BLACK ART AUCTION Saturday, May 16, 2020 at 12pm EST
The “functional� catalog is now on the BLACK ART AUCTION website, as well as on the two internet auction platforms, Invaluable. com and LiveAuctioneers.com. You may register to bid, request condition reports or additional photographs and information regarding lots in the auction.
WORKS ON PAPER AND 3-D, June 20, 2020 This auction will explore alternative mediums in the work of African American Art. This will include works on paper: prints of various types, drawings and watercolors, collage, sculpture, ceramics, metalwork, photography, assemblage and other medium. Please submit consignment inquiries through the form on the website, or email or call the auction house: info@ BLACKARTAUCTION.com or (317)986-6048. Consignment deadline: May 31, 2020.
Bidders will be able to participate in the live auction via one of the two internet platforms, telephone bidding, or absentee bidding. There will be no live audience for this auction, but you may follow the auction live on the internet. Consignments are no longer being accepted for the May 16th auction, but are for two future sales:
AFRICAN AMERICAN ART, FALL 2020 This auction will include works in all mediums. Consignments are being accepted through September 2020.
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Some works appearing in this preview book have been moved to the June 20th auction. This book will remain available until the May auction, so you may read in-depth information regarding the artists. A new preview book will become available for the June auction on May 20th. We are very excited about the upcoming auction, and feel honored to have the opportunity to handle all of the work by these great artists. We are also very appreciative of the support we have received from everyone in preparing for our inaugural sale. Please contact us with any questions you might have about the auction process, and GOOD LUCK in your bidding!
- BLACK
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ART AUCTION
John Wesley Hardrick (1891-1968) Portrait of Irvena Harvey, c. 1930 oil on board 45 x 36 inches signed
Provenance: The Collection of George Gray, Chicago, IL. Mr. Gray’s mother was a close friend of Ms. Harvey. Ms. Harvey was voted “Most Attractive” by the 1929 senior class at Crispus Attucks High School, Indianapolis, IN. She was married to William Robert Ming, Jr., civil rights attorney and member of the litigation team for Brown v Board of Education. Irvena went on to graduate from Butler University in 1933 and worked as a social worker. She served as an assistant field secretary in the NAACP (The Crisis, April, 1945, p.112)
$8,000-12,000 John Hardrick was born in Indianapolis to Shepard and Georgia Etta (West) Hardrick in 1891. He showed a talent for art as a young boy, and his work was brought to the attention of the owner of a local art store and framer, Herman Lieber, who helped the boy enroll in children’s classes at the John Herron School of Art (interestingly, many of the frames one will find on his paintings today were made by Lieber and bear the label). As a teenager, he began studying with important Hoosier Group impressionist painters, William Forsyth and Otto Stark. He worked at a foundry at night to put himself through John Herron (he executed a well known painting of this subject matter, illustrated in the catalog for the exhibition, A Shared Heritage, Art by Four African Americans (Hardrick, Scott, Woodruff, and Majors), IMA, Warkel and Taylor, p. 59). In 1914, he was married to Georgia Ann Howard and held his first exhibition, which was successful. He shared a studio on Indiana Avenue with Hale Woodruff for some of that year, but increased financial pressures caused him to stop painting, and take a job in his family’s trucking business. (continued)
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John Wesley Hardrick (1891-1968) Beech Forest, Indiana, 1945
oil on board 22 x 32 inches signed
$4,000-6,000 When he resumed painting, he exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1927. One of his paintings, Little Brown Girl was purchased by a group of supportive black citizens and donated to the Herron Art Institute for their permanent collection. It currently hangs at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. He exhibited at the 2nd Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Negro Art in San Diego in 1928, and the catalog read: “In spite of acute poverty, this young man has the faculty of discerning beauty in everything, being able to face all his adversities with a smile that conceals the feeling within, at the same time he possesses a personality which strangely draws people to him.” He also exhibited at the Hoosier Salon in 1929, 1931,and 1934, which were then held in Chicago at Marshall Field and Company. He won first prize for a portrait at the Indiana State Fair in 1934. He participated in the American Negro Exposition in Chicago, 1940. The Civil Works Administration commissioned him to do a mural at the Crispus Attucks High School (the school where Irvena, the subject of this work, attended) in 1934, but it was rejected by the principal because it depicted black foundry workers, not doctors and lawyers. Hardrick’s health declined by 1941, and he worked as a cab driver. He would keep supplies in the trunk of his cab, and while waiting for fares, quickly paint local street scenes; later, he would also offer the paintings for sale from the trunk of his cab. (REF: Tom Davis, research for the Crown Hill Cemetery, Indianapolis) Many of Hardrick’s portraits were of well-to-do black women, who were not only married to successful men, but who were, themselves, entrepreneurs. ( A Shared Heritage, Art by Four African Americans, Warkel and Taylor, p. 47).
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Hardrick’s landscapes are derived from the many trips he took to Brown County, about fifty miles out how Indianapolis. He traveled to the area at the peak of the autumn season, when the leaves were at the height of their color; during the summer when the sun was bright and hot; and in the winter when the ground was covered with snow. He did not sketch or paint during these visits . Instead, the artist took in the different scenes and committed them to memory. (REF: A Shared Heritage, Art by Four African Americans , IMA, Warkel and Taylor, p. 41). He applied his paint very thickly, using a palette knife to create a tactile surface. He relied on a brush only to blend or add a shape, and use his thumb to mold the paint as if he were shaping a sculpture. (Ibid, p. 41) Hardrick worked quickly, beginning at the top of the canvas and working down. He was more concerned with the atmosphere and expression of the landscape than the descriptive qualities, thus following in the tradition of earlier African American landscape painters, Bannister and Duncanson. His landscapes were romanticized versions of his memories of his visits to the country. He blended his own paint when possible, and has a very distinctive palette.
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Steve Walker (b. 1945) New Sunday Dress, 1988 acrylic on canvas 30 x 24 inches signed signed, titled, dated verso
Provenance: The Estate of Kathlyn “Elaine” Moragne. Ms. Moragne grew up near the Cabrini Green housing complex in Chicago. At a time when women, especially African American, experienced significant barriers to education, Elaine her BA in psychopathology from University of Illinois (1958) and her MS in clinical nutrition from Rush University. Throughout her life, Elaine demonstrated her commitment to the economic revitalization and cultural recognition of the Black community, spearheading the work of Southside bank, starting a radio station in Boston supporting the needs of minority residents, and serving on the Women’s Board of the Chicago Urban League. She was involved with the South Side Community Art Center for 20 plus years, and supported the work of African American artists, both financially and in an administrative capacity. She helped establish the loaning program at the Art Institute of Chicago, allowing homeowners to borrow or rent certain works to display in their homes. We are indebted to Lisa Morange-Kayser, Elaine’s daughter, for providing this information.
$3,000-5,000
Steve Walker worked in Chicago and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. He was a popular artist at the South Side Community Art Center. His work was influenced by Norman Rockwell. Walker worked as a commercial graphic artist for Walgreen’s (which is headquartered in the north suburbs of Chicago) until his retirement. The three works by Walker that were included in the Johnson Publishing Company Collection, Chicago, recently sold at Swann Auctions for a combined $27,500, a record price for the artist.
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Steve Walker (b. 1945) Two Friends, 1998 acrylic on board 10 x 8 inches signed signed, titled and dated verso Provenance: The Estate of Kathlyn “Elaine� Moragne.
$1,000-2,000
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Allen Stringfellow (1923-2004) Red Umbrella Down By the Riverside, c. 1990 collage and watercolor on paper 24 x 19 inches signed and titled
Provenance: The Estate of Kathlyn “Elaine” Moragne.
$2,000-3,000 Allen Stringfellow was born in Champaign, Illinois, the son of a nightclub singer and jazz guitarist. As a teenager, he designed costumes for his father’s colleagues and painted religious murals for local churches. He was an artist who came of age in the Depression, learning his craft at the University of Illinois and at the Art Institute in Milwaukee before perfecting it as a student and printmaking instructor in the South Side Community Art Center. Stringfellow and William Carter, a WPA artist who became his best friend, veered away from social realism. “I wanted to be an artist without a clenched fist in the air,” he says. “I thought being a black artist would be labeling myself, and besides, I was never mad.” Stringfellow painted pleasant watercolors, exhibiting them at art fairs on the south Side. To make ends meet, he silk-screened store displays for an ad agency. For five years in the 1960s, he ran his own gallery, Walls of Art, where he promoted the artwork of major African American artists, as well as himself. Stringfellow went to work at Armand Lee in the late 60s, one of Chicago’s foremost custom framers and restorers of fine art. This kind of work sparked his interest in creating works on paper and collage. His work often includes religious and jazz imagery.
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The gospel theme appears frequently, enlivened by a flutter of choir robes and women in stylish hats. The fresh-air baptismal, drawn from a bygone era, is a tradition that is recalled in a dazzling collage entitled Red Umbrella Down By the Waterside. ‘That’s one of my signature pieces,’ says the 74 year old artist, ‘there was a version of it in almost every show.’
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His work can be found in the collections of Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Illinois, the Chicago Historical Society, DuSable Museum, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. REF: Website of Africanah.Org: Arena for Contemporary African, African-American and Caribbean Art. Text from Essie Green Gallery, New York
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Betty Murchison (20th century) Girls in Pretty Dresses, 2004-2006
acrylic on canvas 66 x 34 inches signed; titled, and dated verso
Provenance: The Estate of Kathlyn “Elaine” Moragne.
$1,000-2,000 Murchison is described as a figurative expressionist. She earned a degree at D.C. Teacher’s College in 1975, and completed a graduate arts program at Trinity College in 1978. She joined the D.C. Arts Association shortly after and met Lois Mailou Jones and Delilah Pierce. Murchison describes her earlier work as more gestural and spontaneous and the more recent work as more fully developed. In 1989, she had her second solo exhibition at the Foundry Gallery and sold out. This show was covered in the Washington Post and it brought the artist considerable local attention. International Visions Gallery in Washington, DC began representing the artist in the 1980s. Murchison exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution, The Venezuelan Embassy, and the Banneker Museum in Annapolis, MD. Her work is included in the collections of HBO, New York, the City of Rockville, and the District of Columbia Art in Public Places Program. Photo: Jenne Glover, From the Heart Art Gallery
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Gerald Griffin (b. 1964) Black Girl With a Pearl Earring, 2015 acrylic on masonite 36 x 30 inches signed and dated; titled verso
Provenance: The Estate of Kathlyn “Elaine� Moragne.
$3,000-5,000 Gerald Griffin is a successful contemporary painter and sculptor working in Chicago. He earned his BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1986. Griffin has exhibited nationally and internationally in art fairs and museum venues, and has executed significant public commissions in Chicago. His work is in the permanent collection of The Art Museum of Greater Lafayette, IN and the DuSable Museum of African American History, Chicago. His work is predominant figurative and he often paints en grissaile, or in only shades of grey. This choice is very compatible with painters who are also sculptors because it conveys a message deliberately without color, emphasizing depth and line. Exhibitions include: Harlem Fine Arts Show,Washington DC, 2015; The Black Box, DuSable Museum of African American History, Chicago (solo), 2012; Ancestral Legacies, Columbus Museum of Art, OH, 2006; Black Romantic, Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, 2003; Chicago Renaissance, Chicago State University, IL, 2001; and Black Creativity, Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, Il, 1998.
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Mary Reed Daniel (b. 1946) Rasheda No. 2, 1990 watercolor and dye on paper 10-1/4 x 7 inches signed artist label verso Provenance: The Estate of Kathlyn “Elaine” Moragne.
$1,000-2,000 Daniel was born in East St Louis, Illinois, a predominately African American community directly across the Mississippi River from St Louis, Missouri. Daniel studied at the Southern Illinois University, and also with Allen Lunak in Chicago. The majority of her work is done in watercolor and dye on paper, and focuses on the female figure. Her work was included in Choosing: An Exhibit of Changing Perspectives in Modern Art and Art Criticisms by Black Americans 1925-1985 in 1986, presented by Phillip-Morris Companies, Inc., and in the catalog accompanying the exhibition, Daniel said “There is a reservoir of information that can be taken from the African-American lifestyle, and I am presently concerned with capturing this in my work.” (Dr. Jacqueline Fonvielle-Bontemps, Hampton University, p. 79; Daniel’s work is illustrated on this page). Daniel exhibited at Lincoln University, Atlanta University, South Side Community Art Center, Chicago,IL , DuSable Museum of African American History, Chicago, Il, and the University of Wisconsin. She, along with Bill Daniel, Howard Mallory and José Williams started a gallery called 353 East on East 31st St in Chicago. In 1974, she showed with Sylvester Britton at the South Side Community Art Center. REF: Black Dimensions in Contemporary American Art, J. Edward Atkinson, 1971, p. 47. Gumbo Ya Ya Anthology of Contemporary African-American Women Artists, Leslie King-Hammond, 1995, pp. 62-63. Art for People’s Sake: Artists and Community in Black Chicago, 1965-1975, Rebecca Zorach, 2019, p. 46, 54.
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William Tolliver (1951-2000) Trumpet Player, c. 1985
oil on canvas 40 x 30 inches signed
Provenance: Collection of Dr. Lindley T. Smith, Virginia
$6,000-8,000 Tolliver was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi. He was one of 14 children. His father was a carpenter and his mother worked all day in the cotton fields. Tolliver was interested in art as a young boy, but there was no curriculum in the public schools he attended to support this interest. He bought inexpensive watercolor sets at the dime store. When he was 13, he discovered the work of another self-taught painter, Vincent Van Gogh. “Van Gogh painted purely for the love of it,” Tolliver explained in the International Review of African American Art (vol. 7, No. 3, article by John Hart, p. 17-23). Tolliver dropped out of school at the age of 14 and left Mississippi for Los Angeles, and joined the Job Corps program there, learning carpentry and reading skills. He also received limited instruction in painting. He then moved to Milwaukee for awhile, working as an assistant to a local sculptor, before returning to Vicksburg to take a job in construction. He was married in 1977, and did his best to paint in the evenings. In 1981, Tolliver moved to Lafayette, Louisiana to work in construction, but always painting at night. His wife, Debrah, encouraged him to show his work to a gallery, but William felt it wasn’t good enough and refused. Debrah decided to do it herself, showing the work to Bob Crutchfield, a local gallerist. Crutchfield sold 9 paintings in 10 days and requested more. Tolliver frequently painted blues and jazz musicians. Crutchfield moved to the French Quarter of New Orleans in 1989, opening the Galerie Royale, and representing Tolliver’s work. His clients include Sheri Belafonte, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Richard Pryor, Cecily Tyson, David Winfield and Ellis Marsalis. REF: biography from Galerie Royale and Celebration of Life , Zigler Art Museum, Jennings, LA (1987)
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Benny Andrews (1930-2006) Struggle, 1972
etching 10-3/4 x 8 inches signed, titled, dated and numbered 14/39 Provenance: Collection of Dr. Lindley T. Smith, Virginia
$700-900 Born in Madison, Georgia, the son of sharecroppers, Benny Andrews studied at Fort Valley State College (1948-50). After serving in the Korean War with the United States Air Force, he attended the School of the Art Institute in Chicago (1954-58), studying with Jack Levine and Boris Margo. He was generally viewed as an outsider, unyielding to the trends of abstraction at the time he was developing at the Art Institute. His work focused on figurative social commentary depicting the struggles, atrocities, and everyday occurrences in the world, especially in the African American community. In his drawings, paintings, and collages, Andrews continued to pursue representational art, which has been his focus throughout his long career. “Benny Andrews is a remarkable draftsman whose work is characterized by great economy of means,” Patricia P. Bladon wrote in Folk: The Art of Benny and George Andrews. “He infuses his drawings with the same integrity and passion which characterize his large-scale paintings.” As his career flourished he continued to speak out on the inequalities facing African American artists and helped found the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition with fellow artist Cliff Joseph. He spent 29 years teaching art at Queens College and served as the Director of the Visual Arts program, a division of the National Endowment for the Arts (1982-84). His work received both critical praise and commercial acceptance. Elected to the National Academy of Design in 1977, he was awarded premier fellowships and exhibited widely in this country and abroad. Today, his work is found in the collection of many major museums, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; Detroit Institute of Art; Morris Museum of Art, GA; Hirshorn Museum, Washington D.C.; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. Most recently his work was featured in the exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power.
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Isaac Scott Hathaway (1872-1967) George Washington Carver,1945
painted plaster 9-1/4 x 6-1/4 x 2 inches inscribed, George Washington Carver signed inscribed Tuskegee Institute, Ala ©1945 Exhibited and illustrated: Isaac Scott Hathaway (1874-1967), Sculptor, University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, 1996, p. 25. Provenance: Private collection, Indianapolis, IN
$1,500-2,500 Hathaway opened the Isaac Hathaway Art Company in a basement at 1234 U Street, in Washington, D.C. in 1910. He made and sold small busts and ceramic items. Hathaway’s developments in ceramics led him to be labeled by his peers the “Dean of Negro Ceramics”. He moved to Pine Bluff, Arkansas in 1915, and taught at what would become University of Arkansas-Pine Bluff. He made death masks and busts of various sizes of notable African Americans and sold them to individuals and schools across the country. In 1937, he established the Ceramics Department at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. He became good friends with George Washington Carver and the two experimented with the local clay. In 1946, Hathaway was chosen to design two half dollar coins for the mint, honoring two African Americans (Booker T. Washington and George W. Carver), thus becoming the first African American to design a coin - the subjects of which were the first two African Americans honored on a coin. Photo: Isaac Scott Hathaway and George Washington Carver, Isaac Scott Hathaway (1874-1967), Sculptor, University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, p. 13.
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Suzanne Jackson (b. 1944) Womb, c. 1970
acrylic wash on canvas 16 x 12 inches signed, titled label from Ankrum Gallery, Los Angeles verso
$3,000-5,000 Painter, poet, set designer, gallery owner and dancer, Suzanne Jackson was born in 1944 in St. Louis, Missouri and raised in Fairbanks, Alaska. She has examined a variety of media and themes in her art throughout her career, but African and Native American symbolism have remained constant within her oeuvre. Jackson attended San Francisco State College and Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles in 1967 where she studied drawing with Charles White. In addition, she attended the Yale School of Drama and received her MFAD in 1990. From 1968 to 1970 Jackson ran Gallery 32 in Los Angeles. Gallery 32 was inspired by Charles White’s philosophy that art could be an effective vehicle for community activism and social change and showcased art by emerging African American artists. In 1970, the gallery held the Sapphire Show, the first Los Angeles survey of African American women artists. As an educator, Jackson taught classes at the Watts Towers Art Center in Los Angeles from 1967-68. She served as chair of the department of fine and performing arts at the Eliott-Pope Preparatory School, Idyllwild, CA from 1982-1985, was an assistant professor in the department of dramatic arts at St. Mary’s College of Maryland from 1994-1996, and was a professor of art and design at the Savannah College of Art and Design from 1996 until her retirement in 2011. Jackson has had several solo exhibitions at Ankrum Gallery, Los Angeles, CA in the seventies and exhibited extensively throughout her career in group exhibitions including Two Generations of Black Artists, California State University, Los Angeles, CA, 1970; Blacks: USA: 1973; New York Cultural Center, NY, 1973; West Coast 74: The Black Image, 1974; Directions in Afro-American Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; California Black Artists, Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, 1977; Contextures, Just Above Midtown Gallery, NY, 1978; 19 Sixties: A Cultural Awakening Re-Evaluated, 1965-1975, California African American Museum, 1989; Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1960-1980, Hammer Museum, CA, 2011.
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Jackson’s work has recently been shown at the Telfair Museum in Savannah, Georgia in the exhibition, Suzanne Jackson: Five Decades, which ran through October 13, 2019.
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Madeline Murphy Rabb (b. 1945) Untitled, 1980
oil stick with elements of collage 26 x 40 inches signed and dated
$3,000-5,000 Similarly to Emma Amos, with whom she exhibited in 1983 at Jazzonia Gallery (owned by George N’Namdi) in Detroit, Rabb was attuned to both the civil rights movement and the women’s movement, but unlike the artists of Africobra, she was not radical. Her subjects appear personal, and they are, but they are also universal statements of racial and gender identity. The scene addresses the subject’s contemplation of identity, specifically, how a woman of color fits into society, but it is also a statement of protest—an affirmation of racial and gender equality. Amos once said, “For me, a black woman artist, to walk into the studio, is a political act”. The lines and contours of the female figure blend seamlessly with the natural elements surrounding her: the sand of the beach, the water and sky—symbolic of the natural order of inclusion; and yet the physicality of the body also breaks the line of the horizon, interrupting the casual sweeping scan of the viewer, demanding attention. Madeline Murphy Rabb was born in Wilmington, DE and earned her BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art (1966); she earned her MS in 1975 at the Illinois Institute of Technology (Chicago). Continually working and exhibiting her own art, she also was dedicated to promoting art civically. She was became the Executive Director of Fine Arts for the City of Chicago in 1983. She also worked in a curatorial capacity for several corporate collections and is on the board of various museums. Rabb exhibited at the Artist Guild of Chicago, 1974; North Shore Art League; The League of Black Women, Southside Community Art Center; Black Women Artists, 1974; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, 1976-1976; Black Printmakers in Chicago, 1980; and The Arts Club of Chicago, 2012.
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Earl J. Hooks (1927-2005) Man of Sorrows, 1950
cast bronze on wooden base 13 x 7-1/2 x 3-/2 inches 15 x 12 x 11-1/2 inches (with base) signed and dated Provenance: Earl Hooks, Jr.
