The Legacy of Prospect

The Legacy of Prospect

The late Bill Fagaly's personal collection to be auctioned with hopes of expanding Prospect New Orleans

Alexandra Kennon

When New Orleans art curator and Prospect New Orleans co-founder Bill Fagaly died last summer at the age of eighty-three, he left behind a massive and varied collection of “Outsider” art—works by predominantly self-taught artists, whom Fagaly championed throughout his life. His intent for the collection, which he left in the hands of his dear friend, estate executor, and Board Chairman of Prospect New Orleans Chris Alfieri, was that the works be sold to benefit Prospect, the city-wide art triennial Fagaly co-founded.

Alfieri—who acknowledges what a massive gift and responsibility has fallen to his care—has along with the Prospect board established the William A. Fagaly Memorial Fund for Social Impact, with the hopes of utilizing the funds raised from the auction of Fagaly’s personal art collection to expand Prospect into a year-round presence in New Orleans. While specific plans for investment are still somewhat nebulous as the Neal Auction approaches, Alfieri said the plan is to invest the funds in ways that are socially and environmentally responsible, as he and the board feel that is what Fagaly would have wanted.

“And the reason we call it the Fagaly Fund for Social Impact was that Bill was so deeply involved in, and he was an activist for the things that he really cared about and loved. He chained himself to the train tracks when they were trying to put the overpass through Jackson Square. You know, that was Bill. That was Bill,” Alfieri emphasized. “He just felt very deeply about things. I came across a file in his personal effects, which said ‘racial injustices’. He kept a file of things that just broke his heart. And so we’re going to use this amazing gift that he gave us to enhance the work that we’re already doing in those areas. And we’re going to put it all back into New Orleans.”

Nearly fifty works from Fagaly’s estate were already auctioned in February as part of Christie’s “Outsider Art Sale” of works by self-taught artists. “That was wildly successful, in that it really brought in record prices for artists like David Butler,” Alfieri said. “We netted about $500,000 out of that sale. And that was only forty seven lots.” The Neal Auction on March 9–10 will include around eight hundred lots of artwork, furniture, and more—and Alfieri is hopeful that the Outsider Art Sale’s success will be an indicator of how much money it could bring in for The William A. Fagaly Memorial Fund for Social Impact. “It’s going through the Neal catalog that you really get a sense of the breadth of his collecting. He was just endlessly curious about things,” Alfieri said. “And he was deeply influenced by his travels in India and Africa. He would just really take an opportunity to deeply know more about the culture and the artists and would just incorporate those things into his collecting.”

Fagaly championed local culture bearers, as well as artists: according to Alfieri, it was Fagaly who invited the Mardi Gras (or Black Masking) suiting Montana family to the New Orleans Museum of Art, Fagaly who proposed a retrospective of the work of Sister Gertrude Morgan, and Fagaly who was heavily influential in bringing the work of David Butler into the public eye. He was known to avoid creating hierarchies among the works in his collection—he wouldn’t separate the higher-value pieces from those whose artists were less-highly regarded, thereby drawing connections between the two and encouraging conversations. “He was really as deeply interested in these artists and their lives and the cultures from which they came as he was about the work itself,” Alfieri said of his friend’s approach to art and artists. As for the funds Fagaly’s artwork will garner at auction, Alfieri stressed that he and the board are taking their time to ensure they are utilizing them in the wisest possible ways that align with Fagaly’s intent. “We’re thinking through what is the most efficient delivery system for getting to our community the most that we can, that stands in line with what Bill would have wanted us to do. And so that’s just going to take us a little while,” Alfieri said. “But that’s, that’s where we’re going with it. And we just want to be super careful. You don’t get a gift like this every day. So this is transformational for the [Prospect] organization and for our community. And we want to be really careful to do it right.”

nealauction.com/auctions/fagaly