, Forms Follow Function, Hunterdon Art Museum, NJ, 2022, A Survey, 30 Years of Work by Nanette Carter, N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art, Detroit, MI, 2021, and Esperanza en Armonia, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana, Cuba, 2021. Carter has recieved many recent awards and grants including the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, 2021, Siena Art Institute, Siena, Italy, in conjunction with the Pratt Institute, 2021, the Pratt Faculty Development Fund Award, 2018, The Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, 2014, and The Artists’ Fellowship Inc., NY, 2013.
Estimate
$6,000 – $9,000
Ed clark (1926 - 2019)
Untitled (For the Sake of the Search).
Color etching printed with relief rainbow rolls on Arches paper, 1997. 191x215 mm; 7½x8½ inches, full margins. Signed, dated and numbered 47/95 in pencil, lower margin. Published by G. R. N’Namdi Gallery, New York, on the occasion of the publication of the book For The Sake of the Search.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Sam gilliam (1933 - 2022)
Horses Upside Down.
Acrylic and polypropylene on collaged cotton canvas, 1998. 1015x1000x75 mm; 40x39½x3 inches, with bevelled edges on three sides. Signed, titled and dated in ink on the stretcher bars, verso.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; private collection, Arkansas; private collection, Missouri (2009), acquired from Swann Galleries, February 17, 2009; private collection, New York (2020), acquired from Swann Galleries, June 4, 2020.
Estimate
$120,000 – $180,000
Sam gilliam (1933 - 2022)
Manet.
Assemblage of color relief, with hand coloring, and machine-sewn thread on die-cut hand made paper, 1998. 470x603 mm; 18¼x23¾ inches. Edition of 120. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed “ed/120” in ink, lower edge. Printed at the Tandem Press, University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Mildred thompson (1936 - 2003)
Advancing Impulses 36.
Color screenprint, 1999. 958x652 mm; 37¾x25⅞ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated, numbered 34/40 and inscribed “For Myra With Love (05-2000)” in pencil, lower margin. Printed for the Hourglass Project, Caversham Press, KwaZulu Natal, South Africa.
The Hourglass Project, 1999 was a residency founded by Caversham Press that invited 15 women artists, including Mildred Thompson, to create artworks “in the spirit of international exchange through creative work” and as an even exchange of ideas between local and international artists. Thompson conceived Advancing Impulses 36 as a continuation of her study and application of scientific phenomena, applying mathematics and physics, much like fellow Washington, DC artist, Alma Thomas.
Thompson began formal artistic training at Howard University in 1953, studying under James A. Porter–artist, instructor of painting and drawing, chairman of the art department and director of the Howard University Gallery of Art. After graduation, Porter continued to advise Thompson and suggested she study in Germany.
Thompson developed her innovative forms of abstraction in printmaking and wood construction while living between Cologne and Aachen. In 1973, Thompson had a one-person exhibition at the Neue Galerie in Aachen. An oil on canvas work from the Advancing Impulses series was recently exhibited in Never Done: 100 Years of Women in Politics and Beyond at The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, September 17, 2020 - June 6, 2021. Conidarias pp. 58-59.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Janet taylor pickett (1948 - )
Patterns & Perception.
Mixed media on paper, 1998. 571x762 mm; 22½x30 inches. Signed, titled and dated in ink, lower and right margins.
Provenance: private collection, New York.
Janet Taylor Pickett’s Pattern & Perception focuses on the Black female body and 19th-century garments. She uses collage to layer meaning into her artwork via news clippings, photography, portraiture and the framing of a screen-printed border.
Janet Taylor Pickett was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and earned her BFA and MFA from the University of Michigan. She also studied art at the Vermont Studio Center, Parsons School of Design, and the Fashion Institute of Technology. Her expressive artworks explore identity and narrative, utilizing collage to articulate her experience as an African American female artist. She has taught art and art history in New Jersey at Essex County College for over 30 years and Bloomfield College for ten years.
Pickett‘s recent solo shows include The Matisse Series, Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, New Jersey, 2016. Group exhibitions include Seeing Differently: The Phillips Collects for a New Century, 2021, Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition, The Phillips Collection, 2020, African American Women Artists and The Power of Their Gaze, The David C Driskell Center For the Study of Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora, University of Maryland, 2017. Her artworks are in the collections of the Phillips Collection, the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Telfair Museum, Georgia.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Hughie lee-smith (1915 - 1999)
The End (The Pink Door).