$80,000-100,000 This is an extremely important and celebrated work by the artist, as well as a significant mid-century sculpture by an African American artist. Man of Sorrows is an iconic devotional image that was addressed by artists throughout history, including versions by Albrecht Duhrer and James Ensor. Hooks’ close friend, Marion Perkins’ Man of Sorrows (1950) is in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Perkins said this about his own work: “It shows the Negro peoples’ conception of Christ as a Negro—which is as it should be.” (The Black Chicago Renaissance, Darlene Clark Hine and John McCluskey, Jr, 2012, p. 191.) The 1931 poem by Langston Hughes, Christ in Alabama conflates the crucifixion of Christ with a lynched black man. James H. Cone draws the same comparison in his book, The Cross and The Lynching Tree:
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The lynched black victim experiences the same fate as the crucified Christ and this became the most potent symbol for understanding the true meaning of the salvation achieved through ‘God on the Cross.’
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Exhibited: A Homecoming: Selected Works of Art by Earl J. Hooks (1927-2005), The Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture, Sept 12, 2006-Feb 16, 2007. Literature: Two Centuries of Black American Art, David Driskell (catalog accompanying the exhibition, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1976), p. 202 (marble version)
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Earl J. Hooks (1927-2005) Earl J. Hooks grew up in South Baltimore, an impoverished section of the city. He was one of 11 children. His mother had always dreamed of becoming an artist before she married, and when Earl took an interest in drawing and model-building at a very young age, she hoped perhaps he could pursue that interest as he grew older. He was only eight years old when he was invited to attend classes at Walter’s Art Gallery in Baltimore on Saturdays. When he began to prepare for high school, an opportunity again presented itself, and again, Earl’s mother supported it. Earl’s friend, Ralph Matthews, Jr., lived on the northwest side of the city. Ralph’s father was a writer for the Baltimore African-American, and his mother was a teacher. The Matthews family invited Earl to come to live with them so he could attend Frederick Douglass High School. After graduation, he went on to study at Howard University (BFA, 1949), taking classes with James Porter, James L. Wells, and Lois Jones in a program under the direction of James Herring. When Hooks graduated from Howard, he was offered a teaching position at Shaw University in Raleigh, NC. His offer was for only a year, but while there, his work came to the attention of Harold Brennan, who was an administrator for the School of American Craftsmen in Rochester, NY. Brennan encouraged him to continue graduate work in Rochester. Hooks earned a certificate for his work there and also at the Rochester Institute of Technology. After a year, Hooks moved to Gary, Indiana, and opened Studio A Gallery. He remained in Gary for twelve years, albeit Studio A only survived a year, teaching at the Northwest Campus of Indiana University. He had exhibited at the Smithsonian (1954, 1963), the Art Institute of Chicago (1957), Syracuse University, Indiana University, De Pauw University, the South Bend Art Center, Howard University, and the Gary Artists’ League. In 1967, David Driskell invited Hooks to join the faculty at Fisk University in Nashville, TN. Earl J Hooks, Delilah Pierce(l) and Virginia Cateaux In the December 26, 1957 issue of Jet Magazine Delilah W. Pierce helped promote Earl Hooks’ and James A. Porter’s painting and ceramic exhibit at Howard University
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Hooks is known to many as a ceramicist, and surely he was one of the finest African American ceramicists of the 20th century, but that medium accounted for only a portion of his entire body of work. The year of his passing, the University of Delaware opened the exhibition, A Century of African American Art, The Paul R. Jones Collection, which included the artist’s work, Man of Sorrows (executed in marble). Artist and art historian, Amalia Amaki (editor of the catalog accompanying the exhibition and curator of the exhibition), said,
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Earl Hooks was a major sculptor of the second half of the 20th century. He not only successfully balanced being a mentor and teacher along with making important works of art, but he also never lost his touch for injecting a keen sense of humanity into his art. He mastered almost everything he undertook.
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Amaki continued, “Mr. Hooks gained recognition for his unique use of monochromatic forms that maximized the inherent properties and appearances of the materials used to create his quiet, somber sculptural works. His designs frequently took on geometric or biomorphic shapes that referenced his fundamental interest in the human body and facial expressions that were windows to deep personal emotions. He was committed to portrayals related to the African American experience and creative techniques that emphasized his keen understanding of the relationships between balance, light, harmony, and space.” (Taken from an article found in UD Daily Archive, Martin Mbugua, 2005) Hooks was also an accomplished painter, photographer, and draftsman, often combining several mediums within the scope of a single work. REF: 17 Black Artists, Elton C. Fax, 1971, pp. 203-218.
Homes of Color, Magazine of African American Living and Style, March/April 2003, “A Cultural Icon, The Wisdom and Legacy of David C. Driskell.” Man of Sorrows in bronze is pictured in Dr Driskell’s home in the article, and is part of his personal collection.
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Walter Henry Williams (1920-1998) Southern Landscape, c. 1970
mixed media (enamel, oil, gouache, and collage) on heavy paper laid down on masonite 24-1/2 x 17-1/2 inches signed LR Provenance: The estate of Earl J. Hooks; Hooks taught at Fisk University with Williams and the two were friends.
$25,000-35,000 Painter, printmaker, and sculptor, Walter Williams studied art at the Brooklyn Museum Art School under Ben Shahn, Reuben Tam, and Gregoria Prestopino. He also spent a summer studying art at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. In 1955, Williams won a Whitney Fellowship that permitted him to work and travel in Mexico. He also won a National Arts and Letters Grant in 1960 and the Silvermine Award in 1963. Williams moved to Copenhagen, Denmark in the 1960’s to escape the discrimination of the United States, While he was in Copenhagen, he created a series of colorful woodcuts of black children playing in fields of flowers. He returned to the United States to serve as artist-in-residence at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Here, he completed a body of work informed by the experiences of being an African American living in the South. Walter H. Williams died in Copenhagen in June1988. Williams’ work has been featured in major exhibitions including, An Ocean Apart: American Artists Abroad, Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, 1983; Unbroken Circle: Exhibition of African American Artists of the 1930s and 1940s, Kenkeleba House, NY, 1986; Black Motion, SCLC Black Expo 72, Los Angeles, CA; Two Centuries of Black American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1972; and 10 American Negro Artists Living and Working in Europe: paintings, prints, drawings, and collages, Den Frie, Copenhagen, Denmark, 1964.
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Walter Henry Williams (1920-1988) in his studio, Copenhagen, Denmark, Williams family photograph, The Artwork of Walter Williams, M. Hanks Gallery, Eric Hanks, 2005, p. 22. Southern Landscape, c. 1970 (details)
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Ed Clark (1926-2019) China Series, 2000
acrylic on canvas 48 x 38 inches signed, titled, and dated; N’Namdi Gallery label verso Provenance: The Collection of Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Washington, D.C.
$200,000-300,000
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Ed Clark (1926-2019) Ed Clark was born in New Orleans but moved to Chicago in early childhood. He served in the US Air Force between 1944-46, and from 1947-1951, attended the Art Institute of Chicago on the G.I. Bill. He traveled to Paris in 1952, and continued his studies at the L’Academie de la Grande Chaumiere for two years. Clark found the style of education to be much more lax in Paris than at the AIC, but he found inspiration in acquaintances and unlimited access to great works of art. He was particularly influenced by the Russian-born painter, Nicolas de Stael, whose work Clark found to be somewhere between hardedge and the gestural abstraction popular in post-war Paris. Clark’s work became increasingly abstract and he began working in a much larger format. In 1953, he was included in an exhibition of American artists working in France at the Galerie Craven. He was the only African American represented. He returned to New York in 1957 for a solo exhibition at the Brata Gallery in the East Village, and continued to show there through 1959, but with the emergence of Pop Art in the 60s, not much was happening for Clark in the US. He returned to Paris in 1966 for a one man show at Galerie Creuze. Since the 1960s, Clark began using a push broom to push the paint across the canvas lying on the floor. It is interesting to note that his first teacher at the AIC, Louis Ritman, introduced Clark to the work of Claude Monet, and Clark, upon first arriving in Paris, went to see Waterlilies at the Musée du Jeu de Paume, and the work had a significant effect on Clark. Clark experimented with elliptical designs and both shaped canvases and painted, draped canvases. He was concerned with freeing the image concept from the limits of the canvas. (REF: Explorations in the City of Light: African-American Artists in Paris, 1945-1965, Valerie Mercer, The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1996.)
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James Rondeau writes about Ed Clark using a push broom:
With that nontraditional tool, the artist developed his signature technique, characterized by wide, long strokes that were, at first, typically unbent and horizontal but, later, arcing. These marks transform the idea of the refined, handmade brushstroke into a performative, out-sized sweep that involves the entire body. The artist regards the physicality of his process as being akin to dance. One suspects that, like his friend David Hammons, Clark embraces a double meaning: the broom is at once a tool for painting and an emblem of menial labor.
�
-REF: Four Generations The Joyner/Giuffida Collection of Abstract Art, 2016; p. 52
Ed Clark at his home studio in Chelsea in 2014. Credit: Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
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Charles McGee (b.1924) Regeneration (Drawing for Ford Hospital Installation),
2005
micro pigment ink on bond paper 11-1/2 x 20-1/2 inches signed; signed, dated, titled verso
This assemblage was executed for the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, MI in 2007.
$2,500-3,500 McGee was born in South Carolina, but moved to Detroit when he was ten years old. He studied at the Society of Arts and Crafts (now the Center for Creative Studies) in Detroit. He also studied in Spain for a year. He was later an associate professor at Eastern Michigan University (1969-87) and had his own art school and gallery in the 1970s. McGee painted several murals, including The Blue Nile (1987) at the Detroit People Mover Broadway station. He helped found the Urban Wall Mural Program in Detroit in 1978, a community beautification project funded by the Michigan Council of Arts. There were a total of fifteen murals executed for this project in the 1970s and 80s. McGee also painted murals at the Martin Luther King Community Center and for Northern High School. McGee exhibited extensively and was included in the controversial Contemporary Black Artists in America held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971. Photo credit: Ray Manning from Detroiter Charles McGee named first-ever Kresge Eminent Artist, The Kresge Foundation, 2008. https://kresge.org/news/detroitercharles-mcgee-named-first-everkresge-eminent-artist
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William Edmondson (1874-1951) Owl, c.1930s carved limestone sculpture 23-1/2 x 11 x 7 inches unsigned Provenance: Mr. and Mrs. Charles Hagler, Ypsilanti, Michigan Private Collection Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Maryland Exhibited: Building on Tradition, The Collection of Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Hampton University Museum, October 12, 2013-December 7, 2013. Literature: International Review of African American Art , Vol. 24, 3B, Hampton University, VA, p. 17.
$30,000-50,000 This piece was acquired from Charles Hagler. Mr. Hagler and his wife Cottie, were avid and noteworthy collectors of a wide range of American antiques, stoneware, and folk art. Mrs. Hagler was a niece of Henry Ford and a curator at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn Michigan. They both were close friends with Robert Bishop who also worked at the museum and helped them assemble their collection. The Edmondson sculpture was purchased from Mr. Hagler around 1980-81 by a private collector. This piece, as well as most of the other pieces in the Hagler collection, came via their association with Mr. Bishop and his travels in the South where he met both artists and dealers in the early to mid seventies. Mr. Bishop confirmed this information at the Hagler home, (Springhill Farm, Ypsilanti, MI), around 1987-88 when he came to offer advice to the estate (and met the private collector). He said he had made and arranged purchases of pieces including the sculpture during one of these trips.
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William Edmondson (1874-1951) William Edmondson was born in 1874, the child of former slaves. He lived in Nashville, Tennessee his entire life, never venturing far from home. Despite this, his innovative and modernist sculptures brought him international recognition in the art world. He worked as a farmhand, horse groomer, an orderly, and in railway shops before he was hired on as a stonemason’s helper in 1931. Edmondson mixed mortar and helped to cut and place stone. When the Depression set in, the masonry work dried up. He began gathering stones - mostly discarded limestone curbstones from an abandoned city improvement project, and using a chisel he fashioned from an old railroad spike, set to work cutting tombstones. As his work progressed, he began cutting “critters and varmints” and later, biblical figures into the tombstones. Edmondson carved directly into the stone, creating instinctively from his imagination. In 1934, Edmondson and his work was discovered by Sidney Hirsch, a poet and playwright affiliated with Vanderbilt University, and eventually Louise Dahl-Wolfe, a fashion photographer, who photographed his work and was influential in convincing Alfred Barr to give Edmondson the first one man show of work by an African American at the Museum of Modern Art in 1937. The works exhibited here were also exhibited at Three Centuries of Art in the United States held at the Jeu de Paume in 1938. The first one man show of his work was not held in Tennessee until 1941. In 1952, a photo essay of his work, Works of Faith: The Stone Bird, by Louise Dahl-Wolfe , was published in Harper’s Bazaar. His work has appeared in one man shows at Fisk University, 1948; Tennessee Fine Arts Center at Cheekwood, 1964; Montclair Art Museum, 1975; and the Cheekwood Museum of Art, Nashville, TN, 2000.
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Photo credit: Louise Dahl-Wolfe
Installation view of Sculpture by William Edmondson, presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1937. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art
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Hilda Wilkinson Brown (1894-1981) Ball Park, c. 1935 oil on canvasboard 18 x 24 inches signed Exhibited: Hilda Wilkinson Brown, Howard University, 1983 Illustrated: Hilda Wilkinson Brown, Howard University, 1983 (catalog accompanying the exhibition) Reflections on Ledroit Park, Hilda Wilkinson Brown and Her Neighborhood , in Washington History, Magazine of the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., v. 3, No. 2, Fall-Winter, 1991-1992, p. 60.
$10,000-20,000
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Looking across the alley from her house toward the old Griffith Stadium on Georgia Avenue, Hilda could see the lights of the ballpark showering the backs of garages and houses on Fourth Street with an almost sleepy glow. The dichotomy is caught in the painting—the quiet comfort of evening seclusion or company at home and the noise and excitement of the hoped-for home run. Brown was a master in the use of light in her work, which she used as a compositional element to subtly divide, contrast, and emphasize, as she does in this painting.
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-Horace Ward, Bethesda, MD
Hilda Rue Wilkinson Brown was born in Washington, DC, the city where her grandmother first moved after being freed from slavery in 1835. Brown attended M Street High School (later known as Dunbar High) and attended Miner Teacher’s College (then known as Miner Normal School). She also attended the National Academy of Design, Cooper-Union Art School, Howard University (BA in Education), and the Art Students’ League. She received her MFA from Columbia University. (continued)
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Hilda Wilkinson Brown (1894-1981) Provincetown Rooftops, c. 1930-1940 oil on canvasboard 20 x 24 inches
$10,000-20,000 Brown first began teaching at Miner in 1923 and designed the curriculum for art history, design, and fine arts. She married a physician, Schley Brown, in 1929, and the two moved to LeDroit Park in 1934, buying a house at Third Street and Rhode Island, NW. The two also owned property in Oak Bluffs, an area of Martha’s Vineyard popular at the time as a summer destination for African Americans. Brown executed illustrations for significant African American publications in the 1920s, such as The Brownies Book and The Crisis, both edited by W.E.B. Dubois. Brown exhibited at Howard University (1932, 1937); Texas Centennial Exposition (1936); 1st Annual Metropolitan State Art Contest, US National Museum (1936). Her work is in the collections of Hampton University, Howard University, BarnettAden Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Harmon Foundation, and the Art Institute of Chicago. The documentary, Kindred Spirits: Artists Hilda Wilkinson Brown and Lilian Thomas Burwell, produced by Cintia Cabib, is now playing in limited release. For more information please use the following link: Kindred Spirits Film.
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Lilian Thomas Burwell (b. 1927) Sanseveria, 1982 acrylic on canvas 72 x 36 inches titled Exhibited: From Painting to Painting as Sculpture: The Journey of Lilian Thomas Burwell, Hampton University, 1997; Literature From Painting to Painting as Sculpture: The Journey of Lilian Thomas Burwell, Hampton University, 1997: p. 42.
$30,000-50,000 James Burchett Thomas met Margaret Elizabeth Wilkinson Thomas while both held faculty positions at A&T College in Greensboro, NC. In 1926, they were married and moved to Miami, where James set up a photography studio and business. Margaret returned to her family home of Washington, DC, in 1927 to give birth to her first child, Lilian Virginia Thomas. The stock market crash of 1929 devastated James’ business and the couple moved to New York City seeking employment. From 1932-1937, Lilian attended The Little Red Schoolhouse in Greenwich Village, the first school in the US patterned after Thomas Dewey’s design for progressive education. She then attended The High School of Music and Art in Manhattan in 1940, but moved back to Washington DC a year later and attended Dunbar High School. Her mother’s eldest sister, Hilda Rue Wilkinson Brown, and her husband, Dr. Schley Brown, who was Lilian’s godfather, supported Lilian’s interest in the arts. Hilda was a teacher at Miner’s College in Washington, DC. Burwell attended Pratt Art Institute from 1944 to 1947. She married and had a child, Lilian Elizabeth. In 1951, she returned to Washington DC and worked as a cartographic draftsman for two years. She was accepted to graduate school at Catholic University in 1955 and met David Driskell there, as he was completing his MFA degree. (continued)
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Burwell took Aunt Hilda’s advice to heart to commit to teaching art, both for its own sake and also to support the creation of her own art. She taught at St Margaret’s School and in the DC Public School System. She had her first oneperson-show at Channel Gallery in 1966. She continued to exhibit for the next five years (DC Teachers’ College, New Masters’ Gallery (Alexandria, VA), and the Embassy of Ghana). She described her initial style as Abstract Expressionist, but by the mid-1970s, her subject matter shifted toward a base in natural forms. She became, through her participation in various projects, more closely associated with other DC-based artists: Sam Gilliam, Alma Thomas, Michael Platt, Sylvia Snowden E.J. Montgomery, and Kenneth Young. All of these artists, except for Platt, who was primarily a photographer, and whose work was mostly figurative, worked almost exclusively in abstraction. One of her closest artist friends was Felrath Hines, who she describes as her spirit brother. In the early 1980s, Gilliam convinced Burwell to create a studio workspace outside her home, which she did, renting a space at the Hanover Arts Group Project on O Street. This move was significant because it “fostered and allowed a new expansiveness in the sense and she of [her] work.” Since the mid-1970s, Burwell intentionally began limiting her palette to free her from color being a conscious concern, and thus less distracted by academic concerns altogether. David Driskell wrote, “Burwell’s art has moved progressively toward clarifying the rational relationship that a painted environment object has with the spiritual space it occupies.” Burwell credits much of her ingenuity to “the advantage of disadvantage.” When she was young, living through The Depression, her family had to make things rather than buy them. That ability and the satisfaction of creation by one’s hands stuck with her. When her mother died in 1981, she felt a need to alter her environment. She began redesigning the structure of her interiors in wood, which she did by hand, cutting organically-influenced forms, and
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piecing them into a space, creating an entirely new environment within the given area. This project familiarized her with working with wood and combining individual, three-dimensional pieces into a greater overall concept. By the mid-1980s, and especially in the early 1990s, Burwell adopted this approach to her art, creating organic forms of wood, and then stretching canvas over these forms and painting them, once again expanding the psychological space within the confines of the physical space. Continually adapting and re-inventing the relationship between art and space, and thereby the connection to the viewer, Burwell began taking away solid constructs of existing work and replacing them with transparent acrylic shapes. Burwell’s entire body of work centers around the concept of emancipation. It began on a personal level with Abstract Expressionism and evolved into a parallel of creating freedom within a particular space, which mirrored both the artist’s and the viewer’s expanding emancipation physically, psychologically, and spiritually. Unsurprisingly, her art is not limited by symbolism, but offers a practical utility. Always the teacher, Burwell offers us all a place in which to grow. Her work has been featured in many exhibitions including, Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today, National Gallery of Women in the Arts , Washington, DC and Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, 2017-2018; Circle of Friends, American University Museum, 2016; Saving the Legacy, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, 2013; Black Women Artists in the Academy, Howard University Gallery of Art, 1999; and Environments of Spirit, Mind and Space: The World We Create, Lilian Thomas Burwell, Sam Gilliam, and Yvonne Pickering-Carter; Nathan Cummings Foundation, NYC, 1996.
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John Thomas Riddle (1934-2002) Fuse Box, c. 1965 welded metal found object sculpture 14 x 4 x 9 inches (including base) signed and titled on artist’s label Provenance: The Collection of Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Maryland
$6,000-8,000 Los Angeles native John Riddle became known initially for his politically charged works that combined welded steel and debris left from the WATTS riots in 1965 - the purpose for which was to expose the harsh conditions that African Americans lived and labored in South Central L.A. Later in his career, after moving to Atlanta, Georgia, he began to work on low relief assemblages, prints and paintings, which, with their solid color, angular shapes recalled the work of Jacob Lawrence and allowed viewers a glimpse of African American culture.
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Riddle earned his Associate’s degree from Los Angeles City College, and then served in the US Air Force from 1953-1957. After leaving the military, he was able to earn his BA from California State University, Los Angeles on the G.I. Bill, graduating in 1966. He continued there to earn his MFA in 1973.
Like his mentor Noah Purifoy... Riddle was deeply affected by the physical aftermath of the [Watts] riots and created assemblage works from the torched metal junk that was piled everywhere. His sculpture Ghetto Merchant (1966) was pieced together from a destroyed cash register that Riddle found in the wreckage, picked apart down to its barest skeleton, and then mounted on metal legs that he had scavenged from a junkyard. Although its parts betray a pained history, the sculpture possesses a lyricism of form that clearly draws from early twentieth-century abstraction in its emphasis on line and geometry. -Andrea Gyorody, Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1960-1980, 2011: p. 212. Riddle’s work, Gradual Troop Withdrawal (1970)l, was included in Soul of a Nation Art in the Age of Black Power (the leg of the exhibit at The Broad). His work may be found in the collections of the Oakland Museum, High Museum of Art, and the California African American Museum.
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”
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Roy Lewis (b. 1937) Martin Luther King, Jr., along with Albert Raby, formed the Chicago Freedom Movement in Chicago in 1966. Their slogan was “We’re on the move to end slums” (created by Don Rose, the press spokesman for the movement), and they developed a symbol, which combined the letters, M-O-V-E, emblazoned on signs, buttons, and armbands. King moved his family into a tenement in Chicago and began leading protests demanding open housing, good education, and access to jobs. The movement took on “discriminatory and duplicitous real estate practices, such as steering, redlining, and panic peddling, that kept blacks boxed inside big-city ghettos. “(Chicago Magazine, Politics and City Life, The Long March, David Bernstein, 2016). Rev. Jesse Jackson (in the photo on the left) was a young pastor, but already one of King’s top lieutenants, heading up the Chicago chapter of the SCLC “Operation Breadbasket,” PUSH’s precursor. The movement was expectedly met with much resistance and was not deemed successful, but as Jackson pointed out much later, it set the pace for the country and did, in fact, land some success: “it helped erase neighborhood color lines; it led to greater equity in housing, including the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968; it opened up economic and political opportunities for blacks; it galvanized black youths.” Roy Lewis grew up in Natchez, Mississippi, living on a plantation where his father worked as a sharecropper, harvesting cotton. After graduating high school, he landed a job in the subscription department at Johnson Publishing and moved to Chicago. He took up photography after he was drafted into the US Army in 1960. In 1964, Jet magazine published his photo of Thelonius Monk. Lewis’ photo, which appeared in Ebony in a 1967 article pictured a building at 43rd and Langley on the south side of Chicago. The article said, “another barren symbol of slum life” covered with “routine gang inscriptions.” A group of local artists, seeing the article, resolved to paint a mural, and the Wall of Respect project was born. It is a common belief that the Wall of Respect was strictly a painted mural, but photography was also incorporated into the design. The mural included photos by Billy Abernathy, Darryl Cowherd,
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Chicago Freedom Movement March, 1966 silver gelatin print 6 x 9 inches (image) 8 x 10 (sheet) signed and dated, recto and verso
$3,500-4,500 Robert Sengstacke, and Roy Lewis. Lewis’ photos were in the sections dedicated to theater and political activism. (REF: Walls of Prophecy & Protest, William Walker & the Roots of a Revolutionary Public Art Movement, Jeff Hubner, 2019, p. 61-66). In 1970, he videotaped an interview with Elijah Muhammad, which was featured in the film, A Nation of Comon Sense. In 1973, Lewis moved to Washington, DC, and landed a job at the Washington Informer. He traveled to Zaire in 1974 to film the Ali-Foreman fight. (REF: The History Makers, The Nation’s Largest African American Video Oral History Collection, Chicago, online).
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William “Bill” Walker (1927-2011) In August of 1967, on the southeast corner of 43rd and Langley Streets, Chicago, Illinois, a group of African American artists came together to paint the landmark mural that sparked a people’s art movement. William “Bill” Walker was instrumental in the creation of the Wall of Respect. The purpose of the project was to “honor our Black heroes and to beautify our community.” It soon became, in the words of fellow artist Jeff Donaldson,
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An instantaneous shrine to Black creativity, a rallying point for revolutionary rhetoric and calls to action, and a national symbol of the heroic Black struggle for liberation in America.
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Cities across American followed suit with murals of their own. Bill Walker continued to paint murals in the city of Chicago, as he had painted them before 1967, solidifying his role as father of the community mural movement capturing the “human side of street life in the city.” Bill Walker was born in 1927 in Birmingham, Alabama. An only child, he was initially raised by his grandmother in “a desperately poor ghetto of bleak little shacks with outhouses” known as Alley B. In 1938, he was sent north to Chicago to join his mother who worked as a seamstress and hairdresser. They lived in a variety of places in the Washington Park area and he eventually attended Englewood High School. Walker was drafted in WWII and re-enlisted to receive college tuition under the GI Bill. He was a mail clerk, then an MP with the 99th Pursuit Squadron, the all black command under which the Tuskegee Airmen fought. In 1947, he painted his first murals while in the military. While stationed in Columbus, Ohio he became friends with Samella Lewis. He often stayed with her family and assisted her on a few commissions. In 1949 he enrolled in the Columbus Gallery School of Arts. He began studying commercial art and later switched to a concentration in fine art. Walker won the school’s 47th Annual Group Exhibition “Best of Show” award in 1952. He was the first African-American to do so. Walker credits Joseph Canzani with encouraging his interest in mural painting. At school he studied the early Renaissance fresco painters. It wasn’t until after his graduation that he learned about the Mexican muralists - Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, and Jose Clemente Orozco. (continued)
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Luck of the Draw, 1954; oil on board, 24-1/8 x 22 inches, signed and
dated.
Provenance: The Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art, San Francisco, CA Literature: The Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art, Tyler Fine Art, 2019, p. 131.
$3,000-5,000
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William “Bill” Walker (1927-2011) He was particularly impressed with the way they incorporated structural elements in to their compositions. Walker also cited Jacob Lawrence, Charles White, and William McBride as important influences. After graduation, Walker headed to Nashville and Memphis where he painted murals for a Baptist church, a local Elks club, and the Flamingo Club, a nightclub near Beale Street. While researching and preparing to complete another mural of a plantation scene, he had an important epiphany. He realized he needed to create art that spoke for those who had been marginalized. Walker returned to Chicago and worked as a decorative painter for a variety of north-side interior designer firms. By the mid 1960s, Walker was formulating an idea for a mural in the area near 43rd and Langley which never came to fruition. However in May of 1967, the Organization of Black American Culture was formed and the opportunity again arose. OBAC was cofounded by artist Jeff Donaldson, sociologist Gerald McWorter, and Hoyt Fuller, editor of Negro Digest, and was dedicated to visual art, music, writing, dance, and theater. Walker floated the idea of a mural at the location. The group couldn’t just simply paint a mural and leave it at that. Walker knew the neighborhood well and secured permission from business owners, community leaders, and street gangs. The residents were a big part of the process as well. Jeff Donaldson and Eliot Hunter, Wadsworth Jarrell, Barbara Hogu-Jones, Caroline Lawrence, Norman Parish, Edward Christmas, Myrna Weaver and many others contributed sections to the wall. Walker was responsible for the section on religious leaders. Walker had originally painted the portraits of Black Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad, Nat Turner, and Wyatt Walker, a New York minister and civil rights activist, but when threatened with a lawsuit by Muhammad, who did not want to be pictured on the same wall as Malcolm X, he erased the section and replaced it with a composition of Nat Turner. The members of the OBAC eventually drifted apart- some, Donaldson, Jarrell, Jones, and Lawrence formed AfriCobra- and Walker, who remained in the neighborhood, came to be the “guardian of the wall.” As a result of the impact the Wall of Respect had in Chicago, similar walls were created in cities across the country. Walker worked on the Wall of Dignity in Detroit and the Wall of Truth, which was located across the street from the Wall of Respect. He co-founded the Chicago Mural Group (now known as the
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Chicago Public Art Group) with John Pitman Weber and Eugene Eda and completed more than 30 murals over the next four decades in working-class Chicago neighborhoods. In 1975, he formed his own mural group known as International Walls, Inc. Walker turned increasingly to studio art in the late 70’s. Chicago State University held the exhibition, Images of Conscience: The Art of Bill Walker in 1984. The exhibit consisted of 44 paintings and drawings in three series: For Blacks Only; Red, White, and Blue, I Love You; and Reaganomics. The show was not without controversy as the images presented were not pretty, but dark representations of urban black neighborhoods. The exhibition traveled to the Vaughn Cultural Center, St. Louis and the Paul Robeson Cultural Center, Pennsylvania State University. Most recently, Walker’s work was presented in the exhibition Bill Walker: Urban Griot, held at the Hyde Park Art Center, 2017-18.
Right: Bill Walker, in front of Peace and Salvation, Wall of Understanding, Black Artists on Art, v. 2, Samella Lewis and Ruth Waddy, p. 120
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Darryl Cowherd (b. 1940) Lil’ Black Girl Magic, 1968
silver gelatin print 13-1/4 x 10 inches signed, titled, dated, and numbered 8/15 verso artist’s stamp verso inscribed, Stockholm, 1968 verso This image is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College, Chicago.
$4,000-6,000 Cowherd was a founding member of the Visual Arts Workshop of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), and contributed to the Wall of Respect in Chicago. His photos are iconic images of Black Power and the Black Arts Movement on the South Side of Chicago. Later in life, Cowherd moved to the Washington, D.C. area and became involved in broadcast journalism. His work was recently included in two important exhibitions: Soul of a Nation Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983 and The Time is Now! Art Worlds of Chicago’s South Side 1960-1980, Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, 2018. Cowherd was a photographer working with Malcolm X College’s audiovisual department in 1967 when William Walker proposed the Wall of Respect project. Cowherd contributed an image of LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) speaking at the Dunbar Vocational High School in 1966. In 1970, after Cowherd had returned from a two year stint in Sweden, he removed his photo from the wall, which had fallen in ill-repair. A year later a suspected arson fire burned the building. Many of the artists involved in the project believe it was set intentionally to accelerate development in the area—and wipe out any traces of Black Power on the street.
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Darryl Cowherd (b. 1940) Stop White Police (St. Louis, MO), 1967
silver gelatin print 10-1/4 x 13-1/4 inches signed, titled, dated, and numbered 6/20 verso artist’s stamp verso This image is in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College, Chicago.
$4,000-6,000 Founded by activist, Percy Green, the Action Committee to Improve Opportunities for Negroes (ACTION) began as an offshoot of Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in St Louis. The organization was active between 1964-1984, with its origins linked to a demonstration of employment inequality during the construction of the Gateway Arch, a federally-assisted project. African Americans worked as laborers at the site, but held no positions in the skilled building trades. The protest became part of a chain of events that led the US Justice Department to file a “pattern or practice discrimination” suit against the St Louis AFLCIO Building and Construction Trades Council. (REF: Between Civil Rights and Black Power in the Gateway City: The Action Committee to Improve Opportunities for Negroes, Clarence Lang, Journal of Social History, Questia.)
Note from BLACK ART AUCTION: Sadly, while this image was taken over 40 years ago, it could have been taken in St. Louis today. Beginning in 2014, with the killing of Michael Brown, a black youth, by a white police officer, this grim phenomenon has come to national attention as something that has changed little in all these years. Like many cities, the police force of Ferguson bear little demographic resemblance to the population of the community. In the case of Ferguson, Missouri, where Brown lived, 48 of 53 officers were white. In September of 2014, President Obama stated at a United Nations General Assembly that the events of Ferguson (St Louis) was a failure to live up to America’s ideals.
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Michael Platt (1948-2019) The Way Home, 2008 pigment print on paper 33-1/4 x 20 inches (image) 38-1/2 x 25 inches (full sheet) signed, titled, dated, and numbered 4/10 $9,000-12,000 Michael Platt taught and mentored countless artists in the Washington, D.C. area for decades in the late 20th-early 21st centuries. He taught printmaking for 30 years at Northern Virginia Community College, and held residencies at Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop in New York and the WD Printmaking Workshop in Washington, D.C. He also taught at the Corcoran School of Art and Howard University. Platt was best-known for his work in photography and printmaking, but he worked in nearly every medium—and utilized multiple mediums frequently to achieve the desired outcome in a single work. He began exhibiting in 1973 at Howard University and showed for 25 years at the Franz Bader Gallery in Washington, D.C. Tim Davis wrote in The International Review of African American Art, Vol 29, No 1 (an issue focusing on Platt’s work),
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His work and techniques engage the viewer through his fusion of digital and conventional photography, drawing, and printmaking to explore/expose ’the human condition..the history and experiences of African and African Diaspora culture.’ Platt’s subjects—the marginalized and the survivors—exist in spaces that are discarded —a bare forest, a drained fountain, a crumbling room. However, they are not alone: memories echo, and history hovers.
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Michael Platt (1948-2019) Rasta Jacket, c. 2008
pigment print on black paper 28-1/2 x 19 inches (image) 31-1/2 x 21-1/2 inches (full sheet) signed, titled, dated, and numbered 4/10
$7,500-8,500
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Platt’s work vacillates between the African American as object of attack and the age of innocence in his constructions of children at play. In these latter works Platt interweaves remembrances of childhood—including trips to New Orleans..and poetic portraits of family members and shotgun houses indigenous to the rural South—with graphic renditions of atrocities on a global scale. These photomontages are explications on the narrative. Akin to casting a spell, Platt’s prints are glimpses into events and memories that transcend the ordinary and give voice to tragedy and lyricism to memory.
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-A.M. Weaver, St. James Guide to Black Artists, 1997.
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Frank E. Smith (b. 1935) New Uses For Nooses, 2011
multi-media collage of fabric and acrylic paint 25 x 39 inches signed, titled, and dated verso F. Smith stitched into a segment recto
$10,000-15,000 Frank Smith grew up in Chicago and studied at the University of Illinois (BFA, 1958) and at Howard University (MFA, 1972). Smith is part of a family of musicians, his brother being part of Max Roach’s all-percussion ensemble, M’Boom. As a visual artist, music highly influenced his work, and he was enamored with the work of Wassily Kandinsky, whose art was also deeply influenced by music. Smith moved to New York in 1967, and exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1969. In 1970, he met the members of Africobra during their exhibition at the Studio Museum. Jeff Donaldson had become the head of the art department at Howard University, and when Smith completed his MFA he joined the faculty there. He joined Africobra in 1973.
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Frank Smith takes a different approach to the music theme. Instead of painting pictures of musicians performing, Smith interprets the music as he hears it using a panoply of sound wave lines and colors...Smith says he has gone through three phases of visual expression. First, he made visual statements with the human figure; next he combined the figurative with the non-figurative into semi-abstracts…In the third and current state he had cast off all reliance on figurative forms and evolved a totally interpretative style.
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Africobra The First Twenty Years, Nubia Kai, 1990, Nexus Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA, p. 11
Smith retired from Howard in 2001 after having taught there for 31 years. His mixed media fabric collage, Banner for a New Black Nation (1978) was recently included in the Brooklyn Museum’s leg of Soul of a Nation Art in the Age of Black Power. The work is in the permanent collection of the museum. https://www. brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/210709 Smith’s work, Black and Tan Fantasy is part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture.
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Smith’s works on canvas and paper gives way to the formation of two-dimensional soft sculptural images derived through an extemporaneous process of draping. By working on several pieces simultaneously, Smith combines disjointed rhythms and syncopated patterns of paint and mixed media by sewing the canvas or paper together. Bright zigzag stitching joins colorful patches of painted patterns and found objects.
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-Tim Davis, International Visions Gallery
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Carroll Sockwell (1943-1992) Untitled, 1980
pastel on paper 26 x 40 inches signed and dated signed verso
$3,000-5,000
Untitled, 1980
colored pencil drawing 26 x 40 inches signed and dated, STII
$3,000-5,000 Carroll Sockwell grew up in Washington DC, and studied at the Corcoran School of Art. He was tied to the Washington Color School, but gravitated to a later offshoot of the group that was more concerned with abstraction and direct painting. He frequently executed works on paper. Sockwell’s work was included in group shows at the Brooklyn Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. A solo exhibition of his work was held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, in 1974. Sockwell also worked as a curator for the Barnett-Aden Gallery, the nation’s first museum of African American art. Sockwell committed suicide in 1992 by jumping from the Pennsylvania Avenue bridge in Foggy Bottom . He lived in humiliating poverty the last year of his life, sleeping on a mattress in a friend’s framing business. It is believed that severe alcoholism contributed to his suicide. The work of Carroll Sockwell, a former student of Lois Mailou Jones and of the Corcoran School of Art was more congenial to the then dominant school of color field painting. He had briefly become curator of the Barnett-Aden Gallery in 1965-66. By the late sixties, Sockwell was showing prominently in the city. He organized shows with Walter Hopps and Gregory Battcock and was later included by Hopps in major traveling shows of “Art in Washington”. (REF: Art in Washington and Its Afro-American Presence: 1940-1970, Keith Morrison, Washington Project for the Arts, 1985, p. 60; catalog accompanying the exhibition).
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Sockwell was included in many important exhibitions, including Washington: 20 Years, held at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1970, along with contemporaries Sam Gilliam, Alma Thomas, and Kenneth Young; Salute to the Barnett-Aden Gallery, Morgan State College, Baltimore, 1968; The Washington Show, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, 1985; and Washington 1968: New Painting: Structure, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, 1968.
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Charles Alston (1907-1977) Self Portrait, c. 1938 16 x 12 inches oil on canvasboard signed Provenance: The Collection of Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Washington, D.C. Exhibited: Building on Tradition, The Collection of Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Hampton University Museum, October 12, 2013-December 7, 2013. Literature: International Review of African American Art , Vol. 24, 3B, Hampton University, VA Note: This painting relates to a pastel and charcoal self portrait by the artist pictured in Charles Alston, The David C. Driskell Series of African American Art: Volume VI, Alvia J. Wardlaw, p. 19, image courtesy Bill Hodges Gallery.
$20,000-30,000
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Charles Alston (1907-1977) Charles Alston was a painter, sculptor, illustrator, muralist, and educator who lived and worked in Harlem the majority of his life. After his father’s death, his mother remarried Henry Pierce Bearden (Romare Bearden’s uncle) and the family moved from North Carolina to Harlem. Alston painted and sculpted at an early age and received formal instruction at Columbia University. While attending college, he taught art at the Utopia House and served as a mentor to a young Jacob Lawrence. In 1934, he cofounded the Harlem Arts Workshop, which eventually came to be known as 306. During the early years of the group, Alston focused on mastering portraiture. In 1938, he received a Rosenwald Fellowship which enabled Alston to travel to the South. His travel with Giles Hubert, an inspector for the Farm Security Administration, gave him access to unique situations and aspects of rural life which he documented in his “family series” in the 1940’s.
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Alston’s style grew more abstract by the 1950’s, but he never completely abandoned figurative studies. His figures characteristically maintain a sculpture like quality influenced by African sculpture. His subjects were derived mainly from the experiences of his life and time. Alston states, As an artist . . . I am intensely interested in probing, exploring the problems of color, space and form, which challenge all contemporary painters. However, as a black American . . . I cannot but be sensitive and responsive in my painting to the injustice, the indignity, and the hypocrisy suffered by black citizens.
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Recent exhibitions that have included his work include, Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, 2020; Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem, Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA, 2019; I Too Sing America: The Harlem Renaissance at 100, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH, 2018; Witness: Art and Civil Rights in The Sixties, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY, A Force for Change African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund, The Spertus Museum, Chicago, IL, 2009. His work may be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Clark Atlanta University Art Gallery.
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Dox Thrash (1893-1965) Life, c. 1938-39
carborundum mezzotint 11 x 8-3/4 inches signed Provenance: The Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art, San Francisco, CA Literature: The Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art, Tyler Fine Art, 2019, p. 125.
$4,500-5,500 Dox Thrash was a master of technical innovation who was equally adept at capturing African American life with a social realist lens. He was born in a former slave cabin in Griffin, Georgia in 1893 and studied art through correspondence school until 1909 when he moved to Chicago and began taking part time classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1917, he served in the army as a member of the 92nd Division Buffalo Soldiers in France. He was wounded and in lieu of being sent to the front, he toured in a vaudeville act that performed at military hospitals. Thrash was able to resume his studies in 1919 at the AIC and also received tutoring from established African American artist, William Edouard Scott. He lived an itinerant lifestyle in Boston, Connecticut, and New York, working odd jobs and painting, until eventually, in 1926, he settled in Philadelphia where he studied at the Philadelphia Sketch Club with Earl Hortor. He took a job with the Federal Art Project’s Fine Print Workshop in 1937 and began experimenting with the aquatint process. Thrash is credited with later inventing the process of carborundum printing, also known as carbograph, with fellow artists Hugh Mesibov and Michael Gallagher. He made his debut as an artist in 1931 at the Catherine Street YWCA in Philadelphia, which featured an exhibition of his oil and watercolor paintings. In 1933, his first exhibition of prints was held at the same location. Thrash’s work has been exhibited widely including: The Negro Artist Comes of Age, Albany Institute of History and Art, 1945; Two Centuries of Black American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1976; Black Artists/South, Huntsville Museum of Art, 1979; Represent: 200 Years of African American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2015; and In Search of Missing Masters: The Lewis Tanner Moore Collection of African American Art. Woodmere Art Museum, PA, 2009.
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Recent exhibitions include, Dox Thrash: The Hopeful Gaze, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, 2019 and Dox Thrash, Black Life, and the Carborundum Mezzotint, which is now on view at the Syracuse University Art Galleries, NY until March 8 and will travel to Fort Wayne Museum of Art, IN. Photo credit: Digital collections, Free Library of Philadelphia.
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Ralph Arnold (1928-2006) Artist and educator, Ralph Arnold, is best known for his masterful collages and assemblages which he began making in the early 1960’s. The theme of gender and its role in social and individual identity appears frequently in Arnold’s work. Arnold was born in 1928 and raised both in Knoxville, Tennessee and Chicago. His interest in art began as a teen at Blue Island High School (now Dwight D. Eisenhower High School) in Chicago where he worked in the print shop. Here he was exposed to printmaking and working with paper. Arnold briefly attended the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign but left to serve in the army in Korea. When he returned to Chicago, he received his BFA from Roosevelt University. He also attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he received his MFA. He began working as an educator in the 60’s. Arnold taught at the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Rockford College, Rockford, IL; Barat College, Lake Forest, IL; and Loyola University, Chicago, where he served as the chairman of the Fine Arts department. During his career he was represented by Benjamin Galleries from 1964-1969, Gilman Galleries, and Van Straaten Gallery, all in Chicago, which held solo exhibitions in their respective spaces. Other solo shows included Some Old, Some New, South Side Community Art Center, 1973; The Real and Abstract: The Art of Ralph Arnold, Chicago State University,1982; and Ralph Arnold Unmasked: From Pop to Political, Loyola University, 2012, among many others. His work was featured in the group exhibitions: Afro-American Artists, 18001969, School District and Museum of the Philadelphia Civic Center, PA, 1969; Directions in Afro-American Art, Cornell University, NY, 1974; Black American Artists/71, Illinois Bell Gallery, Chicago, 1971; Contemporary Black Artists in America, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, 1971; and Violence in Recent American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1968. In 2018, the exhibition The Many Hats of Ralph Arnold: Art, Identity, and Politics was held at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College, Chicago. His work may be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Fisk University,TN; and DePaul University, Chicago. In 2006, the Ralph Arnold Gallery was established at Loyola as a part exhibition/part workspace in tribute to his advocacy for the arts.