Oil on linen canvas, 1998. 1016x1270 mm; 40x50 inches. Signed in oil, lower right.
Provenance: the estate of the artist; thence by descent to a private collection.
The End is a bold and dramatic painting from Hughie Lee-Smith’s late series of works inspired by the theatre. His depictions of figures in imaginary, staged environments recall Lee-Smith’s early experiences of dance and theatre 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.
The End is a striking painting from this ultimate period of Lee-Smith’s oeuvre. With both the figures hidden or turned from the viewer, the only faces on view are the images of a Greek tragedy mask and an African mask painted on the set. The compressed space and floating elements further create a metaphysical, dream-like space that reflects the lasting influence of Giorgio De Chirico. The End is also a very personal reflection on mortality. Painted after his move to Albuquerque in 1997, Lee-Smith was fighting his final battle with cancer at the time - he passed away on February 23, 1999 at the age of 83.
Estimate
$40,000 – $60,000
Winfred rembert (1945 - 2021)
Jeff’s Cafe & Pool Room and Zeb’s Shoe Shine.
Dye on carved and tooled leather, 1998. 558x711 mm; 22x28 inches. Incised signature and date, lower right and upper left.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, M. Lee Stone Fine Prints, San Jose, CA; private collection, Michigan.
Jeff’s Cafe is an important subject, a location central to Winfred Rembert’s young life in Georgia. It is revisited in this work, as well as in Jeff’s Pool Room, 2003 and Inside Jeff’s Cafe, circa 1997. Jeff was an entrepreneur who owned a pool room in Cuthbert, Georgia, who gave Rembert his first job outside of the cotton field. Eventually, Rembert ran the business after Jeff fell ill and was unable to work.
Born and raised in Cuthbert, Georgia, Winfred Rembert lived and worked as an artist in New Haven, CT. His artwork, painted on carved and tooled leather, displays memories of his youth—Black life in the Jim Crow South. His artistic vision calls forth vivid scenes from Georgia cotton fields and colorful characters from the juke joints and pool halls of Cuthbert. They also reveal his encounters with racial and police violence in the aftermath of a civil rights protest, and the subsequent seven years he spent on a Georgia chain gang.
His paintings have been exhibited at museums and galleries around the country, including the Yale University Art Gallery, the Hudson River Museum, and The Adelson Galleries in New York. In 2011, Rembert was the subject of an award-winning documentary film, All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert, by Vivian Ducat, and in 2015, he was honored by Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative. In November 2019, NPR aired a segment produced by StoryCorps on the artist. Winfred Rembert’s 2021 memoir Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South written in collaboration with Erin I. Kelly, a professor of philosophy at Tufts University, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2022.
Estimate
$25,000 – $35,000
Winfred rembert (1945 - 2021)
Winfred Rembert and Class of 1959.
Dye on carved and tooled leather, 1999. 571x825 mm; 22½x32½ inches. Incised signature and title, recto. Signed and dated in ink on the mount verso.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, M. Lee Stone Fine Prints, San Jose, CA; the Patricia and Donald Oresman Collection; private collection, Michigan (2018).
Estimate
$25,000 – $35,000
Winfred rembert (1945 - 2021)
The Book That Couldn’t Be Read.
Dye on carved and tooled leather, 2013. 228x133 mm; 9x5¼ inches.
Provenance: acquired from Adelson Galleries, Boston, with the gallery label on the verso, the Anthony and Davida Artis Collection of African-American Fine Art.
Exhibited: Viewpoints: 20 Years of Adderley, Stephen D. Paine Gallery, the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, September 22 - December 6, 2014, with the gallery label on the frame back.
Estimate
$10,000 – $15,000
Samella lewis (1924 - 2022)
Untitled (Dancers).
Oil stick on paper, 2000. 698x533 mm; 27½x21 inches. Signed and dated in oil stick, lower left.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, private collection, Arizona.
Estimate
$6,000 – $9,000
Faith ringgold (1930 - )
Under a Blood Red Sky.
Color etching and aquatint on BFK Rives paper, 2000. 245x194 mm; 9⅜x7⅜ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated “11/16/00” and numbered 1/20 in pencil, lower margin.
The artist made several variations of the Under a Blood Red Sky which was originally created as a story quilt in the Coming to Jones Road series.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Betye saar (1926 - )
Bookmarks in the Pages of Life.
Bound volume with complete text and 6 color screenprints on handmade Langdell paper, 2000. Each 381x279 mm; 15x11 inches, full margins. Edition of 300. Signed and numbered 174 in pencil on the justification page. Printed at Drexel Press, PA. Published by the Limited Editions Club, New York. In the original publisher’s folding box.
Titles include: Magnolia Flower * Mother Catherine * High John De Conquer<i/i> * The Conscience of the Court * The Bone of Contention * Now You Cookin’ with Gas.
These complex collage images created in fabric and found photographs were transferred under Betye Saar’s direction to silkscreened color and sepia-toned prints on hand-torn heavy Rosaspina paper (imbued with cinnamon bark), a paper specially selected by the artist. In the artist’s Afterword, Saar says “Hurston was a ‘Southerner with the map of Dixie on her tongue’ . . . The Stories I selected span three decades and show Hurston’s diversity in writing style.”
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Betye saar (1926 - )
Mother Catherine.
Color screenprint, 2000. 381x279 mm; 15x11 inches, full margins. A hors commerce impression, aside from the edition of 75. Signed and inscribed HCI/HCV in pencil, lower margin. Published by the Limited Editions Club, New York. From Bookmarks in the Pages of Life, a set of 6 color screenprints illustrating stories of author Zora Neale Hurston.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Betye saar (1926 - )
Bone of Contention.
Color screenprint, 2000. 381x279 mm; 15x11 inches, full margins. A hors commerce impression, aside from the edition of 75. Signed and inscribed HCI/HCV in pencil, lower margin. Published by the Limited Editions Club, New York. From Bookmarks in the Pages of Life, a set of 6 color screenprints illustrating stories of author Zora Neale Hurston.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Contemporary - Now
Rashid johnson (1977 - )
Larry.
Van Dyke Brown photo-emulsion print on heavy wove paper, 1997. 11223x844 mm; 44¼x33¼ inches, full margins. Signed and numbered 2/5 in pencil, lower margin.
Provenance: acquired from G. R. N’Namdi Gallery, Chicago, private collection, New York (2000).
Larry is part of Rashid Johnson’s Seeing in the Dark series of portraits of homeless men in Chicago executed with a large format camera between 1997 - 1999. His subject’s names are the titles of the artworks. They are given agency and made visible beyond the fringe of society. Johnson’s use of the Van Dyke Brown process, an early photographic technique with mineral-like pigments that dates from the mid-19th century, gives these portraits a unique richness and depth. Photographs from the Seeing in the Dark series are held by numerous institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Estimate
$10,000 – $15,000
Kara walker (1969 - )
The Emancipation Approximation (Scene #26).
Color screenprint on Somerset 500 gram paper, 2000. 1118x864 mm; 44x34 inches. Artist’s proof, aside from the edition of 25. Signed, dated and inscribed “A/P 7” in pencil, verso. Printed by Jean Yves Noblet, New York. Published by Sikkema Jenkins Editions, New York. From The Emancipation Approximation portfolio.
Estimate
$15,000 – $25,000
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; 9 ⅜x8 ⅜ inches, full red leather binding as issued. Edition of 4000.
Each year, the Peter Norton family commissions an art edition to celebrate the 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 story of a free life written in the mode of a fairy tale quickly mimics her dark and provocative imagery. Freedom, A Fable, details the racial and sexual horrors experienced by African American women in the 19th century.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Kara walker (1969 - )
The Bush, Skinny, De-boning.
Set of three free-standing, stainless steel silhouette cutouts, painted black, presented in a shadow-box frame, 2002. Overall 250x533x127 mm; 9⅞x21x5 inches. The Bush,115x77 mm; 6½x 5⅜x⅝ inches; Skinny, 146x89 mm; 5¾x6x⅝ inches;De-Boning, 172 x 77 mm; 4⅜x4x⅝ inches. Signed and numbered 55/100 in ink on the label affixed to the original box. Published by Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin for Edition No.19, on the occasion of the exhibition Kara Walker – Deutsche Bank Collection.