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Through the Forest, c. 1965
mixed media collage on paper 11 x 11-1/2 inches signed and titled verso label verso from Benjamin Galleries, Chicago, IL artist’s label with address verso.
$1,000-2,000
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Ralph Arnold (1928-2006) African Mask, 1995 paper maché (wall hanging sculpture) 9 x 9 x 6 inches signed and dated Provenance: The Estate of Kathlyn “Elaine” Moragne.
$1,000-2,000
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Walter Ellison (1899-1977) Just Business, c. 1940 oil on paperboard 18 x 24 inches signed lower right titled and dated on label verso $60,000-80,000 Walter Ellison was born in Georgia in 1900. He developed his early love of art into a career as a painter, designer and craftsman. He was best known for his works depicting the shared experiences of African Americans who were a part of the Great Migration north, a movement that he had experienced for himself. After moving north to Chicago in the 1920s, he attended the Art Institute of Chicago. Ellison was employed by the Easel Painting Division of the Illinois Art Project/Works Progress Administration and was active in the South Side Community Art Center. His work was featured widely in exhibits featuring African-American artists, however by the early 1940’s, he seemed to have stopped actively exhibiting. Ellison died in Chicago in 1977. His work is found in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago and the St Louis Art Museum. Photo: Courtesy of Eskinola Ellison, grand-niece of the artist.
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With the Depression raging and black unemployment at nearly 50 percent, Policy was not only an obsession, it was also one of the leading engines of jobs and economic production in Chicago’s teeming black neighborhood known as Bronzeville. As described at length by Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake in their captivating 1945 study of Chicago’s black citizens, Black Metropolis, there were some 500 policy stations in the neighborhood: one on almost every block and more numerous than churches. At its height in the late 1930s, Policy employed more than five thousand people, “with a weekly payroll of over $25,000, and an annual gross turnover of at least $18,000,000.” (taken from text written by Daniel Schulman, www.chicagomodern.org) Schulman is describing another work by Ellison, Old Policy Wheel, (1936). Ironically, he points to an excerpt claiming there were more policy stations than churches in Bronzeville. In the painting, Just Business, policy has actually been brought into the church. In what appears to be a makeshift neighborhood church, repurposed from an old vacant retail store, we see the pastor addressing an almost exclusively female audience, dressed for church, and packed into the front pews. The men, originally seated in the back of the congregation, and likely with the intention of the events unfolding, have abandoned their seats to buy policy tickets through an open window from a neighborhood “runner”. A second glance back to the front of the congregation reveals the pastor turning a blind eye to the proceedings in the back. Ellison foresaw this back and forth play and emphasized it. His portrayal of the physical setting coincides with the nature of the activity: the front of the congregation is swathed in light and nicely appointed with floral arrangements, while the rear of the building, or what is our foreground, is dark and the walls show decay. Ellison also left one pew toward the back completely empty, to act as a subtle dividing line between the two dynamics. The posture of the men in the composition reveals a measure of insecurity and guilt, but not so much that they wouldn’t stand in plain sight and do it. Ellison’s paintings consistently convey the message that the lapse of judgement and/ or morality is enacted in plain sight. REF: Convergence: Jewish and African American Artists in Depression-era Chicago, Koehnline Museum of Art, Des Plaines, IL: Oakton Community College, 2008. “Walter Ellison.” In Chicago Modern, 1893–1945: Pursuit of the New, edited by Elizabeth Kennedy, p. 109. Chicago: Terra Museum of American Art, 2004. They Seek a City: Chicago and the Art of Migration, 1910-1950 (Art Institute of Chicago, catalog to the exhibition), Sarah Kelly Oehler, 2013.
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Harlan Jackson (1918-1993) Untitled (Mask), c. 1950
oil on canvas 27 x 21-1/2 inches signed
$30,000-40,000 Harlan Jackson was born in Cleburne, TX in 1918. He moved to Hutchinson KS and attended Kansas State Teacher’s College to major in art. Shortly before WWII, he returned to Texas and worked as a cartoonist for the Houston Informer. During the war, he served in the Navy. After the war, he briefly joined the Harlem Globetrotters as a part of their backup team. Jackson’s talents in basketball were less impressive than his artistic ones, so when the G. I. Bill afforded him the opportunity to continue his education, he pursued it. He enrolled at the California School of Fine Art, where he studied with Abstract Expressionists Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko (Rothko taught in San Francisco during the summers of 1947 and 1949 and had the use of Still’s studio), Clay Spohn, and David Park. His notable classmates were John Grillo and James Keeney. In San Francisco, Jackson listened to bebop and met Maya Deren (a Ukrainian surrealist film-maker who influenced Jackson. The function of film, Deren believed, like most art forms, was to create an experience; each one of her films would evoke new conclusions, lending her focus to be dynamic and always-evolving. She combined her interests in dance, Haitian Vodou and subjective psychology in a series of surreal, perceptual, black and white short films. Jackson contributed to and acted in a short surrealist film titled The Cage, authored by his friend Keeney in 1947), saw Katherine Dunham perform (Dunham’s modern interpretive dance influenced the art of both Jackson and Thelma Johnson Streat), and with James Budd Dixon, started the North Beach Art Gallery, an artist’s cooperative. His first one-person show was at the Artist’s Guild in 1947. Photo: Harlan Jackson in an advertisement for Teacher’s Scotch Whiskey, EBONY, November 1960
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At this time the only recognized African American artist on the West Coast was Sargent Johnson. Jackson was quickly accepted and represented in shows sponsored by the San Francisco Art Association at the city art museum in 1946, 1948, and 1951. Jackson received a Rosenberg Traveling Fellowship in 1948 which enabled him to live and work in Haiti. It was here he met and befriended the artist Eldzier Cortor. Jackson renewed his acquaintance with Maya Deren in Haiti. “His interest in the spirituality of Haitian Vodou was genuine, and this set him apart from those artists who saw it as merely an exotic object of study. Jackson believed that Haitian Vodou radiated power and evil in a sexualized form. Jackson was caught between the participant’s and the outsider’s view… struggling with the understanding of which Hans-Georg Gadder wrote, ‘The text that is understood historically is forced to abandon its claim that it is uttering something true.’ (a violence I may be doing to certain aspects of Abstract Expressionism as it is still understood by many). This was a violence that Jackson, faced with Haitian ritual and inspired by Dunham and Deren, was reluctant to perform despite the pressure of his Methodist upbringing .” (Abstract Expressionism Other Politics, Ann Gibson). In his book, Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century, Richard Powell gives a seemingly different critique of Jackson’s mask paintings: “In 1949, the artist Harlan Jackson…applied this notion of a problematic black identity to his painting Mask No 11. Split between racial pride that was embodied in a tribal mask and a desire to assimilate that black identity within the white cultural practice of abstract painting. Mask No 11 illustrated the contradictions that were increasingly felt by proponents of black culture. Toward the end of this period the options for black cultural expression and its reception went beyond a simple dialectic of pride versus assimilation and, instead, embraced models that were either inclusive of both, or were derived from an entirely different set of social and aesthetic values. These new options emerged just at the moment when black cultural groups became conspicuous, cosmopolitan, and candid about their universality and growing political importance in world affairs.” The two analyses, while claiming different intent and context, are similar in that Jackson is working out an internal struggle throughout the process of his painting—in an attempt of self-discovery, and using abstraction to create an objective distance from his conscious state in order to self-reflect. During this period his works were notable for their deconstruction and reconstruction of
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Haitian masks and motifs using cubist elements. Upon his return, he studied at the Hans Hoffman School of Fine Art (1950-1), and shared a studio in NYC with Lilly Fenichel, another Abstract expressionist artist from California. Jackson and Fenichel frequented the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village, well-known as a hang out of painters Rothko, Kline, Pollock and Resnick. Eventually, Jackson and his wife, Jaki, moved to the Hamptons, across the street from painter Willem de Kooning, and among a community of Ab-ex artists: Motherwell, Pollock, Krasner, and Rothko. He continued to focus on works of experimental abstraction until the mid-1970’s. At this time his religious convictions began to preclude his artistic inclinations. Harlan Jackson died in relative obscurity in 1993. Roberta Smith wrote a review for the New York Times regarding the exhibition, The Search For Freedom: African American Abstract Painting 1945-1975; Kenkeleba House, NY (1991), and mentioned Jackson’s work: “Stronger still in touch and composition are the semi-abstract mask images, also from the late 40’s, by Harlan Jackson, a painter born in 1918 who studied with Mark Rothko. In these highly tactile works, Picasso’s dissections of the human face, themselves inspired by African masks, are turned into attenuated abstractions whose facial features announce themselves slowly.” Jackson’s work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Panoras Gallery, NY; Gallery East, NY; Barnett Aden Gallery; International Exposition, Palais des Beaux Arts, Haiti; Nassau County Black History Museum, Hempstead, NY; and Acts of Art Gallery, NY. Group exhibitions include: Exhibition of Graphic Arts and Drawings by Negro Artists.Howard University, Washington D.C., 1947; New Vistas in American Art, Howard University Gallery of Art,1961; Driven to Abstraction: Works by Contemporary American Artists, New York State Museum, Albany, 2006; and Abstraction + Abstraction; Kenkeleba House, 2010. In 2019, his piece, African Series Phoenix was featured in the exhibition Harlem Roots held at the Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. State Office Building, NY, November 15, 2019 -January 10, 2020. His work is found in the collections of Guild Hall, East Hampton, NY; Howard University, Washington D.C.; and Southhampton College, New York.
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Elton Fax (1909-1993) Laborers, 1939 oil on canvasboard 24 x 18 inches signed and dated label verso This is a very early, important work for this artist.
$20,000-30,000 Elton Fax was born in Baltimore and studied with Augusta Savage and at Claflin University and Syracuse University. He exhibited at Syracuse University 1930-31; Women’s Civic League, Baltimore, 1932; Harmon Foundation, 1933; Corcoran Gallery, 1934; Baltimore Museum, 1939; National Gallery of Art , 1934, and the American Negro Exposition, Chicago, 1940. Fax painted a mural for the Public Works of Art Project at Dunbar High School in Baltimore in 1934, of the rural southern black becoming an industrial worker (REF: A History of AfricanAmerican Artists, Bearden and Henderson,p. 258) Steel Worker and Coal Hopper , both painted in 1939, and share related subjects, appear in The Negro in Art, by Alain Locke, p. 82. Fax served as a faculty member at the Harlem Community Center and taught at the City College of New York. In 1940, he became more involved in illustration work. In 1959, he made his first trip to West Africa as part of the United States’ Educational Exchange Program (along with John Biggers).
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Peter Bradley (b. 1940) Long Stone, 1973 acrylic on canvas 45-1/2 x 137 x 2-1/4 inches signed, titled, and dated verso Andre Emmerich, NY label verso $15,000-20,000 lower left detail
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Abstract/Color field painter Peter Bradley was born in Western Pennsylvania and attended Cranbrook and the Society of Arts & Crafts in Detroit (about 1959). He also attended Yale, where he met William T. Williams. The two shared a studio in New York City for a number of years after Peter arrived in 1963. While painting, he also worked doing installations at the Guggenheim and then at Perls Gallery. He worked his way up to associate director at Perls (1968-1975), and through his dealings there, met many important artists and collectors in the city. One of his earliest exhibitions in NYC was at MoMA in 1968, In Honor of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. He also exhibited at the High Museum in Atlanta, 1969; San Francisco Museum of Art, CA, 1969; IBM, 1970; and the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, 1970. (continued)
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Peter Bradley (b. 1940) Bradley lived in a loft on Broadway in the same building as Kenneth Noland and the two became friends. Noland would participate in The DeLuxe Show that Peter curated for John de Menil in Houston in 1971 featuring abstract art. Clement Greenberg was, at the time, a curatorial assistant for de Menil, and assisted Bradley in the undertaking. Darby English describes the two in his book, 1971, A Year in the Life of Color,
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Greenberg and Bradley were familiar with each other through Perls Gallery… Bradley enjoyed none of the commercial success of the artists popularly identified with Greenberg at the time, artists such as his friend and neighbor, Kenneth Noland, or Olitski. Bradley was in it for the love of painting, an ambition Greenberg supported in him..
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English discusses the optimism found in modern art in regard to the work of Bradley and Alma Thomas, pp. 22-23:
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...for people like Bradley, modernism served as a broadly multicultural formation, a fragile community of equals where lines of affiliation differed significantly from public life. Artists such as Bradley and Thomas did not use doctrine or physical actions to exploit their intimacy with nonblack modernists. But they enacted and advanced integration by working rigorously within the modernist paradigm, which they found capricious.
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Bradley was approached by Andre Emmerich in 1972, who asked him to show at this gallery on 57th Street in NYC. Bradley said he had 6 shows there.
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Helen Winkler, Clement Greenberg, and Peter Bradley installing The DeLuxe Show, 1971. Menil Archives, The Menil Collection, Houston. Photo: Hickey-Robertson, Houston. Helen Winkler, Peter Bradley, Kenneth Noland, and Clement Greenberg installing The DeLuxe Show, 1971. Menil Archives, The Menil Collection, Houston. Photo: HickeyRobertson, Houston.
Bradley never knew his father, and was raised by his adoptive mother, Edith Ramsey Strange, in Connellsville, PA. Edith was living in a 27 room house owned by a Chicago family for whom she worked and she ran an impromptu jazz club there. Many important musicians came through, including Miles Davis. Bradley’s uncle insinuated Peter was Miles’ son, and Peter and Miles maintained a relationship for years. For greater detail on this and about Bradley’s life in New York, see BOMB Magazine’s Oral History Project interview with the artist: https://bombmagazine.org/articles/peter-bradley-1/. English says this about Bradley’s work leading up to The DeLuxe Show (and his close connection to Olitski):
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The ideas that shaped Bradley’s practice from the mid-1960s had their origins in the color effects that Jules Olitski began to achieve when, in 1965, he found in the compressor-powered commercial spray gun an end to his search for a way to spray color in the air so that it stayed there, The idea was to leave the openness the two painters saw in color undelimited: open.
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Gordon Parks (1912-2006) Gordon Parks bought his first camera at the age of 25. He was working as a dining car waiter for a railroad company, and was taken by the photos in magazines left by passengers—especially images taken by Roy Stryker’s team documenting poverty in America for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Parks’ first photography show was at Chicago’s South Side Community Art Center. His efforts won him a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship. In 1944, he made portraits of famous African Americans, such as Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson and Richard Wright for Edwin Embree’s book, Thirteen Against the Odds. In 1948, Parks’ photo documentary on the life of a Harlem gang member for LIFE Magazine landed him a position as photographer and writer —the first such position held by an African American . As his prestige grew, so did his control over the editorial content that accompanied the pictures. In 1962, Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammed led a rally of Muslims in Chicago, and the following year, Parks produced the photo documentary, The White Man’s Day is Almost Over. A version of this image is in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Corcoran Collection (Gordon Parks Collection).
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Place de la Concorde, Paris, 1951; iris print, 14-1/4
x 13-3/4 inches
(image), signed.
Exhibited: Building on Tradition, The Collection of Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Hampton University Museum, October 12, 2013-December 7, 2013. Literature: International Review of African American Art , Vol. 24, 3B, Hampton University, VA, p. 52.
$3,000-5,000
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John Rozelle (b. 1944) Untitled, c. 1990
acrylic on canvas 36-1/2 x 36-1/2 inches signed verso
$5,000-7,000 A native of St. Louis, Missouri, John Rozelle is a prolific painter and collagist. Rozelle attended Washington University, St. Louis, where he received a BFA and Fontbonne College, where he received a MFA. He is currently a tenured Associate Professor in the Drawing and Painting Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Prior to joining the Art Institute faculty he taught drawing, design, painting, and sculpture at Fontbonne College. In 1989, Rozelle was artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. His work has been featured in exhibitions including I Remember...Thirty Years After the March on Washington: Images of the Civil Rights Movement 1963-1993, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., 1993; The Chemistry of Color: African American Artists in Philadelphia, 1970-1990, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, PA, 2005; Layers of Meaning: Collage and Abstraction in the Late 20th Century, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, PA, 2003; The Studio Museum in Harlem: 25 Years of African-American Art, NY, 1994; African American Abstraction: St. Louis Connections, MO, 2008. In 1998, Rozelle was commissioned to install the Middle Passage Project at the Dred Scott Courthouse in St. Louis, MO. Museum collections include the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, PA; Margaret Harwell Museum, Spertus Museum of Jewish Studies, Chicago, IL; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; California Afro-American Museum, Los Angeles; and The Museum of African American Art, Los Angeles.
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... As an artist, Rozelle seems to have zeroed in on this uncompromising balance, one which allows him to cite influences of all kinds without having to suppress personal and cultural history. His intricate collages, products of a fertile imagination and a skilled hand appeal to us not because they are from the mind of a black artist; they appeal to us solely on the grounds that they come from a gifted artist.
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-Jeff Daniel, critic for the St Louis Post-Dispatch
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Felrath Hines (1913-1993) Felrath Hines was born in Indianapolis, IN in 1913. As a student at segregated public school #47, he received a scholarship to attend youth classes at the Herron Institute. After graduation he worked a variety of odd jobs until he was able to pursue his art education at the Art Institute of Chicago. While there, Hines focused on design - he thought it would be a more marketable skill , but it probably had a simultaneous effect on the type of painting that he became best known for - non-representational abstraction. In 1948, Hines moved to New York City, working in fabric design as he took classes at the Pratt Institute. Later, he took a job at a frame shop, which eventually led to an apprenticeship in art conservation. Upon completion of his apprenticeship, he began working as a private conservator for contractors such as MOMA, NY. His work was shown in several exhibitions during this time, including Eight Young Americans at the John Heller Gallery, NY; and solo shows at Parma Gallery and Creative Gallery, both in NY. Hines joined Spiral in 1963 and participated in their first and only show at the Christopher Street Gallery in 1964. In 1972, he became chief conservator of the National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C., later working for the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Notable independent projects included contracts to conserve five paintings by Henry Ossawa Tanner, and also the mural, The Contribution of the Negro to Democracy by Charles White, all in the collection of Hampton University Museum. He retired from art conservation in 1984. Hines’s art career continued to flourish. He has exhibited widely in major exhibitions including: Invisible Americans: Black Artists of the 1930s, Studio Museum in Harlem, 1968; Contemporary Black Artists, 1969; Afro-American Artists: New York and Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1970; Two Centuries of Black American Art, Los Angeles Museum of Art, 1976; and African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era, and Beyond, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, 2012. In 2019 the exhibition, It’s About Time: The Art of Felrath Hines, was held at the Indiana State Museum. His work is found in the collections of the David C. Driskell Center, University of Maryland, College Park; Flint Institute of Arts, MI; Muskegon Museum of Art, MI; Smithsonian American Art Museum; National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. Photo: The Artist; The N. Jay Jaffee Trust.
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The Island, 1962 oil on canvas 48 x 71 inches signed LR. Provenance: The collection of Dr. Laura Hines, former wife of Felrath Hines
$30,000-40,000
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Beauford Delaney (1901-1979) Portrait of a Young Man (Larry Calcagno), 1953
oil on canvas 31-3/4 x 25-1/2 inches
Provenance: Private collection, Chicago, IL Exhibited: Beauford Delaney: From New York to Paris; The Minneapolis Institute of Art, 11/04; Knoxville Museum of Art, 4/05; Philadelphia Museum of Art, 11/05.
$25,000-35,000
“
He (Beauford) is about the only person in my life, who gave me generously of deep insights into life—without demanding tribute. A true artist—beyond this world!
”
-from a letter written to Wes Olmsted from Larry Calcagno in 1975
Lawrence (Larry) Calcagno (1913-1993) was an American abstract expressionist painter from San Francisco. Larry served in the army in WWII, and enrolled on the G.I. Bill to the California School of Fine Arts, studying with Mark Rothko, Richard Diebenkorn, and Clifford Still. He left for Paris in 1951 to study at L’Academie de la Grande Chaumiere. In the early 1950s, Calcagno and Delaney became friends and remained so until Beauford’s death. Larry took Beauford to Ibiza in 1956, where they were joined by James Baldwin. The book, An Artistic Friendship, Beauford Delaney and Lawrence Calcagno, by Joyce Henri Robinson (2001) is devoted entirely to the unlikely relationship of the two expatriate painters. Excerpt from Beauford and Larry, the foreword by David Leeming to the book, An Artistic Friendship, Beauford Delaney and Lawrence Calcagno: In Paris Beauford met Larry Calcagno, who quickly became a soul brother and an ally
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against the voices. They drank together, traveled together, painted portraits of each other, and spent many hours discussing their inner lives, and especially their craft. But in less than two years after they met, Larry returned to the States. Until Beauford’s defeat at the hand of his mental demons in the late seventies, the two men corresponded regularly, and Larry returned from time to time to visit his friend. Beauford measured his life by these visits. If Larry were coming the voices were stilled. The Delaney-Calcagno friendship was one based in deep love and respect. With James Baldwin, Larry was among the very first to recognize in Beauford’s canvases the mark of genius. He never stopped encouraging his friend, urging him to fight his depression, slipping much-appreciated 5-dollar bills into his letters from New York, and leaving behind art supplies after his visits. And Beauford’s letters to Larry were those of a philosophical and doting older brother whose advice spanned such territories as sexuality, religion, and as always, especially art.
Photograph by Leslie Schenk of (l-r), “Arnold”, James Baldwin, Lawrence Calcagno, and Beauford Delaney in Ibiza, Spain, 1956. Courtesy of David Leeming, and illustrated in, An Artistic Friendship: Beauford Delaney and Lawrence Calcagno.
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Beauford Delaney (1901-1979) Beauford Delaney’s talent was discovered by local and influential painter, Lloyd Branson whose support took him to Boston to study at the Massachusetts Normal School, the Copley Society, and the South Boston School of Art. In 1929, he moved to New York, where he became an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance, painting urban landscapes populated with the disenfranchised people he lived among, as well as portraits, sometimes of his famous friends. Although he was a well respected artist with influential friends like James Baldwin, Henry Miller, and Georgia O’Keefe, he couldn’t escape the sense of marginalization he felt as an individual who constantly had to overcome the inequalities of being not only African American, but homosexual as well. He moved to Paris in 1950, a place where he felt a new sense of freedom. His style shifted from the figurative compositions of New York City life, to abstract expressionist studies of color and light, notably a vibrant, Van Gogh inspired yellow. In 1956, he met Darthea Speyer, an American cultural attaché living in Paris. She organized a group exhibition of works which included Delaney at the American Cultural Center in 1966, as well as two solo exhibitions of his work at her gallery which was established in 1968. Delaney lived his remaining years in Paris, eventually being hospitalized for mental illness and dying in 1979. His work may be found in the collections of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; The Studio Museum, Harlem, NY; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, MA. The Knoxville Museum of Art, TN is currently showing Delaney’s work in Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin: Through the Unusual Door, February 7-May 10, 2020. This exhibition of 50+ paintings, works on paper, and unpublished archival material examines the 38-year relationship between painter Beauford Delaney (Knoxville 1901-1979 Paris) and writer James Baldwin (New York 1924-1987 SaintPaul-de-Vence, France) and the ways their ongoing intellectual exchange shaped one another’s creative output and worldview.
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Varnette Honeywood (1950-2010) Rap Street, 1979
color screenprint 23 x 23-1/2 inches signed, titled, and dated Provenance: The Collection of E.J. Montgomery, Washington D.C.
$500-700
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Varnette Honeywood is an artist who celebrates black lifestyles in America with images rich in African references...Honeywood’s primary concern is to illustrate the strong, reassuring, and free expressions of proud Black people. For Honeywood, this goes far beyond depicting the icons of African American history to her own community. She is documenting a secular historical record of everyday African American life. “Who else”, says Honeywood, “is going to interpret or document these feelings..and who else is going to deal with our triumphs and our sufferings if it is not us?”
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-Curtis James, Gumbo Ya Ya: Anthology of Contemporary African-American Women Artists, 1995, p. 110.
Varnette Honeywood was born in Los Angeles. Her mother, Lovie, moved from Mississippi to L.A. in 1945 and married Stepny Honeywood. Both her parents were elementary school teachers. Varnette studied at Spelman College and USC. She visited Africa in 1977, when her work was exhibited at FESTAC. She met Bill and Camille Cosby in the 1980s, and a reproduction of one of her works was chosen to hang in the living room set on The Cosby Show. Honeywood was a prolific printmaker as well as painter. REF: Forever Free: Art by African-American Women 1862-1980, Center for the Visual Arts Gallery, Illinois State University, 1981; St James Guide to Black Artists , editor Thomas Riggs, 1997, pp. 251-252.
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Marie Johnson Calloway (1920-2018) Educator and artist, Marie Johnson Calloway, depicts the “rough-hewn beauty”of ordinary individuals in realistic, representational terms using a variety of media such as weathered wood, worn clothing, and found objects. As a black woman artist,” she writes, “I wished to look beneath the misconceptions with which history had covered my people and me. The one connecting thread through all of my work is my perception of my own world (which, too, has been an odd mix), and my continuous effort to interpret it in a personal way.” Born in Maryland, Marie Johnson Calloway received degrees from Coppin Teachers College, Baltimore; Morgan State University, Baltimore; and San Jose State University, California, before settling down to teach. She was the first African-American public school teacher in San Jose. In 1969, she became an assistant professor at both the California College of Arts & Crafts and San Jose State University. Calloway became active in the civil rights movement during the 1960s, becoming president of the San Jose chapter of the NAACP. She also joined Art West Associated North, an organization of black artists in San Francisco established by artist and curator Evangeline J. Montgomery. Calloway’s work was featured in solo exhibitions at the Oakland Museum, California College of Arts & Crafts, Howard University, San Francisco City College, Triton Museum in Santa Clara, and the African American Cultural Center in San Francisco. Numerous group exhibitions include the San Francisco Museum of Art (Marie Johnson and Betye Saar), Studio Museum in Harlem, Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles and Bennett College, North Carolina. She participated in the landmark exhibit, Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980, Hammer Museum, MoMA PS1, Williams College Museum of Art, 2012-2013, which chronicled the vital legacy of the city’s African American artists. In 2015, the exhibition, Marie Johnson Calloway: Legacy of Color was held at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA.
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Mother and Daughter,
c. 1970 wood cut-out assemblage 47 x 27 inches signed on label verso
$12,000-18,000
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Mavis Pusey (1928-2019) Decaying Construction, 1970 color screenprint 28-1/2 x 21-3/4 inches (full sheet) 28 x 21-1/2 inches (image) signed, titled, dated, and numbered 14/20 $1,000-2,000 Mavis Pusey was best known for her hard-edge, non-representational images. This was very much her singular focus throughout her entire career. Pusey was born in Jamaica in 1928. Her parents died when she was young. An aunt taught her to sew, and her first job was cutting fabric in a garment factory in Kingston, Jamaica. When she was 18, Pusey went to NY to study at the Traphagen School of Fashion. Due to financial constraints she began attending classes at the Art Students League instead, where she studied painting and printmaking over the next four years. One of her teachers was Will Barnet. When her student viso expired, Pusey went to London, and then Paris, where her first solo exhibition was held at Galerie Louis Soulanges in 1968. When she returned to NY, her work Dejyqea (oil/canvas, 72 x 60 in.)was included in the important exhibition, Contemporary Black Artists in America, held in 1971 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. She worked with Robert Blackburn at his workshop for three years and was struck by the energy and constant movement of the city. Many of her prints from this period reflect a focused interest on the city’s construction. Pusey also taught at various institutions throughout her career including Rutgers University and the New School for Social Research. She moved to Virginia later in her career. In 2017, her work was included in the exhibition, Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today . It was the first U.S. presentation dedicated exclusively to the formal and historical dialogue of abstraction by women artists of color. Her work will also be the subject of a major exhibition at the Birmingham Museum of Art, AL. Pusey’s work is found in the collections of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington D.C.; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; and the Birmingham Museum of Art, AL.
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“
I am inspired by the energy and the beat of the construction and demolition of these buildings. The tempo and movement mold into a synthesis and, for me, become another aesthetic of abstraction. I use color and texture to convey the tension that is the heartbeat of the city… I see the new construction as a rebirth, a catalyst for a new environment, and since the past must be a link to the future, in each of my works…. there is a circle to depict the never-ending continuation of natural order and all matter.
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Dindga McCannon (b. 1947) Dindga McCannon is a Harlem artist working in virtually every medium of interest to her. As a young girl, McCannon’s mother pressed her to pursue an education in fashion design rather than fine art. In the early to mid-1960s, while teaching arts and crafts to children for the Red Cross, her supervisor suggested she contact a group of professional artists known as the 20th Century Art Creators (now known as the Weusi Artists). In 1966, she exhibited with the Art Creators in the First Annual Harlem Outdoor Show. She met Faith Ringgold in 1970, and contributed to several murals. In 1971, she was a founding member of the Where We At, Black Women Artists, Inc., which was a showcase for black women artists. This group was reacting to neglect from black male artists and white feminist artists. McCannon, Ringgold, Kay Brown and several others organized an exhibition in 1971 at the Acts of Art Gallery , the Greenwich Village gallery directed by Nigel L. Jackson, who also hosted the Rebuttal To Whitney Museum Exhibition the same year. McCannon also had a solo exhibition there earlier that year. McCannon’s work was included in two recent exhibitions paying homage to these early shows: Acts of Art and Rebuttal in 1971, Hunter College Art Galleries and We Wanted a Revolution, Black Radical Women 1965-85, Brooklyn Museum. McCannon opened a boutique on the Lower East Side in the 1960s, making and selling African-inspired clothing and jewelry. She later began incorporating her skills with fabric design in her fine art, adding elements of collage to paintings, as seen in this work, Festival in Harlem. Early in her career, she did some informal work at Robert Blackburn”s Printmaking Workshop and later studied privately with Charles Alston, Richard Mayhew, and Al Hollingsworth. Her work, Day in the Life of a Black Woman Artist (1978) is in the collection of the Schomburg Center (see: Black Artists the 20th Century, Selections from the Schomburg Center Collections, p. 50.) Further Reading: Gumbo Ya Ya: Anthology of Contemporary African American Women Artists, King-Hammond, 1995. McCannon’s work, Revolutionary Sister, 1971 is now on view in the exhibition Out of Place: A Feminist Look at the Collection at the Brooklyn Museum.
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Festival in Harlem, 1976 oil and fabric collage on canvas, 24 x 34 inches, signed and dated. $8,000-12,000
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My art is an attempt to remember/colors, shapes and form…as I perceived them before..I was old enough to realize…I was in prison. -Acts of Art and Rebuttal in 1971, Hunter College Art Galleries, catalog accompanying the exhibition, p. 83
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Dorothy Carter (Higginson) (20th century) CONFABA Poster, c. 1970 serigraph 34-1/2 x 23 inches (sheet size), matted signed, Toot Higginson, upper right in the plate Provenance: The Collection of E.J. Montgomery, Washington D.C. Literature: International Review of African American Art: The Art of Political Struggle and Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, vol. 15, no. 1: Reflections on Confaba: 1970, Cherilyn C. Wright, pp. 36-44.
$400-600 On May 7-10, Confaba (Conference on the Functional Aspects of Black Art) convened the first working conference to “organize the study of African American art...(to) provide a firm foundation whose superstructure, when completed, will properly preserve, protect and project our visual art history” (Jeff Donaldson, Reflections on Confaba, p. 42). Each member had been invited by a group of students enrolled in Prof. Jeff Donaldson’s African American Art history course at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. Invitees were placed in one of six task forces. These included education, research, resources, dissemination, philosophy, and aesthetics. Additional groups included elders of distinction and student cadres. Each group presented their findings to the whole on the final day. One of those students, Dorothy “Toot” Carter, designed the poster to commemorate the gathering. It was silk screened on poster stock and given to each conference participant. This poster belonged to E.J. Montgomery, who served in Task Force 4: Dissemination.
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Wadsworth Jarrell (b. 1929) Isaac Burns Murphy (1861-1896) won the Kentucky Derby in 1884, 1890, and 1891). With his outstanding victory rate never being equaled, he is an African American Hall of Fame jockey, and one of the greatest riders in American Thoroughbred history. James “Soup” Perkins (1880-1971) began racing at 11, and gained his nickname, “Soup”, for his love of the food. He won the Kentucky Derby in 1895, at the age of only 15. Alonzo Clayton (1867-1917) won the Kentucky Derby in 1892, also at the tender age of 15. Unfortunately, racist stable owners switched to using only white riders around the turn of the 20th century, and since 1909, no African American jockey has ridden a winner in any major American Graded stakes race. Jimmy Winkfield (1882-1974) Winkfield was the last African American jockey to win a Kentucky Derby in 1901 and 1902. Influenced by the reluctance to hire African American jockeys, Winkfield moved to Russia in 1903. He raced there and across Europe until the outbreak of WWII. In 2004, Winkfield was posthumously inducted into the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame. The following year, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution honoring the man. William Walker (1860-1933) Walker was born a slave near Versailles, Kentucky. He was the leading rider at Churchill Downs in the fall racing season of 1875-76, and won the Kentucky Derby in 1877. Wadsworth Jarrell painted The Jockeys #1 in 1962, and continued to revisit the theme of horse-racing and African American jockeys throughout his career. In 1981, Jarrell executed three significant works of this theme: The Jocks #2, Homage to Isaac Murphy, and Master Tester (a portrayal of Marshall Lilly who tested and trained horses). In 1995, he created Day of the Kings, a tribute to sixteen important African Americans involved with horse-racing, twelve jockeys and four trainers.
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The Jocks #2, 1981 acrylic on canvas, 48 x 68 inches, signed and dated 1981 lower right Exhibited: AFRICOBRA/Farafindugu, Neighborhood Arts Center, Atlanta, GA (Spring 1981) The Art of Wadsworth Jarrell, Carriage House Gallery, Richmond, VA, May, 1981. Illustrated: Wadsworth Jarrell, The Artist as Revolutionary, pg 59
$50,000-70,000 The Jocks #2 is an expressive group portrait of James “Soup� Perkins, Alonzo Clayton, Isaac Murphy, Jimmy Winkfield, and William Walker. The figures are painted across the frontal plane like a Kemetic/Egyptian wall painting on a ground of muted light blue and green. Isaac Murphy, who was the first jockey to win three consecutive Kentucky Derbys and who won more races than any other jockey, is placed in the center with a glowing crown around his head. -Wadsworth Jarrell, The Artist as Revolutionary, Robert L. Douglas, p. 59.
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Wadsworth Jarrell (b. 1929) Wadsworth Jarrell was born in Albany, Georgia. By the time he was school-age, his family had moved to Athens (GA). Athens was still a fairly small, segregated city, and the community of approximately 3,000 blacks strove to support one another. Wadsworth was interested—and talented—in art at an early age, and his parents withstood “healthy” skepticism to support him in this endeavor. His father was a furniture maker, and Wadsworth considered him to be an artist. When Wadsworth finished high school, he enlisted in the army and trained at Camp Polk in Louisiana. He acted as the company artist, making signs, maps and charts. He served his last six months in Korea. Upon returning from overseas, Jarrell moved to Chicago and enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1954-58). In the early 1960s, he was exhibiting his work throughout the Midwest and enjoying a strong measure of local success. In the mid 1960’s, following tumultuous local racial violence, Jarrell became involved in the Organization of Black American Culture, and befriended artist Jeff Donaldson, whom he had met years earlier. Together in 1967, they created The Wall of Respect, a mural depicting African-American heroes. For his part, he focused on rhythm and blues, featuring portrayals of James Brown, B.B. King, Billie Holiday, Muddy Waters, Aretha Franklin, and Dinah Washington. Around 1967, he and his wife Jae, opened WJ Studio and Gallery, where he hosted regional artists and musicians. His gallery became an important focal point for African-American art in Chicago . Shortly after, he co-founded COBRA (Coalition of Black Revolutionary Artists), whose platform became an integral part of the artistic style Jarrell adopted: their artwork was to act as a visual statement focusing on a central figure, profound and proud; secondly, the artwork must be readily understood, so lettering would be used to extend and clarify the message—and it must be incorporated into the composition; thirdly, the message must identify a problem and offer a solution; and finally, it must educate within a perspective of time (history). Eventually, the group
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chose to expand to an international platform, and changed their name to AFRI-COBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists). The group showed extensively, becoming known for sociopolitical themes as subject matter and the use of coolade colors. Jarrell continues to explore the contemporary African-American experience through paintings, sculptures, and prints. His work is found at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, the High Museum of Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Cleveland Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, Brooklyn Museum, and the University of Delaware. Recently, Jarrell’s work has been featured in Africobra Nation Time at Venice Biennale, May 11, 2019 - November 24, 2019 His work is currently on show in the exhibition, Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983 at the deYoung Museum, San Francisco, CA;
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Howardena Pindell (b 1943) Autobiography: Present and Autobiography: Past (diptych), 1988-89 Serigraph in two parts, Edition 4/55, Signed, titled, dated, and numbered in pencil
Exhibited: Building on Tradition, The Collection of Dr. Dianne WhitfieldLocke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Hampton University Museum, October 12, 2013-December 7, 2013. Literature: International Review of African American Art, Vol. 24, 3B, a Hampton University publication, pp. 60-61.
$6,000-8,000 Pindell was involved in a serious automobile accident in 1979, and the experience influenced
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her to produce work that was more personal in nature as well as address the underappreciation for works by women of color—as she experienced earlier in her career. She called the entire project Autobiography and this series encapsulates work executed between 1980-1995. This work emulates the mixed-media work of the series, using imagery from postcards and photographs she had collected for years prior to the accident in a collage structure. Pindell had traveled extensively in Japan, India, Africa, Brazil, and Europe. She also began to regularly implement silhouettes of figures in the composition, oftentimes her own face and body. Pindell earned her B.F.A. at Boston University School of Fine and Applied Art, and an M.F.A. at Yale University, graduating in 1967. She then worked as an exhibition assistant and associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art. She began teaching at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1979. She exhibited extensively from 1970-present, and her work was recently included in these exhibitions: Soul of a Nation, Art in the Age of Black Power, originating at Tate Modern, London; Howardena Pindell, What Remains to Be Seen, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2018; and We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85, Brooklyn Museum, 2017.
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William Sylvester Carter (1909-1996) William Sylvester Carter was born in St. Louis, MO and moved to Chicago in 1930 to study art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Illinois. In order to earn room and board, Carter worked as a janitor at the Palette and Chisel Club (an all-white club, to which he became an honorary member in 1986). He was among the artists represented in the American Negro Exposition assembled by Alonzo Aden, with the Harmon Foundation and the WPA in Chicago, 1940. Carter was awarded first prize for a work in watercolor. The same year, he exhibited in the Art Institute of Chicago’s 19th International of Watercolors with a work simply titled, Study. Carter was also among those included in Alain Locke’s book The Negro in Art, a survey of African American artists. In 1942, he was represented in the show, American Negro Art, 19th and 20th Centuries held at the Downtown Gallery in New York. Carter worked for the WPA in Illinois in 1943, and taught art at the historic South Side Community Art Center. Carter worked in many styles and addressed virtually any subject matter from the traditional portrait to completely non-objective compositions. Carter’s greeting to a fellow artist was “Have you painted today?” Until his death at eightyseven years of age, Carter maintained he was “too young to have a painting style.” (REF: The Black Chicago Renaissance, Darlene Clark Hine and John McCluskey, Jr., University of Illinois Press, 2012, p. 188) His works are found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the DuSable Museum of African American Art, and the South Side Community Art Center.
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Still Life With Purple Plum, c. 1950
oil on canvas 18 x 32 inches signed
Provenance: The Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art, San Francisco, CA Literature: The Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art, Tyler Fine Art, 2019; 34. Selections from the Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art, Tyler Fine Art, 2019, 81.
$2,000-3,000
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Jim Alexander (b. 1935) Jim Alexander was born in Waldwick, New Jersey, one of thirteen children. When he turned 18, he decided to enlist in the US Navy. This decision would coincidentally influence the course of his life and career. In a dice game while he was at boot camp in Bainbridge, Maryland, he won a camera, and after some practice, began selling photos to other sailors for fifty cents each. While on a naval base in Charleston, he learned more about photography from the base photographer, and when he left the Navy he enrolled in the New York Institute of Photography. He earned a degree in commercial photography there (1968), and a certificate in Business Management at Rutgers University. Alexander began a lifelong project of documenting human rights and the Black experience after the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. He befriended Gordon Parks and Parks became a sort of mentor to Alexander. After hearing Alexander’s intention to devote his career to this cause, Parks replied, “that sounds good James, but your ass is going to starve, nobody is going to pay you to just run around shooting anything that interests you.” Alexander’s solution was to accept teaching jobs that would earn him a living and allow him to indulge his interest in more artistic (and less profitable) endeavors. In 1970, he moved to New Haven, CT, and taught at Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture’ Black Environmental Studies Team and The Black Workshop. In 1976, he moved to Atlanta, GA, to take a position as audiovisual communications director for the Atlanta Office of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, a non-profit established to save, protect, and expand the landholdings of African American family farmers in the South. Another interest of Alexander’s was music—from jazz to rock. He executed an extensive photoessay of legendary jazz great, Duke Ellington (highlighted in the publication, Duke and Other Legends). Two similar images may be seen in A Century of African American Art, The Paul R. Jones Collection, Amalia Amaki, editor, 2004, University of Delaware, pp. 184-185. REF: The Jim Alexander Collection , www.jimalexandercollection.com/biography Photo: Jim Alexander with Gordon Parks, Clark College, Atlanta, GA 1988.
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Duke #3, 1972
photograph 5 x 7-1/2 inches signed, titled, and dated
$500-700
Duke #11, 1972
photograph 5 x 7-1/2 inches signed, titled, and dated
$500-700
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Irene Clark (1927-1980) Portrait of a Girl, c. 1950
oil on board 7 x 5 inches signed
Provenance: The Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art, San Francisco, CA Literature: The Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art, Tyler Fine Art, 2019; p. 159.
$1,500-2,000 Painter, designer, and gallery director Irene Clark studied with the Art Institute of Chicago’s 414 Workshop, as well as at the San Francisco Art Institute. An accomplished realistic painter, Clark adopted an expressionistic, and later, naïve approach to painting, drawing particularly from folklore heard and read as a child.
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I try to project in my work a universal (embracing or comprehending) feeling or mood. It is really a truly spiritual expression that I hope will be enjoyed by all viewers. Black Artists on Art, Volume 1; Samella Lewis and Ruth Waddy, Contemporary Crafts, Inc. 1969, p. 10 Why folklore? As a child I was always fascinated by good stories. Having a vivid imagination, I made up fantasies of my own. After reading many stories, I had to try to paint the substance of what I had read.