Other sets are in the collections of the Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore University, New York and the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in Saint Louis.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Kara walker (1969 - )
Testimony (Portfolio).
Set of 5 photogravures on Hahnemühle copperplate paper, 2005. 165x222 mm; 6½x8¾ inches and 406x546 mm; 16x21½ inches, full margins. Each sheet signed, dated and numbered 39/40 in pencil, lower margin. Published by the Lower East Side Print Shop, New York, with their blindstamp lower left.
Testimony is a set of 5 photogravures of the artist’s cut-out silhouettes and projections from Walker’s 2004 video work Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Fortune. Testimony bears witness to the trauma of enslavement that persists in contemporary culture.
Estimate
$8,000 – $12,000
Ellen gallagher (1965 - )
Bouffant Pride.
Photogravure with die-cuts, collage, paint, Plasticine, and toy eye additions on rag paper, 2003. 331x255 mm; 13⅜x10⅜ inches. Signed, dated and numbered 15/20 in pencil, verso. Printed by Two Palms Press, New York. Published by Edition Schellmann, Munich and New York, for La Biennale di Venezia, 2003.
Additional impressions are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Laser-cut with plastic materials, three-dimensionally modelled and layered, Bouffant Pride is a mixed-media print composed in a grid-like structure that references a photography contact sheet. Inspired by advertisements in popular African American beauty magazines Ebony, Sepia, and Our World, Ellen Gallagher recast images that comment on mid-century Black beauty and cultural standards. The miniature portraits address the complex role hair plays in African American culture as means of personal expression and as a signifier of cultural identity and difference. Using Plasticine, toy eyeballs, paint, and ink, Gallagher exaggerated and transformed the images that once promoted aesthetic change to the magazine’s reader and suggests means for personal revamping.
Estimate
$8,000 – $12,000
Ellen gallagher (1965 - )
Duke.
Photogravure with laser-incised peeled paper, collage and hair pomade, 2004. 372x254 mm; 14⅝x10 inches. Printer’s proof, aside from the edition of 20. Signed, dated, inscribed “PP” and numbered 2/5 in pencil, verso. Printed and published by Two Palms Press, New York.
Additional impressions are in the collections of the Princeton University Art Museum, Harvard Art Museums, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College.
Estimate
$7,000 – $10,000
Glenn ligon (1960 - )
Boy on Tire.
Color screenprint on wove paper, 2004. 1054x806 mm; 41¼×31¾ inches, full margins. Signed and numbered 97/108 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Brand X Editions, New York. Published by The Lincoln Center/List Poster and Print Program, New York.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
David driskell (1931 - 2020)
The Bassist.
Color lithograph, 2006. 760x540 mm; 29¾x21¼ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 38/80 in white ink, lower edge. Printed and published by the Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia.
Provenance: collection of Anne & Allan Edmunds.
Consigned to support the Brandywine Workshop in Philadelphia and its legacy endowment campaign.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Faith ringgold (1930 - )
Somebody Stole My Broken Heart.
Color screenprint on wove paper, 2007. 762x572 mm; 30x22½ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated “9/9/07” and numbered 49/60 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by the Brodsky Center for Innovative Print and Paper, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ.
Another impression of this print is in the collection of Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Bisa butler (1973 - )
Sea Island Woman.
Quilted and appliquéd dyed cotton fabrics with collage of cotton bolls, woven raffia and wicker, 2007. 914x406 mm; 36x16 inches. Signed in thread, lower right.
Provenance: acquired from Hearne Fine Art, AR, private collection, AR (2008).
Referencing the South Carolina Sea Islands Gullah Geechee culture, and the history of Sea Island cotton, Bisa Butler portrays a woman picking cotton with a full basket in her hand and on her head. Sea Island cotton and plantations were notorious for having horrible conditions while cultivating the most famous of all strains of cotton.
Born in Orange, NJ, Butler graduated Cum Laude from Howard University with a BFA degree. During her education at Howard, she refined her natural talents under the tutelage of lecturers such as Loïs Mailou Jones, Elizabeth Catlett, Jeff Donaldson, and Ernie Barnes. Butler then went on to earn an MFA from Montclair State University in 2005. Butler was a high school art teacher for ten years in the Newark Public Schools and three years at Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey. While obtaining her MFA, Butler took a Fiber Arts class where she had an artistic epiphany relating to how she expresses her art. “As a child, I was always watching my mother and grandmother sew, and they taught me. After that class, I made a portrait quilt for my grandmother on her deathbed, and I have been making art quilts ever since.”
Butler’s work was recently the focus of a solo exhibition Bisa Butler: Portraits at the Art Institute of Chicago, the second stop of a traveling exhibit that began at the Katonah Museum of Art, 2020 - 2021. The Toledo Museum of Art recently exhibited Butler’s work in a group show. Butler’s artwork has recently been acquired by many private and public collections, including The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, The Nelson-Atkins Museum, The Kemper Museum of Art, The Orlando Museum of Art, The Newark Museum, The Toledo Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Pérez Museum of Art, Miami.
Estimate
$40,000 – $60,000
Eric mack (1976 - )
Untitled.
Mixed media on canvas mounted on board, 2001. 444x482 mm; 17½x19 inches. Signed in pencil, lower right.
Provenance: acquired from Sande Webster Gallery, Philadelphia; private collection, PA.
Eric Mack’s ongoing body of work utilizes multi-media and complex compositions centered around urban design. Using a grid as a framework to create his artworks, he creates intricate collages from graphic images before handcoloring. This early work shows how he investigates multi-media as the springboard for his practice.
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. Recent solo exhibitions include Ordo Naturalis, The Albany Museum of Art, GA 2022; Of Stone and Stem, Whitespace Gallery, GA, 2021, and Impossible Architectures, Stone Center, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC, 2016.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Sam gilliam (1933 - 2022)
Fire on Water, VIII.
Acrylic on three hinged birch plywood panels, 2003. Approximately 695x357x51 mm; 27⅜x14⅛x2 inches. Signed, titled and dated in ink, verso.
Provenance: private collection, New York.
Estimate
$15,000 – $25,000
Sam gilliam (1933 - 2022)
Mary Ann.
Assemblage of color screenprint and offset lithograph on various hand-sewn papers in a shadow box frame, 2008. 813x660 mm; 32x26 inches (overall, including the frame). Signed and dated in ink, lower right.
Provenance: private collection, New York.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Melvin edwards (1937 - )
Premonitions.
Color screenprint on Arches paper, 2007. 596x448 mm; 23½x17⅝ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 21/60 in pencil, lower margin. Printed at the Experimental Printmaking Institute, Lafayette College, PA.
Another impression is in the collection of the Brooks Memphis Museum of Art, Memphis, TN.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Xenobia bailey (1955 - )
Think (Study for MTA Hudson Yards).
Hand crocheted cotton and acrylic yarn with record collage on cotton canvas, 2008. Approximately 990x1524 mm; 39x60 inches. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed "Artist in Residency with Nick Cave, Atlantic Center for the Arts: May 10-30, 1998. Direction inspired for composition of crochet shapes into Cosmic Mandala's by the mentorship of Nick Cave" and "Large collection of multi-size, vibrant patterned, crochet, primary shapes 1996 - 1998" in ink, verso.
Provenance: collection of the artist, New York.
Exhibited: SITElines. 2016 much wider than a line, SITE Santa Fe, NM, July 2016 - January 2017.
Xenobia Bailey's Think. Study for MTA Hudson Yards is a maquette for her commission by the MTA Percent for Art of New York. It culminated in the construction of three monumental glass mosaic works entitled Funktional Vibrations at the 34th Street - Hudson Yards subway station. Composed of a series of concentric tondos, Bailey's study is inspired by what she calls "the Aesthetic of Funk." It is derived from the visual, performing, culinary, and literary arts of African American culture and the ability to create beauty from the discarded.
Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, Bailey attended the University of Washington, studied Ethnomusicology, and attained a BFA in Industrial Design from Pratt Institute. Her textile art is inspired by her mother's handmade domestic needle arts and quilted creations, and her mother's collection of domestic textiles of local African American homemakers/caregivers in Seattle. This study and practice has developed into an aesthetic language fused with a range of cultural and experiential influences - including ancient African weaving techniques and the Kongo Cosmogram, a symbol important to Kongo metaphysics and spiritual ceremonies, Chinese, Native American, and Eastern philosophies, with undertones of 1970s Funk.