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African American Art and Artists, Samella Lewis, U of California Press, 1978, p. 176 Clark was a member of The African-American Historical and Cultural Society and gallery director of the Exhibit Gallery and Studio in Chicago. Her work is found in the collections of the Oakland Museum of Art, CA and Atlanta University.
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William T. Williams (b. 1942) Karen’s Tale, 2008
serigraph 24 x 18 inches signed, titled, dated, and numbered 28/50
$1,500-2,000 William T. Williams was born in 1942 in North Carolina and raised in New York. He attended the Pratt Institute, where he earned his BFA and Yale University where he earned his MFA in 1968. Williams also studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Just one year after his graduation, his career took off in a monumental form. The Museum of Modern Art in New York purchased his work, Elbert Jackson, L.A.M.F. Part II. Williams participated several group exhibitions, including Afro-American Artists Since 1950, Brooklyn College Art Gallery, NY; the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. In addition, he curated the exhibition, X to the Fourth Power, which included his work along with Mel Edwards and Sam Gilliam, for the Studio Museum in Harlem. He also began teaching at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York - a position he held for four decades. His first solo exhibition was held at Reese Palley Gallery, NY in 1971. Williams has remained a committed abstractionist throughout his career, although not purely intellectual, rather he uses color and form to engage the viewer in the “intense emotional quality of memory.” Specifically Williams’ memories of his childhood in North Carolina, the pattern of a stained glass church window, or his grandmother’s quilts. In 1975, Williams began a collaboration with Robert Blackburn at his Printmaking Workshop. The two created 19 editions. Since then he has collaborated with the Brandywine Workshop and Lafayette College’s Experimental Printmaking Institute. Recent exhibitions include Generations: A History of Black Abstract Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, MD, 2019; Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983, de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA, through March 15 and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, April 26, 2020 — July 19, 2020; Black Refractions: Highlights from the Studio Museum in Harlem, Smith College Museum of Art, MA, through April 17, 2020 and Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA, May 9-Aug 2, 2020; With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985, Museum of Contemporary Art, LA, now through May 18, 2020. 132
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Gus Nall (1919-1995) Untitled (Abstract), c. 1960
oil on board 55-1/2 x 60 inches signed
Provenance: The Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art Literature: The Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art, Tyler Fine Art, 2019; p. 94.
$3,000-4,000 Gus Nall studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and in Paris. Nall studied with Eldzier Cortor and was also influenced by fellow Chicagoan, Archibald Motley, Jr. His subjects were elongated human figures executed in a surrealist or cubist manner. In turn, Nall influenced the work of young writer and painter, Clarence Major, who met Nall at the Art Institute and gave Major lessons in his studio/apartment. Nall exhibited regularly during the 1950’s-60’s in popular art fairs around the city, much like many of the local painters, including fellow South Side painter, Gertrude Abercrombie. Margaret Burroughs praised Nall’s work in Art Gallery Magazine (April 1968) when she was asked to report on the Chicago African American art scene. Nall was also mentioned in Black Power in the Arts (Carol Myers, Cornell University, 1970). His most well-known work, Lincoln Speaks to Freedmen on the Steps of the Capitol at Richmond (1963) was commissioned by the State of Illinois to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. This work is on permanent exhibit at the Du Sable Museum of African American History in Chicago.
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John Biggers (1924-2001) Born in North Carolina in 1924, John Biggers’ body of work experienced a constant evolution throughout his career. He was an accomplished draftsmen as well as muralist - adept at weaving southern AfricanAmerican and African culture together - incorporating sacred geometry and complex symbolic elements. Biggers attended Hampton Institute (University) in the early 1940s, and befriended Charles White and Elizabeth Catlett. Much of his early work was social realist - depicting the everyday hard work and perseverance of the African American community. In 1949, Biggers moved to Houston, TX and chaired the art department at Texas State University (later Texas Southern).
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The artist yearned to penetrate the invisible but very real curtain which seemed to separate American blacks from Africans. For 15 years, he tried and failed to get fellowships to Africa. Finally he made it in 1957, on a UNESCO grant which provided seven months of living and traveling through Ghana and western Nigeria. “I had a magnificent sense of coming home, of belonging,” he says - and he doesn’t mean it sentimentally. “I recognized at once the Africanisms in our life in America, which we simply had not been able to recognize and to claim,” Biggers asserts. The sight of African men and women building their own houses, hewing and shaping their own ax handles, weaving their own quilts, making their own chairs, impressed him deeply. “And it reminded me of my own childhood times in North Carolina.”
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-Ann Holmes, It is Almost Genetic, The ARTGallery Magazine, April 1970, p. 38. Biggers’ work may be found in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, NY; Atlanta University, GA; Barnett-Aden Collection, Washington D.C.; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Howard University, Washington D.C.; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
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Cloth Traders, 1958
black contÊ crayon on cream stock paper 40 x 59 inches signed and dated. Provenance: The Estate of Clara Meek, Houston, TX . Ms Meek was a dedicated attorney who supported many organizations, including TransAfrica, the NAACP, the National Council of Negro Women, the Houston Area Urban League, the African American Studies program at the University of Houston, and the Houston Area Women’s Center Guild, among many others. Illustrated: Ananse: The Web of Life in Africa, drawings and text by John Biggers, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1967: 76. The ARTGallery Magazine: The Afro-American Issue, April 1970: p.38.
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John Biggers (1924-2001) The Seed, 1983 lithograph 16-1/2 x 22 inches signed, titled, dated, and numbered 63/100 $3,000-4,000
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John Biggers (1924-2001) Family Unity, 1994
color lithograph 9-3/4 x 13-1/2 inches signed, titled, and dated inscribed AP1
$3,000-4,000
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John Biggers (1924-2001) The Return, 1997 color etching and aquatint on cream wove paper 16-3/4 x 12-1/2 inches signed, titled, dated, and numbered 55/60 $3,000-4,000
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John Biggers (1924-2001) Upper Room, 1984 color lithograph cream wove paper 38 x 26 inches signed, titled, dated, and numbered 66/75 $7,000-9,000
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John Biggers (1924-2001) Four Seasons, 1990
color lithograph on cream wove paper 22-1/2 x 31 inches signed, titled, dated and numbered 105/120 printed and published by Hand Graphics, Santa Fe, NM Provenance: Collection of Dr. Lindley T. Smith, Virginia
$6,000-8,000
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John Biggers (1924-2001) (Tom) Bass Park Mural Sketch (Houston, TX), 1987 graphite on two combined sheets of drawing paper 24 x 37-1/2 inches signed and titled Label verso: Hemphill, Washington, D.C.
Literature: Walls That Speak: The Murals of John Thomas Biggers, Ollie Jensen Theisen, University of North Texas Press, 2010, pp. 87, 88, 90, Provenance: Collection of Dr. Lindley T. Smith, Virginia
$20,000-30,000
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John Biggers (1924-2001) Biggers painted the Song of the Drinking Gourds outdoor mural on the exterior of the Senior Citizen Craft House in Tom Bass Regional Park outside of Houston. The building was designed by James Marshall, and set on a grassy knoll so the mural could be seen from many points in the park. Tom Bass was a Harris County commissioner who brought a sense of humanism to politics in the county. Bass had suggested Biggers for another mural (Adair). “The setting and the building and the wall filled me with thoughts of Mexico and the murals of Rivera.” (p.87) Texture and pattern predominate in Song of the Drinking Gourds. It almost appears that Biggers painted directly onto the concrete block surface—so successfully did he incorporate the building texture into the smooth prepared plaster wall. Creating an underlying quilt-like pattern, Biggers divided the entire wall into tiny triangular shapes, just as a quilt maker might when working with scraps of fabric, making every piece count. Bold shapes emerge from this painted quilt. At the center is a large blackbird hovering over a balaphon with gourds fastened below for resonance and tone. These are the only shapes not fragmented by the quilt pattern, and thus they form the natural focal point of the mural. To the left and the right, balanced symmetrically, are window-like forms that evolve first into quilt patterns and finally into a figure composed of an anvil and a wash pot. To the far left and far right are figures of a king atop a lion and a queen atop an elephant. There are connecting threads between the king and queen, and veiled forms within the window frames. (p.88) It may be then, that Song of the Drinking Gourds reflects John Biggers’s belief in the universality of the human spirit and the unique qualities of the individual soul. (p.90)
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Biggers at work on platform. (Walls That Speak: The Murals of John Thomas Biggers, Ollie Jensen Theisen, University of North Texas Press, 2010: 88.)
Detail, ascending blackbird with gourds. (Walls That Speak: The Murals of John Thomas Biggers, Ollie Jensen Theisen, University of North Texas Press, 2010: 89.)
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Alma Thomas (1891-1978) Expressionist painter and art educator Alma Thomas was born in Georgia in 1891. Her family moved to Washington D.C. while she was in her mid-teens, where she lived and worked for the rest of her life. Thomas enrolled in Howard University, studying under James V. Herring and became the first graduate of the newly organized art department in 1924. She began teaching after graduation, but continued studying art and painting part-time. In 1946, she joined Lois Mailou Jones’ Little Paris group, members of which sketched, painted and exhibited together in the Washington D.C. area. She studied painting at American University under Joe Summerford, Robert Gates, and Jacob Kainen; all of whom inspired her to look at the structure of a painting differently and use color as a single, qualitative element. When she retired, she began painting in earnest. Her work evolved from more traditional styles and themes to fully realized abstract works that explored color and composition which reflected her own unique vision of nature as well as incorporating influence from the Washington Color School. She was also known as a brilliant watercolorist. Her first retrospective exhibition, curated by James A. Porter, was held at Howard University in 1966. For this show, she created the Earth paintings, a series of works inspired by nature that resembled Byzantine mosaics. In 1972, she became the first African American woman to be given a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC. Soon after she exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. After seeing an exhibit of Matisse’s late gouache collages at the Museum of Modern Art, 1961, she began experimenting with rearranging geometric shapes. Thomas carefully calibrated the colors in the positive and the negative.
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Thomas’s work is found in many museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Phillips Collection, Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 2009, two of her paintings, Watusi (Hard Edge) and Sky Light were chosen by First Lady Michelle Obama to be exhibited during the Obama presidency. Several retrospective exhibitions have been dedicated to her work, including A Life in Art: Alma Thomas, 1891-1978, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., 1981; Alma W. Thomas: Retrospective Exhibition, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1972. The Columbus Museum, GA and the Chrysler Museum of Art, VA will be presenting a comprehensive retrospective of her work entitled, Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful in the summer of 2022. In addition to showing at these locations, the exhibition will also be presented at The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C. and the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN.
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Alma Thomas (1891-1978) Untitled, 1972 watercolor on paper 7 x 11 1/8 inches (image) 9 x 12 1/2 inches (sheet) Initialed AWT in a circle, recto; full signature on masking tape Provenance: Private collection, Washington D.C.
$40,000-60,000
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Alma Thomas (1891-1978) Untitled (Abstract), 1967
double-sided watercolor on paper 22 x 30 inches signed and dated
$65,000-85,000
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recto
verso
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Augusta Savage (1892-1962) The Harp (Lift Every Voice and Sing), 1939
metal with brown patina on green marble base 10-3/4 x 9-1/2 x 4 inches signed inscribed, World’s Fair 1939 Literature: Augusta Savage Renaissance Woman, Jeffreen M. Hayes, Cummer Museum, 2018, pp. 82-83.
$10,000-15,000 158
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Augusta Savage (1892-1962) Augusta Savage was born in Green Cove Springs, Florida. She had a knack for sculpting even as a small child, making mud ducks and selling them at the local fair. She married at the age of 15, but her husband died the following year, after having a child together. In 1915, her family moved to West Palm Beach, where she met a potter and acquired 25 pounds of clay. Her sculpture received much local attention, and through a series of events and support of teachers, Savage traveled to New York City in her quest to become a professional sculptor. She was admitted to the Cooper Union School, which was tuition-free, and finished her 4 year program in 3 years. She traveled abroad to France on scholarship and joined a group of black artists and intellectuals, including Hale Woodruff, Henry Tanner, and Countee Cullen. By the early 1930s, Savage was living in Harlem and had created a school, Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts. In 1933, she founded The Vanguard, a group of Harlem intellectuals who met in her studio to discuss politics, art, and the condition of the African American. In 1938, Savage was commissioned to do a sculpture for the New York World’s Fair, occurring the following year. Inspired by a song written by Rosamund and James Weldon Johnson, she produced the 16 foot painted plaster Lift Every Voice and Sing near the Contemporary Art Museum. Funds to have the work cast in bronze never materialized, and the sculpture was bulldozed at the closing of the fair. Only the small metal maquettes remain. The kneeling youth displaying a bar of musical notes and his offering have been symbolic of both the musical gifts of African Americans and the African background of African American music. The choir procession came forth from the hand of the Creator.
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Augusta Savage (1892-1962) Gamin, c. 1929
bronze 9h x 5-3/4w x 4-3/8d inches titled; signed verso Provenance The Estate of David Copley, former publisher of the San Diego Union-Tribune Private Collection, California Literature: The Evolution of Afro-American Artists 1800-1950, City University of New York; 1967, p. 23. Art: African American, Samella Lewis; 1978; p. 85. Augusta Savage Renaissance Woman, Jeffreen M. Hayes, Cummer Museum, 2018, pp. 68-69.
$20,000-30,000
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Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012) Head of a Woman, 1979 conté crayon on paper 18 x 16 inches signed and dated Provenance: The Estate of Clara Meek , Houston, TX
$15,000-20,000 Elizabeth Catlett was born in Washington D.C. She attended Howard University where she studied design, printmaking and drawing. She continued her graduate work at the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History, and in 1940 became the first African American student to receive an M.F.A. in sculpture from the school. Grant Wood instilled in her the idea of working with subjects that she, the artist, knew best. She was inspired to create Mother and Child in 1939 for her thesis. This limestone sculpture won first prize in its category at the American Negro Exposition in Chicago, 1940. Eager to continue her education, she studied ceramics at the Art Institute of Chicago (1941), lithography at the Art Students League of New York (194243), and independently with sculptor Ossip Zadkine in New York (1943). In 1946, Catlett received a Rosenwald Fellowship that allowed her to travel to Mexico City with her husband, Charles White, where she studied wood carving with Jose L. Ruiz and ceramic sculpture with Francisco Zuniga. There, she worked with the Taller de Grafica Popular, (People’s Graphic Arts Workshop), a group of printmakers dedicated to using their art to promote social change. The TGP inspired her to reach out to the broadest possible audience, which often meant balancing abstraction with figuration. After settling in Mexico and later becoming a Mexican citizen, she taught sculpture at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City until retiring in 1975. Catlett’s work has exhibited widely (most recently The Art of Elizabeth Catlett: From the Collection of Samella Lewis was presented at the University of Delaware, Sep 3-Dec 6, 2019) and her work is found in many important collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NY.
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Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012) Cabeza Cantando (Singing Head), c. 1968
bronze with bluish green patina 9-3/4 inches signed with artist’s initials EC
Provenance: The Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art, San Francisco, CA Literature: The Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art, Tyler Fine Art, 2019, p. 36. Selections From the Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art, Tyler Fine Art, 2019, p. 37. A version of this sculpture is illustrated in Four Generations: The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection of Abstract Art, Courtney J. Martin, editor, 2016, p. 60.
$18,000-22,000
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Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012) To Marry, 1992 color lithograph 22-1/2 x 18-1/2 (full sheet) signed and dated Artist’s Proof II Provenance: Private collection, Chicago, IL Literature: Elizabeth Catlett: Works on Paper, 1944-1992, Hampton University Museum, VA, 1993; p. 41.
$1,000-1,500
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Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012) Lovey Twice, 1976
lithograph on paper 15-3/4 x 21 inches (image) signed, titled, dated, and numbered 32/100 Provenance: The Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art, San Francisco, CA Literature: The Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art, Tyler Fine Art, 2019, p. 37.
$2,200-2,800
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Betye Saar (b. 1926) Saar was born in Los Angeles, and moved with her family to Pasadena in the early 1930s. She first studied design at Pasadena City College and interior design at UCLA. This strong design-centered background would prove to be highly influential in her mature work in fine art. She was close friends with two other L.A. artists, Curtis Tann and William Pajaud. Saar and Tann actually started an enamel design business which was featured in Ebony in 1951. After graduating, from the late 50s through the mid-1960s, Saar was primarily interested in print-making, producing color etchings and intaglio prints. During the turmoil of the 1960s, the Watts riots, and the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., Saar’s work began to shift to collage and assemblage, reclaiming and repurposing personal objects she inherited as well as negatively-charged objects she found at LA flea markets. She believed that a universality of international culture could be connected by reclaiming objects and artifacts from other cultures to be used in her own constructs of perspective. She was inspired further by a visit to a retrospective exhibition of Joseph Cornell at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1967. Saar comments:
“
There has been an apparent thread in my art that weaves from my early prints of the 1960s through later collages and assemblages and ties into the current installations. I am intrigued with combining the remnants of memories, fragments of relics, and ordinary objects with the component of technology. It’s a way of delving into the past and reaching into the future simultaneously. The art itself becomes the bridge.
”
Saar exhibited extensively throughout the 1970s and on, including: Whitney Museum of American Art, NY;Wadsworth Athenaeum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Studio Museum in Harlem; MOCA, Los Angeles; University of Connecticut, Hartford; Santa Monica Museum of Art, and the National Gallery, Washington D.C. Her work is in numerous important public and private collections including the Brooklyn Museum, NY; MOMA, NY; The Oakland Museum, CA; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA.
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Mystic Sky with Self Portrait, 1992
color offset lithograph with paper construction, 21-7/16 x 25-1/4 inches, signed and dated, edition: 100, 10 artist’s proofs, 2 printer’s proofs; 50/100. Printers: James Hughes and Robert W. Franklin Exhibited: Building on Tradition, The Collection of Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Hampton University Museum, October 12, 2013-December 7, 2013. Literature: International Review of African American Art, Vol. 24, 3B, a Hampton University publication, p. 57. Full Spectrum: Prints from the Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2012, p. 66
$6,000-8,000 173
Beulah Ecton Woodard (1895-1955) Bad Boy, 1937 (conceived in 1936)
bronze 6-3/4 x 5-1/2 x 5-1/4 inches signed and dated incised founder’s mark, Helli-Art-Bronze-Works-LA Provenance: The Golden State Mutual Life African-American Art Collection Swann Auction Galleries, lot 4, October 4, 2007 Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Maryland Exhibited: Building on Tradition, The Collection of Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Hampton University Museum, October 12, 2013-December 7, 2013. Literature: Creating Their Own Image - The History of African-American Women Artists, p. 95, figure 4.17, Lisa Farrington, 2005. (A different example) 3 Generations of African American Women Sculptors: A Study in Paradox, catalog to the exhibition at the Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum, Philadelphia, PA. Lizetta LeFalle-Collins, “Working from the Pacific Rim, Beulah Woodard and Elizabeth Catlett”, p. 42 (1996). Bearing Witness: Contemporary Works by African American Women Artists, Jontyle Theresa Robinson, Curator, Spelman College and Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1996, p. 66. International Review of African American Art, Vol. 24, 3B, a Hampton University publication, p. 30.
$12,000-18,000 Woodard founded the Los Angeles Negro Art Association in 1937. A proponent of the New Negro movement, Woodard aspired to promote a “better understanding of the African with his rich historical background.” One L.A. reporter spoke in support of Woodard’s realism: “Not for her [Woodard] the fol-de-rols [sic] of abstraction, to create which one needs only ingenuity. What counts with her is something more worthwhile—to wit, emotion.” REF: Fine Arts at Spelman, 9; King-Hammond, “Quest for Freedom”, 28. Broude and Garrard, Power of Feminist Art, 13. (Both quoted in Farrington)
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Beulah Ecton Woodard (1895-1955) Beulah Woodard was born in rural Ohio in 1895 and largely raised in California where she eventually graduated from the Polytechnic High School in Los Angeles with a degree in architectural drawing. She was living in Chicago when she married in 1928. When the couple later returned to Los Angeles, Woodard was offered significant financial support or her study abroad by a wealthy benefactress, under the condition that she present herself as an American Indian. Woodard refused - opting to study art with the help of private tutors and by attending classes at the Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles Art School, and the University of Southern California. From an early age, she had shown interest in ethnology and indigenous African cultures. She spent a great deal of time studying these subjects and her early works were meticulously researched and detailed renderings of African masks and peoples intended to educate African Americans on their heritage. She was adept at working with clay, plaster, wood, copper, metal, oils, and papier-machÊ. In 1935, several of her works were displayed in the office windows of the California News. An illustrated article was also published. Miriam Matthews, the first black librarian in Los Angeles, invited Woodard to exhibit the works at the Vernon Branch Library. The exhibition was then shown at the Los Angeles Central Library. An exhibition of her masks was held at the Los Angeles County Museum - she was the first African American to show there and it brought national attention. Woodard’s work was in high demand now, with important commissions for busts of well-known Los Angelenos. She began to focus on creating realistic images of African Americans. Hard at work with her sculpting, she organized the Los Angeles Negro Art Association in 1937. She exhibited two terra cotta pieces, Bad Boy and Fulah Kunda, along with four other works with the group.
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In 1950, Woodard organized the Eleven Associated Artists Gallery whose aim was to encourage young artists and develop public appreciation of the work of Negro artists. Alice Taylor Gafford and William Pajaud were among its members. In 1953, she received a Purchase Award for sculpture at the All City Art Festival held at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Woodard died in 1955. She had been scheduled to exhibit her work in Germany. Her sculpture, Maudelle, is in the collection of the Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of Missouri, Columbia. Photo: The artist; Miriam Matthews Collection, California Afro-American Museum, Los Angeles, CA.