Bailey’s most recent public art installations were at the New York City Art for Transit: #7 Subway Line Extension Station-34th St.-11th Ave., part of the Hudson Yard Development Project with three commissioned mosaic murals. Bailey's other permanent art installations are at Coney Island, Brooklyn, NY, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library - Central Library, Washington, DC and the Boston Children’s Hospital, Boston, MA. Her artworks are also in the collections of the Facebook Headquarters, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Allentown Textile Museum, the Newark Museum, the Sheldon Museum of Art, the Museum of Arts and Design of New York, the Mott-Warsh Collection, the Fuller Craft Museum, the Kamel Lazaar Foundation, Tunisia, the US Embassy in Ghana and the US Embassy in Djibouti.
Estimate
$12,000 – $18,000
Danny simmons (1953 - )
Circle Game.
Pastel and acrylic on cotton canvas, 2009. 609x457 mm; 24x18 inches. Signed, titled and dated in ink, verso.
Provenance: Carol Walter, New York; thence by descent, private collection, New York.
Exhibited: Danny Simmons: From There to Here, Spanierman Gallery, East Hampton, New York, October 8 - November 23, 2009.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Cheryl warrick (1956 - )
Untitled.
Acrylic and ink on paper, 2009. 1520x403 mm; 59⅞x15⅞ inches. Signed and dated in pencil, verso.
Provenance: acquired from Dolan Maxwell, Philadelphia, Carol Walter, New York (2010), thence by descent, private collection, New York.
Boston-based abstract painter and designer Cheryl Warwick was born in St. Albans, New York. She received a BFA in Painting at the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, and in 1996 she received a MA in Education from Lesley College, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her mixed-media paintings invite the viewer to decipher visual relationships and meaning in shapes, textures, symbols, landscapes and patterns. Her work can be found, in numerous public and corporate collections, including the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Yale-New Haven Hospital, the Boston Public Library, Boston, MA, Museum Of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, Providence, RI, and the Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Cheryl warrick (1956 - )
Untitled.
Acrylic and ink on paper, circa 2009. 571x389 mm; 22½x15⅜ inches. Signed and dated in pencil, lower edge.
Provenance: acquired from Dolan Maxwell, Philadelphia, Carol Walter, New York; thence by descent, private collection, New York.
Estimate
$1,000 – $1,500
Claude lawrence (1944 - )
The Lean.
Acrylic on cotton canvas, 2013. 457x355 mm; 18x14 inches. Signed, titled and dated in ink, verso, with the artist's label.
Provenance: acquired from Keyes Art, New York, Carol Walter, New York; thence by descent, private collection, New York.
Chicago based painter and printmaker Claude Lawrence is largely a self-taught artist who began his career as a jazz musician. His boldly colored artwork shifts between figuration and abstraction with a direct, gestural style. Lawrence moved to Harlem where he began his artistic career in 1987. In New York, he befriended artists Fred Brown, Lorenzo Pace, Jack Whitten, Joe Overstreet and Bob Blackburn, whom he later joined to study printmaking at the Printmakers Workshop from 1992 - 1993. He exhibited in galleries in Sag Harbor and Riverhead, New York in the 1990s, and had a solo exhibition at the Montclair University, Montclair, NJ in 1997. He has experienced a recent revival with a solo exhibition at Gerald Peters Gallery in 2015. In addition, his artworks have been accepted into several museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery, the Parrish Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Estimate
$1,500 – $2,500
Claude lawrence (1944 - )
Untitled 2.
Acrylic on cotton canvas, 2013. 457x355 mm; 18x14 inches. Signed and dated in ink, verso, with the artist's label.
Provenance: acquired from Keyes Art, New York, Carol Walter, New York; thence by descent, private collection, New York.
Estimate
$1,500 – $2,500
Latoya ruby frazier (1982 - )
Grandma Ruby and Me in Her Livingroom.
Archival inkjet print, 2007. 285x355 mm; 11¼x14 inches. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 19/50 in ink, verso. Printed and published by Light Work for the 2018 Fine Print Program, Syracuse, NY.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Deborah willis (1948 - )
I Made Space for a Good Man.
Color lithograph, from photo film and drawing on mylar, 2009. 381x762 mm; 15x30 inches. Signed, dated and numbered 9/28 in pencil, lower edge. Printed at the Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia.
Additional impressions are in the permanent collections of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design.
In a 2010 interview with the Huffington Post about the print, Dr. Deborah Willis recalled: “I was an undergraduate at Philadelphia College of Art and one of my professors said to me, ‘you’re taking up a good man’s space, you should not be in this program. All you’re going to do is get married, get pregnant, have a baby and a good man could have been in your seat.’ I’ll never forget that moment. I was so humiliated and embarrassed because this was a public event. And of course what happened? When I graduated, I got pregnant. [Laughs] I was embarrassed. I couldn’t celebrate the fact that I was having a kid. Recently, my son found a contact sheet with photographs of my pregnant belly and he said, ‘mom, you never printed these.’ I remembered this story. What I realized in terms of flipping the script, was that I made space for a good man, by having my son, who is a photographer. Flipping that into positive energy and still creating work.” Martha St. Jean, “A Portrait of Deborah Willis,” The Huffington Post, April 6, 2010.
Consigned to support the Brandywine Workshop in Philadelphia and its legacy endowment campaign.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Hank willis thomas (1976 - )
Negroes to be Sold.
Laser-cut relief on handmade paper, 2009. 622x431 mm; 24½x17 inches. Signed, dated and numbered 16/30 in pencil, lower margin. Printed at the Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia.
Negroes to Be Sold parallels 18th-century enslaved persons advertisements, specifically one from Charleston, South Carolina, on April 26, 1760. Thomas uses the familiar silhouettes of Shaquille O’Neal and Michael Jackson to portray enslaved bodies, expressing the duality of past and present as well as enslavement and success. The artist raises questions about the history of slavery, and the continued commodification of Black bodies. Other impressions are in the collections of the museums of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Rhode Island School of Design.
Estimate
$6,000 – $9,000
Willie cole (1955 - )
¡No mas!
Etching, aquatint and chine collé on Rives BFK paper, 2011. 673x514 mm; 26½x20⅜ inches, full margins. Printer’s proof, aside from the edition of 8. Signed, dated, inscribed “PP” and numbered 1/2 in pencil, lower margin.
Another impression is the collection of the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Willie cole (1955 - )
Home Mark.
Spit bite and aquatint on Rives BFK paper, 2011. 609x482 mm; 24x19 inches, full margins. Artist’s proof, aside from the edition of 16. Signed, dated, inscribed “AP” and numbered 2/2 in pencil, lower margin.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Faith ringgold (1930 - )
Big Black.
Color lithograph on Rives BFK wove paper, 2010. 752x265 mm; 29⅞x22¼ inches, full margins. Artist’s proof, aside from the edition of 125. Signed, titled, dated “8/8/2010”, inscribed “AP” and numbered 4/10 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 painting Black Light Series #1: Big Black.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
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 77/100 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Thomas Lucas at Hummingbird Press, Chicago.
Estimate
$8,000 – $12,000
Theaster gates (1973 - )
Bitch, I Made This Pot.
Lithograph, screenprint and rubber stamp on Somerset paper, 2013. 600x800 mm; 23⅝x31½ inches. Edition of 100. Signed, titled, dated and numbered in ink on the certificate of authenticity. Published by Whitechapel Gallery, London.
For the group show Spirit of Utopia at the Whitechapel Gallery, July - September 2013, Theaster Gates created a studio for making pottery, training apprentices, and investigating skill, teaching, and craft. Bitch, I Made this Pot is a wryly emblematic commentary by Gates on the subject of artistic authorship. This work obliquely references the longtime use by American collectors and scholars of the name, “Dave the Slave” for the 19th-century African American potter David Drake.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Michael cummings (1945 - )
Freedom.
Quilt with appliqué including machine sewn cotton fabrics, ceramic beads and textile markers, 2013. 1701x1397 mm; 67x55 inches. Signed and dated in ink, lower right recto. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed “67x55” in ink on a fabric label, verso.