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Beulah Ecton Woodard (1895-1955) Young Boy (Chuck), 1954
painted clay (fired) 12-1/2 x 10 x 6 inches signed and dated. “B.Woodard” and "9-54” Provenance: The Golden State Mutual Life African-American Art Collection Swann Auction Galleries, lot 10, October 4, 2007 The Collection of Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Maryland
$12,000-18,000 In 1925, the fledgling operation which was to become the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company was formed. In those days the company existed solely to provide Blacks with insurance, a commodity which was denied them by other financial institutions. Because of its origin, and the fact that GSM remains completely Black-owned and operated [1976], the company has been closer to the lives of its policy owners and the Black community in general, than most financial institutions could ever be. Along with its services as an insurance company, GSM committed itself to giving its support to all facets of life in the Black community. Various programs, designed to help alleviate social, economic and educational problems were devised. Among the latter was a cultural endeavor which was destined to offer the community the company’s most important service of a non-business nature. This was the Afro-American Art Collection. -Francine Carter, Black Art: An International Quarterly, Winter, 1976, p. 12.
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John Wilson (1922-2015) Mother and Child, 1952 lithograph on paper 22-1/2 x 18-1/2 inches signed, titled, and dated numbered 43/50
$4,000-6,000 John Wilson was a Boston painter, sculptor and printmaker who was influenced by the Mexican muralists, in terms of both style and subject matter, and addressed issues of racism and oppression of African American people in his art. He grew up in Roxbury and took art classes at Roxbury Memorial High School before continuing his education at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He also studied in Paris with Fernand Leger. Upon his return to the U.S., he married Julie Kowitch, a teacher, and traveled to Mexico. He later taught at Pratt University in New York, and Boston University. Wilson’s bronze sculpture of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., is on permanent display at the Capitol Rotunda in Washington , D.C. This image, Mother and Child, is reproduced in American Negro Art, by Cedric Dover on page 23. It was exhibited in the Atlanta University Art Annual in 1952.
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Richmond BarthÊ (1901-1989) Catalog note: The following works by Richmond Barthe come from the collection of Jerry Manpearl and Jan Goodman, Los Angeles. Mr. Manpearl is a real estate, civil rights, and civil litigation lawyer in the state of California. He received his B.A. from UC Berkeley and then his law degree at UCLA, where he met artists Samella Lewis, Ruth Waddy, and E.J. Montgomery. Samella Lewis first arrived in Southern California in 1966 and took a position teaching at Cal State Long Beach. Two years later, she began working for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as a coordinator of education, but she became disenfranchised with the institution and set out on her own, planning a combination of ambitious projects that would help change the landscape of African American art in the region. First, she and Ruth Waddy published two books, Black Artists on Art (2 volumes, in 1969 and 1971). These books help connect working black artists across the country as well as familiarize the public with their work. Secondly, she formed the Museum of African American Art, now located at 4005 Crenshaw Blvd, in the Macy’s Building, Los Angeles, CA. Lewis opened a place called The Gallery on Redondo Blvd, and with the moral and financial support of her sister Millie, and a small group of friends, they opened the museum. The group was operating on a shoestring, and leaned on their friend, Jerry Manpearl, to act as their lawyer to help with these projects. (continued)
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The year was 1976, the same year Richmond Barthe arrived in Pasadena, with the entirety of his personal belongings: a television and a modeling table. Charles White and his wife had found him a small apartment. Barthe was an acquaintance of the actor/director Ivan Dixon, and Dixon introduced his friend to Samella Lewis shortly after his [Barthe’s] arrival in L.A. Two years later (1978), Dixon introduced Barthe to a co-worker, Nanette Turner, who decided to interview him and submit an article to the Inner City Cultural Center, who published a multicultural magazine of the arts. Dixon was directing an episode of the television show, The Rockford Files, and upon hearing the story of Barthe and reading the article, actor James Garner (the star of the show), requested a meeting with the artist. Barthe was involved in an issue of possible copyright infringement, as a collector wanted to reproduce two of his images—seemingly without permission. Within the circle of acquaintances, Jerry Manpearl was contacted to help the artist. Manpearl aided Barthe in properly copyrighting his images so they would not fall into the public domain, and set up a trust to protect the accounts of the artist. The trio of Lewis, Garner, and Manpearl turned the elderly artist’s life around. Once copyrighted, Garner funded the casting of editions of Barthe’s sculptures, under the supervision of the artist. The revenue from these sculptures, supplemented by financial support from Garner (Mr. Manpearl, stated in an interview that Garner put Barthe on his payroll for the remainder of the artist’s life) provided support for the artist. Barthe celebrated his 81st birthday in 1982 on the set of The Rockford Files, and five years later, in 1987, The Museum of African American Art honored Barthe for his achievements in the art world. Jerry Manpearl is the co-founder of the Paul Robeson Community Wellness Center in Los Angeles and President of the Southern California World Trade Association. He clerked for the Chief Justice of the California Courts of Appeal. Through his interest in the visual arts, Manpearl has lent his services to many artists, including Elizabeth Catlett and Samella Lewis, both of whom, like Barthe, are represented in his collection.
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Barthé was born in Bay St Louis, Mississippi. He left in 1924, headed for Chicago to study at the Art Institute. It wasn’t until Richmond Barthé’s senior year there that he was introduced to sculpting--in an effort to improve his skill at fleshing out three dimensional forms on canvas. A bust completed in his introductory class was included in the Art Institute’s juried exhibition, The Negro in Art, in 1927. This led to commissions for busts of Henry O. Tanner and Toussaint L’Ouverture. He had been awarded two Rosenwald Fellowships in 1929 and 1930, and so after graduation, he moved to New York, focused on establishing himself as a sculptor, set up a studio in Harlem, and continued studying at the Art Student’s League. Both the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased sculptures for their permanent collections. Throughout his career he created intimate portrait busts, large scale public commissions, and studies of the human figure. His work may be found in the public collections of Fisk University, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In a review of his first solo exhibition, Edward Alden Jewell, art critic for the New York Times commented,
“
Richmond Barthé penetrates far beneath the surface, honestly seeking essentials, and never after finding these essentials, stooping to polish off an interpretation with superficial allure. There is no cleverness, no slickness in this sculpture. Some of the readings deserve, indeed, to be called profound.
”
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Richmond Barthé (1901-1989) Girl Putting Flower in Hair, 1965/1987 bronze on a marble base 20 inches high signed, dated 87, AP
Provenance: Collection of Jerry Manpearl and Jan Goodman This work was originally conceived and executed while Barthé was living in Jamaica. Literature: Barthé His Life in Art, Dr. Samella Lewis, published by Unity Works in collaboration with the Museum of African American Art Los Angeles, CA, 2009; color plate, unpaginated.
$22,000-25,000
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Richmond BarthĂŠ (1901-1989) Inner Music, c. 1961/1986 bronze on marble base 23-1/2 inches high signed and dated 86, AP
Provenance: Collection of Jerry Manpearl and Jan Goodman Literature: This work appears in an image in Barthe, A Life in Sculpture, Margaret Rose Vendryes, 2008; p. 171. BarthĂŠ His Life in Art, Dr. Samella Lewis, Published by Unity Works in collaboration with the Museum of African American Art Los Angeles, CA, 2009; p.18.
$55,000-65,000
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Richmond Barthé (1901-1989) Paul Robeson as Othello, c. 1974-1975/1986 bronze on a marble base 17-1/2 inches high signed and dated 86, AP
Literature: This work appears in an image in Barthe, A Life in Sculpture , Margaret Rose Vendryes, 2008; p. 181 and dated 1974. This image is pictured in Samella Lewis’ Barthe, His Art in Life, 2009, p.125, dated 1975.
“
Vendryes writes about Paul Robeson as Othello (pp. 180-181) In the spring of 1973, Actor’s Equity commissioned Barthe to model a bust, Paul Robeson as Othello. This forced him to buy new materials and to work, because a new piece always held the promise of a grand success. Barthe’s landlord was also excited since he had not received rent for several months. Then, no matter how hard Barthe tried, Robeson’s face eluded him. Leaving Florence penniless, Barthe returned to Paris searching for inspiration and grounding. And the city of light absorbed him….Unfinished work actually kept Barthe lucid. He took great pride in finishing every commission he ever accepted, and Paul Robeson as Othello was successfully completed after Barthe returned to Florence. $75,000-95,000
”
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Richmond BarthÊ (1901-1989) Masai Warrior, c. 1933/1986 bronze on a marble base 8-1/2 inches high signed and dated 86, AP Provenance: Collection of Jerry Manpearl and Jan Goodman Literature: This work appears in an image in Barthe, A Life in Sculpture , Margaret Rose Vendryes, 2008; p. 166, and titled, African Man (in plaster). This image is pictured in Samella Lewis’ Barthe, His Art in Life, 2009, pp.96-97.
$22,000-26,000
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Charles White (1918-1979) Love Letter III, 1977 color lithograph on cream wove paper 30-1/16 x 22-5/8 inches signed, dated, titled, and numbered 26/30 in pencil Provenance: Private collection, Houston. Literature: Charles White A Retrospective, Sarah Kelly Oehler and Esther Adler, 2018, cat. 89.
$8,000-10,000
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Charles White (1918-1979) As a child, Charles White, preferred to retreat into a world of reading and drawing. Gradually he became more outspoken, influenced by Alain Locke’s The New Negro. As a student at Englewood High School, alongside other future notables such as Margaret Burroughs, Eldzier Cortor, and Charles Sebree, he often clashed with his teachers over their whitewashing of historical subjects. He joined George Neal’s Art Crafts Guild and gathered at the studio of Morris Topchevsky, where he was able to further explore his views of art, politics, and the role of the African American in society. White graduated high school in 1937 and went on to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was subsequently hired by the Illinois Art Project in the easel division, but transferred to the mural division, where he worked with Edward Millman and Mitchell Siporin. His first major mural, Five Great American Negroes, was completed in 1940. His work was also exhibited at the American Negro Exposition, winning several awards. White married Elizabeth Catlett in 1941 after meeting her at the South Side Community Art Center, and the pair moved to New Orleans where they both taught at Dillard University. Two consecutive Rosenwald scholarships allowed him to study lithography at the Art Student’s League of New York with Harry Sternberg, as well as travel the Southern United States. He used this opportunity to observe and paint black farmers and laborers for his mural, The Contribution of the Negro to the Democracy of America. Catlett and White relocated to Mexico where they both became involved with the Taller Grafica de Popular. After their divorce, White returned to New York City. His work retained a figurative style which stood in stark contrast to the burgeoning abstract movement occurring at the time. He used drawings, linocuts, and woodcuts to celebrate the historical figures who resisted slavery, as well as ordinary African Americans struggling amid great social injustice in
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a post-slavery America. Despite their small size, these works conveyed the
power of a mural. In New York in the 1940s and early 1950s, White showed his work at the progressive ACA Gallery and was a prominent member of African American and leftist artist communities. White moved to Southern California in 1956, and his career flourished as he embraced drawing and printmaking more fully, pushing at the boundaries of his media while continuing to engage with civil rights and equality. Despite his rejection of the prevailing style of Abstract Expressionism and ongoing use of an expressive figuration, he found critical acclaim in the United States and abroad. White was the second African American to be inducted into the National Academy of Art and Design in 1975. Charles White: A Retrospective was held at the Art Institute of Chicago (2018). This exhibition traveled to the Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2019).
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Charles White (1918-1979) Sound of Silence, 1978 sepia lithograph 30 x 40 inches signed, titled, dated, and numbered Provenance: The Collection of Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Maryland Exhibited: Building on Tradition, The Collection of Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Hampton University Museum, October 12, 2013-December 7, 2013. Literature: International Review of African American Art, vol. 24, 3B, Hampton University Museum, VA, p. 9.
$8,000-10,000
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Grafton Tyler Brown (1841-1918) Untitled; Scene on the Mississippi approximately 25 miles north of Winona, Minnesota, c. 1897-1905 oil on canvas 23 x 46 inches signed “G.T. Brown” lower left
Provenance: Kramer Fine Art, Minneapolis, Minnesota Private Collection, Minneapolis, Minnesota
$100,000-150,000 This work by Grafton Tyler Brown of the Mississippi River just south of St Paul, Minnesota is very rare. Brown came to St Paul to work for the United States Army Corps of Engineers in 1893 as a draftsman, and from 1897 to 1910, he worked in the Civil Engineering Department for the city of St Paul, Minnesota as a draftsman. Although he was listed in the St Paul city directories as an artist and draftsman, works from this period and of this subject are exceedingly scarce. Even beyond the scope of Grafton Tyler Brown’s work, this image is highly significant historically to the area of the Upper Mississippi.
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Grafton Tyler Brown (1841-1918) Grafton Tyler Brown was a painter, graphic designer, and lithographer who worked in California in the late 19th century. Brown worked in Peter S. Duval’s print shop in Philadelphia in the 1850s. By 1865, he had founded his own lithography business in San Francisco, designing stock certificates for a wide variety of companies ranging from ice to mining corporations, as well as admission tickets, maps, sheet music and advertisements. In the 1870s, Brown moved to Victoria, British Columbia to work on a geographical survey for the Canadian government. He held his first exhibition of paintings in 1883 in Victoria, which included 22 local landscapes. Brown lived in Portland from 1886-1889 and Wyoming in 1891, before returning to California, all the while painting the local scenery. In 1892, he left the West and moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, where he worked as a draftsman and civil engineer. Brown lived out his remaining 25 years in St. Paul, Minnesota. Right: The artist at work in his studio; Collection of British Columbia Archives and Records Service.
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Selma Burke (1900-1995) Although Selma Burke displayed an early aptitude for sculpting, it wasn’t until the early stages of midlife that she actively pursued art as a career. She was initially employed as the private nurse of a wealthy heiress, who later became a supportive patron. Burke received her M.F.A. from Columbia University at the age of 41 and became involved with the Harlem Artists Guild and the WPA. During the 1930s, she traveled across Europe studying and honing her skills as a painter under Aristide Maillol of Paris and ceramics under Wiener Werkstatte master, Michael Powolny in Vienna. The refinement of her craft as a sculptor throughout her career led to important commissions for relief portraits of FDR, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Duke Ellington among others. The portrait she created of FDR served as the model for his image on the US dime used today. Burke was also a dedicated educator, opening the Selma Burke School of Sculpture in New York City in 1940 and the Selma Burke Art Center in Pittsburgh, PA in 1968. A nine-foot statue of Martin Luther King, Jr. she completed while in her eighties is on display in Marshall Park in Charlotte, North Carolina. Burke was recognized by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 for her contribution to African American art history. Her work may be found in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Spelman College, GA; Atlanta University, GA; and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NY.
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Reclining Nude, 1950 bronze with dark brown patina 13 x 6-1/2 x 5-3/4 inches signed and dated Roman Bronze Works NY Provenance: The Collection of Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, MD Exhibited: Building on Tradition, The Collection of Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Hampton University Museum, October 12, 2013-December 7, 2013. Literature: International Review of African American Art, vol. 24, 3B, Hampton University Museum, VA, p. 16.
$10,000-15,000
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Norman Wilfred Lewis (1909-1979) Untitled, from the Seachange series, 1976
oil and ink on paper 21 x 27 inches signed and dated 1/14/76
Provenance: The Collection of Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Maryland Exhibited: Building on Tradition, The Collection of Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Hampton University Museum, October 12, 2013-December 7, 2013. Literature: International Review of African American Art, vol. 24, 3B, Hampton University Museum, VA, p. 43. $20,000-25,000 Although Norman Lewis began his career predominantly as a social realist, he grew increasingly dissatisfied with the genre’s ability to manifest societal change. He began to explore abstraction in the mid-1940’s, developing a personal style consisting of a cast of calligraphic figures reminiscent of pictographs. From 1946 to 1964, Lewis was represented by the Willard Gallery, where he had six solo shows and participated in two group exhibitions. Like most African American artists of the time, he straddled two worlds, one of the African American artist, the other that of the abstractionist. He co-founded the Harlem Artist’s Guild, 1935 and the Spiral Group, 1963, as well as the Cinque Gallery. He was the only African American included in the Studio 35 sessions, organized by Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline to define abstract expressionism. The Museum of Modern Art subsequently included his work in the exhibition, Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America. Lewis’ first retrospective exhibition was held in 1976 at the Graduate Center of City College, New York. His work is found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Museum of Modern Art; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; Studio Museum in Harlem; and Whitney Museum of American Art. His work was featured in the recent exhibition, Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis, held in 2015 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
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Norman Wilfred Lewis (1909-1979) The Red Umbrella, 1973
etching printed with orange intaglio with gray relief on off-white wove paper 11-3/4 x 15-7/8 inches (image) 20 x 23-1/2 inches (sheet) edition of 50 signed Norman Lewis OBL (by Ouida Lewis - his wife) titled 9/50; second edition Provenance: The Collection of Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Maryland An edition is in the Studio Museum in Harlem. Literature: Ruth Fine, Procession The Art of Norman Lewis, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 2016: p. 140.
$5,000-7,000
“
Lewis’s first foray in to color intaglio was The Red Umbrella. Continuous line distinguishes much of the row of pictographic figures, integrating form and their motion. Some of the figures are defined by orthogonals surrounded by spirals, suggesting twirling dancers. Others seem to hold brass or percussion instruments, but their shapes suggest vibration or resonance instead of form. An umbrella can be seen at the left, giving the print its name. The Red Umbrella was a popular print - the only one of Lewis’s career; it eventually sold out its inscribed edition of 20 impressions. The prints of Norman Lewis reflect an open, creative personality; voracious in his influences, stylistically and technically he was a versatile talent who could set his hand to anything. Curious about the disciplines of the graphic arts and the quality of its products, he seems to have made prints for diversion, to experiment with imagery and details of style, and to develop technical skills applicable to his paintings and unique works on paper.
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-David Acton, Jammin’ at the Press, Procession The Art of Norman Lewis, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 2016: pp.129-130
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Robert Duncanson (1821-1872) 19th century painter best known for his lushly detailed landscapes, Robert S. Duncanson was born in Seneca County, NY in 1821. As a teenager, he worked as a housepainter and glazier in Michigan and taught himself fine art by copying prints and drawing still lifes and portraits. He moved to Cincinnati, then known as the Athens of the West, and became an itinerant artist - working between Cincinnati, Monroe, Michigan, and Detroit painting portraits. In 1842, three of his portraits appeared in the second exhibition held at the Cincinnati Academy of Fine Arts. As he continued to work from town to town, the concept of landscape painting began to hold appeal. In 1848 he was commissioned by anti-slavery activist Charles Avery to paint Cliff Mine, Lake Superior, after which he focused entirely on landscape painting. Duncanson and fellow painters William Sonntag and T. Worthington Whittredge, embarked on a series of sketching trips - the results of which Duncanson turned into some of his best work - transforming the Ohio River Valley into romantic landscapes with literary allusions. In 1851, he received a commission to paint eight landscape murals for the Belmont Mansion in Cincinnati. The mansion is now the Taft Museum of Art and the murals, which were covered and rediscovered in 1933 , are on display at the museum. With his growing patronage, Duncanson was able to travel to Europe. When he returned, he worked in the photography studio of James Presley Ball, an African American photographer. They created the anti-slavery panoramic painting, Mammoth Pictorial Tour of the United States Comprising Views of the African Slave Trade, which toured the country. Duncanson left for Canada at the onset of the Civil War. He settled in Montreal, painting Canadian landscapes and inspiring the creation of the first Canadian school of landscape painting. After two years he headed for England and Scotland where he had many royal patrons. By the time he returned stateside, the Civil War had ended and Duncanson, with several years of landscape painting under his belt throughout his travels, enjoyed greater recognition in the art world. In the final years of his life, Duncanson was afflicted with dementia, which may have been brought about by lead poisoning, but also may have been exacerbated by the stress associated with living in two worlds - one, AfricanAmerican, the other - a white world that was filled with contradicting elements - and having to forge a new African American identity in a post-Civil War America. He died in 1872 at the age of 51. 212
Hunting in the Woods, 1846
oil on canvas 13 x 18-1/2 inches signed and dated
Provenance: The Collection of Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Maryland Literature: International Review of African American Art, vol. 24, 3B, Hampton University Museum, VA, p. 24. Exhibited: Robert S. Duncanson: The Spiritual Striving of the Freedman’s Son , The Thomas Cole Historic Site, Catskill, NY , 2011. Building on Tradition, The Collection of Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Hampton University Museum, October 12, 2013-December 7, 2013.
$35,000-45,000 Duncanson’s work is found in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum; National Museum of African American History and Culture; Detroit Institute of Arts; Cincinnati Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, among many others. 213
Edward Mitchell Bannister (1828-1901) Heading Home from Haymaking, c. 1880 oil on board 14 x 10 inches initialed lower right
Provenance: The Collection of Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Maryland Exhibited: Building on Tradition, The Collection of Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Hampton University Museum, October 12, 2013-December 7, 2013. Literature: International Review of African American Art, vol. 24, 3B, Hampton University Museum, VA, p. 26.
$7,500-9,500 Edward Bannister is one of the first African American artists to achieve recognition in the United States during his lifetime. His tonalist paintings reflect a considerable influence from the Barbizon school in subject matter and technique. Bannister painted nature with such reverence that it wouldn’t be inaccurate to state that he may have also been influenced by the modern Transcendentalist themes of nature and spirituality that were prevalent in the northeastern United States at the time. Originally from Canada, Bannister settled in Boston at the age of 20 and studied at the Lowell Institute with William Rimmer. He eventually moved to Providence, Rhode Island with his wife, Christiana Cartreaux, a Narragansett Indian. In 1876, his painting, Under the Oaks won first prize at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition and caused considerable disruption. Bannister emerged with his title upheld and career as a serious artist firmly established. Bannister co-founded the Providence Art Club and continued to paint with considerable community support. He was the only major African-American artist of the late nineteenth century who developed his talents without the benefit of European exposure. REF: Free within Ourselves: African-American Artists in the Collection of the National Museum of American Art (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art in Association with Pomegranate Art Books, 1992)
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William Artis (1914-1977) Untitled, Head of a Boy, c. 1940 cast bronze with medium brown patina (from a terra cotta image, 1940) 9 x 7 x 5-1/2 inches (without base) 6 x 5 x 5 inches (base) signed This is a rare bronze version of an image Artis originally executed in terra cotta (pictured in: Against the Odds African-American Artists and the Harmon Foundation, Gary Reynolds and Beryl Wright, 1989, p. 153; and Black Artists on Art, vol 2, Samella Lewis and Ruth Waddy, 1970, p. 86-87) Provenance: The Collection of Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Maryland Exhibited: Building on Tradition, The Collection of Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Hampton University Museum, October 12, 2013-December 7, 2013. Literature: International Review of African American Art, vol. 24, 3B, Hampton University Museum, VA, p. 16.