Provenance: collection of the artist, New York.
Freedom depicts a civil rights worker signing for freedom, surrounded by quotations and lyrics from Bob Dylan, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Mavis Staples. Along the quilt’s edges, Michael Cummings has placed additional text related to events during the civil rights movement.
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, moved to strictly fabric. Today, he lives and works in Harlem. Other quilts by 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 was previously commissioned by the Art in Embassies, Absolut Vodka, the City of Knoxville, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, the Percent for Art, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, and HBO.
Estimate
$12,000 – $18,000
David driskell (1931 - 2020)
Accent of Autumn.
Color screenprint on wove paper, 2016. 825x584 mm; 32½x23 inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 12/60 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Curlee R. Holton at the Raven Fine Art Editions, Easton, PA, with the blindstamp lower left.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Andy robert (1984 - )
Flint.
Oil on cotton canvas, 2017. 509x457 mm; 24x18 inches. Signed and dated in ink, recto.
Provenance: the artist’s studio; acquired from The Kitchen: Benefit Auction, private collection, California (2017).
Andy Robert turns a quick study into a searing composition of socio-political critique of the severe water crisis that has swept the city of Flint, Michigan, since 2014. Their water source is contaminated with lead and only became public after numerous investigations and lawsuits; that emerged from mismanagement and political concealment.
Born in Les Cayes, Haiti, Robert is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Studio Program and most recently completed the Artist-in-Residence program at The Studio Museum in Harlem in 2016-17. He holds an BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and his work has been exhibited in Greater New York 2021, MoMA PS1, October 7, 2021 – April 18, 2022. Robert has been included in exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Robert has participated internationally at the Bienal de las Fronteras at the Instituto Tamaulipeco para la Cultura y las Artes, Tamaulipas, Mexico; and at the Paris Avant Premiere, Paris, France. He is the recipient of a California Community Foundation Fellowship Award for Visual Arts Grant, a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Artadia Awards, 2018, and the William H. Johnson Prize, 2017.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Glenn ligon (1960 - )
Untitled (America).
Color screenprint on Coventry Rag paper, 2015. 152x228 mm; 6x9 inches, full margins. Signed, dated and numbered 41/50 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Axelle Fine Arts Gallery Ltd, New York. Published by Nottingham Contemporary in conjunction with the exhibition Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions at Nottingham Contemporary and the Tate Liverpool.
Glenn Ligon’s starting point was an installation view of one of his iconic America neon sculptures. He subjected this image to low-tech copying and transferring techniques, which has resulted in a frayed and mottled image of the original work, whose tones have been reversed.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Hank willis thomas (1976 - )
All Li es Matter.
Screenprint on black wove paper, 2019. 605x457 mm; 23⅞x17¾ inches. Signed, dated and numbered 295/400 in white ink, lower right. Published by the Public Art Fund, New York.
Estimate
$1,500 – $2,500
Freddie styles (1944 - )
Silver Series (Blue).
Acrylic on cotton canvas, 2020. 1219x1219 mm; 48x48 inches. Signed and dated in acrylic, lower right recto. Signed, titled and dated in ink, verso.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, the Anthony and Davida Artis Collection of African-American Fine Art.
Estimate
$15,000 – $25,000
Chakaia booker (1953 - )
Untitled (CB.1.21).
Lithograph with chine-collé on embossed, handmade paper, 2021. 533x355 mm; 21x14 inches, full margins. Signed and numbered 47/100 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by the artist with master printer Justin Sanz at Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop, New York. Published by Flint Institute of Arts, MI.
In this recent series, Chakaia Booker layers thin hand-painted paper to create an organic mass of swirling and energetic lines in muted tones adhered together through the process of chine collé.
Booker, born in Newark, NJ, has an undergraduate degree in sociology from Rutgers University, 1976, and an MFA from CUNY - The City College of New York, 1993. Solo museum exhibitions have been held at the Katonah Museum of Art, the University of Missouri, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., in 2007. She has shown her work extensively in numerous gallery exhibitions in the United States and abroad, including the 2000 Whitney Biennal and the 2005 Corcoran Biennal. Her sculptures are found today in such collections as the Bronx Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Neuberger Museum of Art, the Queens Museum of Art, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.