$20,000-30,000 Prominent African American sculptor, ceramicist, and educator, William Ellsworth Artis was born in Washington, North Carolina in 1914. He relocated to Harlem in 1926 where he studied sculpture and pottery at the Augusta Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts in the early 1930’s. Artis won the John Hope prize, in association with the Harmon Foundation for his terra cotta sculpture, Head of a Girl. This allowed him to receive further instruction at the Art Student’s League in New York in 1933. Two years later he was awarded a second John Hope prize which he used to continue his education at the Craft Student’s League. It was his work of this period that he is best known for – a series of terra cotta and stoneware heads of African American youths, Art Deco in style, which according to the St. James Guide to Black Artists, possess an “introverted impassivity and spiritual appeal.” Important early exhibitions for Artis include the Whitney Museum of American Art; New York City Art Center, 1933; Art Students League, 1933; Salons of America, 1934; Harlem Art Committee, 1935; Texas Centennial, 1936; National Arts Club, New York City, 1940; American Negro Exposition, Chicago, 1940; Syracuse Museum Fine Arts, 1940, 1947-51; Grace Horne Galleries, Boston, 1942; Atlanta University (Annuals), 1944, 1951; USO Exhibition, New York City, 1944. 216
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Artis’ compositions reflect his personality. They are not political or social, nor do they express current problems of any kind; rather, they are profound statements of human aspirations. A deep concern for human beings is seen, for example, in his sensitive treatment of form: his sculptures seem to breathe, and the essence of gentle life flows from each base through to the highest point.
”
- Samella Lewis, African American Art and Artists. 217
Aaron Douglas (1899-1979) Mr. Baker, c. 1935 oil on board 16 x 12 inches signed
The preparatory drawing for this painting was reproduced in the Cedric Dover book, American Negro Art, 1960. Provenance: The Collection of Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Maryland Exhibited: Building on Tradition, The Collection of Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Hampton University Museum, October 12, 2013-December 7, 2013. Literature: International Review of African American Art, vol. 24, 3B, Hampton University Museum, VA, p. 5.
$20,000-30,000
Mr. Baker A Sketchbook study Mr. Baker was a farming philosopher, who reached adolesence in slavery. It was a privilege to know him-as a person and as a symbol of the wise, courageous and creative ancestry of the Negro people of America. American Negro Art, Cedric Dover, p. 11.
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Aaron Douglas (1899-1979) Aaron Douglas was born in Topeka, Kansas in 1899. After he graduatued high school, Douglas moved to Detroit, Michigan, working odd jobs while taking classes at the Detroit Insitute of Arts. Later, he attended the University of Nebraska where he received his BFA degree in 1922. After teaching for a time at Lincoln High School in Kansas City, Missouri, Douglas moved to New York City in 1925 to be a part of Alain Locke’s New Negro Movement. There, he studied with German/American portrait artist, Winold Reiss, who encouraged Douglas to introduce African imagery and themes into his paintings. As Douglas developed this individual style, he became the figure to which the Harlem Renaissance aspired to emulate. Murals and drawings were his primary focus early in his career. He did illustrations for a number of publications, including Opportunity and The Crisis. In 1934, he was commissioned to do a series of murals at the Countee Cullen Branch of the New York Public Library. This was to be Douglas’ most well known mural series. The series consists of four chronological compositions highlighting African-American heritage and history. A series of concentric circles expanded from a fixed point, figure elements superimposed on its background. The person, or object, would bear several diffused shades of the same color, lending his work a dreamlike quality. These murals were especially noteworthy for their chromatic complexity and sophisticated design. Aaron Douglas received two Rosenwald Fellowships, one for study in France and the other to tour Haiti and the American South. He was also elected president of the Harlem Artists Guild in 1935 and worked to obtain WPA recognition and support for African-American artists. In 1937, he founded and chaired the Art Department at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he remained involved until 1966. Douglas died in Nashville in 1979. His work may be found in the collections of Fisk University, TN; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; and the de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA. Douglas’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions. The retrospective, Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist held in 2008 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum toured nationally and showed nearly 100 works including paintings, prints, drawings and illustrations.
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Sargent Johnson (1888-1967) Girl With Braids, c. 1945-49
black Oaxacan clay 8-1/2 x 2 x 2 inches signed
Provenance: The artist to Lawrence Pitt, 1965. The Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art Exhibited: Sargent Johnson Retrospective, The Oakland Museum, 1971 Literature: Sargent Johnson (1888-1967): Works in the Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art, Tyler Fine Art, 2019, p. 52. The Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art, Tyler Fine Art, 2019, p. 174
$10,000-15,000
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Sargent Johnson (1888-1967) Sargent Johnson was best known as a modernist sculptor, influenced by the cultures of Mexico, Latin America, and West Africa. Born in 1887, to a father of Swedish descent and a mother of Cherokee and African American heritage, Johnson and his siblings could have passed for white, but he remained firmly aligned with his African American heritage. In fact, the aim of his art was, according to him, to show African Americans how beautiful they were to themselves. Johnson was orphaned at an early age and sent to live with an uncle, whose wife, May Howard Jackson, happened to be a well-known sculptor of African American portrait busts. He received his first formal art training at the Worcester Art School in Boston, later relocating to the West Coast in 1915, where he studied at the A.W. Best School of Art and the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. He studied with Ralph Stackpole, as well as Benjamin Bufano, whose work influenced his artistic output greatly in the 1920’s. At this time, Johnson’s work consisted of small scale ceramic heads, primarily of children. He became a regular exhibitor in the Harmon Foundation exhibitions between 1926 to 1935. Johnson’s creative output increased dramatically in the 1930’s. He experimented with a variety of material including terra cotta, wood, beaten copper, marble, terrazzo, and porcelain. He also produced prints and gouache drawings. He was employed by the California WPA, eventually becoming a supervisor, where his work took on a monumental scale. He created public sculptures such as a carved redwood organ screen for the California School of the Blind, and exterior low relief friezes and mosaic decorations for the San Francisco Maritime Museum. Johnson also created sculptures for the Golden Gate International Exposition held in 1939 on Treasure Island. In 1944 and 1949 he traveled to Mexico using funds from the Abraham Rosenberg Scholarship, where he studied the culture, ceramics, and sculpture
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of the region. While still incorporating the geometric shapes and motifs of indigenous peoples, his work became increasingly more abstract until his death in 1967. In 1970, the Oakland Museum organized the first retrospective of his work, and in 1998, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art held an exhibition entitled, Sargent Johnson: African American Modernist. His work may be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
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Sargent Johnson (1888-1967) Breakfast, 1945 oil on board 16 x 11-1/2 inches Inscribed verso, “I hereby give notice that I witnessed Sargent Johnson painting this panel in my mother’s house in the year 1945. Passed on to Melvin Holmes March 14, 1996. John Fredericks Box 22823 Road88, Winters, Calif. 95694.” Provenance: John Fredericks to Melvin Holmes, 1996. Literature: Sargent Johnson (1888-1967): Works in the Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art, Tyler Fine Art, 2019, p. 33. The Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art, Tyler Fine Art, 2019, p. 175.
$8,000-10,000
John Fredericks and Sargent Johnson, Winters, CA, 1945
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Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) The Coachmen, Toussaint L’Ouverture series, 1990 color silkscreen on Bainbridge two ply rag paper 29-1/2 x 19-1/2 inches signed, dated, titled, numbered 32/99
Printer: Lou Stovall, master printer at Workshop Inc., Washington D.C. Publisher: Amistad Research Center, New Orleans and Spradling Ames, Key West 1990 Provenance: The Estate of Clara Meek, Houston, TX Based on the eighth image of the series The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture. Nesbett 90-4. Blind stamp LL. Illustrated: Jacob Lawrence: The Complete Prints (1963-2000), Peter T. Nesbett, p.76.
$5,000-7,000
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Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) Jacob Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1917 and raised in Philadelphia and Harlem. As a teenager, Lawrence had been uprooted from a childhood spent in Philadelphia when his mother brought her children to live with her in Harlem. She enrolled him in the after-school arts program directed by James Lesesne Wells (see page 310 ). Lawrence’s mentor happened to be Charles Alston. He was able to create voraciously - he created elaborate paper mâché masks and three-dimensional models of Harlem. He read about master painters and focused his attention on patterns and colors. Lawrence began attending high school, but quit after two years, worked odd jobs, and completed a stint with the CCC digging ditches during the Depression. He re-discovered Alston who was now teaching in a WPA art center. Alston directed him to the Harlem Community Art Center, which was run by Augusta Savage. She was able to get him admitted as an easel painter by the time he turned 21. He eventually found studio space with fellow artists Ronald Joseph, Romare Bearden, and Claude McKay. Lawrence was a regular at Professor Charles Seifert’s discussions of African and African American history at the 135th St. branch of the NYPL. At Seifert’s request, he attended an exhibition of West African sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. As an artist, Lawrence synthesized the events, meetings, discussions, experiences, and moments of his life onto the canvas and into his first narrative series (and the works to come). In 1936-38, he produced a series of works, The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture. For him, it was not sufficient to produce one defining work on the life of such an important historical figure, so he created 41 paintings. Lawrence also created series on Frederick Douglass in 1939; Harriet Tubman, 1940; John Brown; and the Migration Series. In 1939 the James Weldon Johnson Literary Guild sponsored an exhibition of his work at the Harlem YMCA - his first publicized one man show. The Toussaint L’Ouverture series was also shown at the Manhattan headquarters of the Catholic Interracial Council. Later, an entire room was set aside at the
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Baltimore Museum of Art for his series. This was unprecedented. Lawrence was well on his way to becoming the best known African American artist of his time. Lawrence won three successive Rosenwald Fellowships. With the second, he traveled through the South, experiencing both rural and urban life, the result of which was his Migration Series. It was at this time that Edith Halpert of the Downtown Gallery began representing him. During WWII, he served in the Coast Guard, and was assigned to the first racially integrated ship in US history. In 1946, he accepted an invitation from Josef Albers to teach at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. He taught at many schools throughout his career, including the Art Students League, New School for Social Research, Pratt Institute and the University of Washington in Seattle, where he eventually retired. Between 1986 and 1997, Lawrence created prints from The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture Series, which is now in the collection of the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University in New Orleans. Lawrence translated 15 of these paintings into silk screen prints. At this later date, he was able change certain aspects of the work when adapting his original paintings to sets of silkscreen prints. The works were shown in the exhibition, To Preserve Their Freedom: Jacob Lawrence’s Toussaint L’Ouverture Serigraph Series, held at the Amistad Research Center, New Orleans in 2017. Recently, his work has been shown in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Jacob Lawrence and Black Mountain College, Black Mountain College Museum & Art Center, Asheville, NC, 2018-19 and I, Too, Sing America, Columbus Museum of Art, OH, 2018-19. The exhibition, Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle, is now on view at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA until April 26th of 2020. This show will continue from June 2-September 7, 2020 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. His work is found in the collections of MOMA, NY; National Academy of Design, NY; National Gallery, Washington D.C.; The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and many more.
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Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) Harlem Street Scene, 1975
silk screen on wove paper through hand-cut film stencils 24-1/2 x 18-1/2 inches (image) 30-3/8 x 22-1/4 inches (full sheet) signed, titled, dated, and numbered Published by the Harlem School of the Arts, NY; printed by Ives-Silllman, New Haven, CT. Variously titled Harlem Street Scene; People in Other Rooms; Other Rooms. Literature: Jacob Lawrence: The Complete Prints (1963-2000), Peter T. Nesbett, 2001, p. 31.
$5,000-7,000
“
I grew up in New York City. I guess when you grow up in any city you become familiar with doorways and windows and looking through windows. I like the architectonic, geometric shapes of these things. I use these forms over and over again. I don’t have any symbolism for them. I imagine that much of our symbolism comes from our experience. Had I been born in the country, maybe I would use a different kind of form. It’s always used as a backdrop, a prop, for my imagery.
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-Jacob Lawrence
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Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) Eight Passages, 1990 Eight color screen prints chine-collé on St. Armand paper captions lithographed on left side from hand-written mylars. 26 x 40 inches (each full sheet) Lithography and chine-collé done by Stone Press Editions, Seattle, with a blind stamp. Each print signed and numbered, 5/22 in pencil in the margin. Published by Limited Editions Club, NY. This series of prints was also offered in a bound book by Limited Editions Club in 1989, with the entire text of Genesis presented. The edition offered in this auction are and have always been loose individual sheets. Comprised of: 1. In the Beginning All Was Void 2. And God Brought Forth The Firmament and The Waters 3. And God Created The Day and The Night and God Put Stars in the Sky 4. And God Said Let The Earth Bring Forth The Grass, Trees, Fruits and Herbs 5. And God Created All The Fowls of The Air and Fishes of The Seas 6. And God Created All the Beasts of The Earth 7. And God Created Man and Woman 8. The Creation Was Done—and All Was Well Provenance: Collection of Dr. Lindley T. Smith, Virginia
$30,000-40,000
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William H. Johnson (1901-1970) Bazaars Behind Church of Our Savior, c. 1935
color woodblock print with watercolor 13-1/2 x 14-1/2 inches (image) remnant of original backing board inscribed with title and by William H. Johnson Provenance: The Collection of Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Maryland Exhibited: Building on Tradition, The Collection of Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Hampton University Museum, October 12, 2013-December 7, 2013. Literature: International Review of African American Art, vol. 24, 3B, Hampton University Museum, VA, p. 34. William H. Johnson, An American Modern, catalog accompanying the exhibition of the same name; Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) and the James E. Lewis Museum of Art, Morgan State University, Baltimore, MD. Teresa Gionis, editor. 2011. To our knowledge, this image has never come to auction before; nor has a woodcut with hand-coloring. To create this image, the artist would have printed the woodcut in black ink and then colored in areas in tan, red and green with watercolors, resulting in a much more colorful image than simply an ink woodcut.
$10,000-20,000
Oslo Bazaars, 1899, Photo in the collection of the Oslo Museum 236
The Oslo Bazaars were constructed of untreated red brick between the years 1841-1859 in a Romanesque Revival style, and are connected to the Oslo Cathedral, formerly known as Our Savior’s Church . In 1927, eight years before Johnson made this work, Oslo considered demolishing the bazaars , but the city council voted against it.
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William H. Johnson (1901-1970) William Henry Johnson was born in Florence, South Carolina in 1901. His mother, Alice Johnson, was of African American and Native American ancestry and his father (who was not married to his mother) was white. Alice soon married a local African American man and they had four additional children. William was interested in drawing at an early age, copying cartoon characters. When he was 18, he dropped out of school and accompanied his uncle to New York in search of better job opportunities. Two years later, when he was 20 years old, he had saved enough money to enroll at the National Academy of Design to study art. Johnson showed tremendous promise at the NAD and came to the attention of two well-respected painters, Charles Hawthorne and George Luks. They mentored him and raised enough money forJohnson to travel to Paris. Hawthorne suggested Johnson might have more success as a black artist in Europe initially, and upon proving himself there, possibly return to the States. One of Johnson’s greatest influences in France was the work of Chaim Soutine. Soutine’s paintings were a step further than the Ashcan style works of Luks; they were Expressionist, and full of energy and emotion. Landscapes, seascapes and buildings were frenzied, distorted and thickly painted. Johnson moved to the South of France to Cagnes-sur-Mer, where Soutine had worked, and produced two important works of the village, Street in Cagnes-sur-Mer and Cagnes, White Houses. In 1929, Johnson met a Danish tapestry weaver and ceramicist named Holcha Krake. Holcha and her sister and brother-in-law were preparing to tour Europe’s museums and art centers, and invited William to come along. Eventually, the group returned to Holcha’s home of Odense, Denmark. Johnson married Holcha in 1930, and they lived in Kerteminde, a Danish fishing village.
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Johnson admired the woodcut prints made by the Expressionists, especially the German, Max Beckmann, and the Norwegian, Edvard Munch, and this work reveals the influence of artists such as these on not only Johnson’s style, but also his choice of medium. Johnson met Munch in 1932, introduced by Pola Gauguin, the son of painter Paul Gauguin. In 1929, Johnson had returned to New York to exhibit in the Harmon Foundation show of 1930, in which he was awarded the gold prize. He returned to the United States with Holcha in 1938, planning to make the U.S. his permanent residence. He felt a need to succeed in his home country. This was a difficult time in the United States, and Johnson had no luck selling his work. He eventually got a job through the W.P.A. teaching at the Harlem Community Art Center. Johnson became enamored with the work of Horace Pippin and Jacob Lawrence and decided to change his style to what he called “primitive” (he had actually deemed himself a “primitive” earlier in his career, influenced by Paul Gauguin’s adoption of the term as a mindset—not a style of painting). Johnson’s new style embraced simplicity, and his subjects were calm and self-assured of their identity. He enjoyed his most productive period from 1939 through the mid 1940s. In 1943, Holcha died of breast cancer, and Johnson returned to Florence. He painted portraits and local scenes in his new style, but succumbed to grief about losing Holcha. In his devastated state, he developed a plan to return to Denmark to marry Holcha’s sister, Musse, whom he had met in 1929. His proposal was rejected by Musse, but he remained with the Krake family for six months. He then moved to Oslo with the intention to exhibit his work there, but was in a state of declined mental health and was found wandering the streets. He was taken in by the Traveler’s Aid Society and shipped back to New York, where he was admitted to a state hospital in 1947. He remained there until his death in 1970, unable to recognize anyone and unable to paint. Photo: The artist at his easel, c. 1930; William H. Johnson, An American Modern, p.104.
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Sam Gilliam (b. 1933) Patched Leaf, 1973
oil on shaped canvas 64 x 65 inches signed, titled, and dated on verso Provenance: The artist to the Collection of Dr. Dianne WhitfieldLocke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Maryland Exhibited: Building on Tradition, The Collection of Dr. Dianne WhitfieldLocke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Hampton University Museum, October 12, 2013-December 7, 2013. Literature: International Review of African American Art, vol. 24, 3B, Hampton University Museum, VA, p. 53.
$300,000-500,000
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Sam Gilliam (b. 1933) Patched Leaf, 1973 (details)
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Sam Gilliam (b. 1933) Sam Gilliam was born in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1933. Shortly after his birth, the family (Gilliam was one of eight children) moved to Louisville, KY where he was raised. Gilliam attended college at the University of Louisville, receiving a BFA in 1955. That same year his first solo exhibition was held at the university. He went on to serve in the Army and upon his return, began working towards his MFA. After graduation, he taught for a year in the Louisville public schools until he moved to Washington D.C., where he continues to live today. Gilliam continued to teach in the Washington public schools as well as the Maryland Institute College of Art, University of Maryland and Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh throughout his career. By the time Gilliam arrived in Washington D.C. in 1962, the Washington Color School had been established and included Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Thomas Downing. Gilliam met and became friends with Downing. Soon, his works became large, hard-edged abstractions. His works evolved as he continued to experiment with innovative methods - taping and pouring colors, folding and staining canvases. He created Beveled-edge paintings in which he stretched the canvas on a beveled frame, so that the painting appeared to emerge from the wall on which it was hung. In 1965, he abandoned the frame and stretcher altogether and began draping and suspending his paint stained canvases much like hanging laundry on the clothesline. Each work could be improvised and rearranged at will. The first of these was displayed at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1969. Gilliam received numerous public and private commissions for his draped canvases. One of the largest of these was Seahorses in 1975. This six part work involved several hundred feet of paint stained canvas installed along the exterior walls of two adjacent wings of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 1972 he represented the US in the Venice Biennale.
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By 1975, Gilliam began to create dynamic geometric collages influenced by Miles Davis and John Coltrane. In 1977, he produced similar collages in monochromatic black hues. Re-invention has been a consistent component in Gilliam’s work throughout his career - he has constantly innovated, disrupted, and improvised and he is still doing all of it at age 86. He is now being represented by Pace Gallery in New York and David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles. Gilliam’s work is found in the collections of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington D.C.; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Tate Modern, London; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among many others. Recent exhibitions include: Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 19631983, now showing at the deYoung Museum, San Francisco, CA; Black: Color, Material, Concept, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, 2015; Surface Matters, Edward H. Linde Gallery, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2015; Affecting Presence and the Pursuit of Delicious Experiences, The Menil Collection, Houston, 2015. A semi-permanent installation of Gilliam’s paintings is currently on view at Dia:Beacon, NY.
Sam Gilliam photographed on June 22, 2016 in Washington, D.C. (Marvin Joseph, The Washington Post)
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Sam Gilliam (b. 1933) Untitled, 1984 watercolor and acrylic with monoprint on heavy handmade paper 40 x 61 inches signed and dated lower center $40,000-60,000
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Sam Gilliam (b. 1933) Untitled, 1970
watercolor and pigment on handmade manipulated paper 19 x 25-1/2 inches signed and dated lower right $20,000-30,000
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Barkley Hendricks (1945-2017) Painter and photographer best known for his portraits of young, urban men and women rendered in a realist or post-modern style. Barkley L. Hendricks was born in 1945 in north Philadelphia. He attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts between 1963 and 1967 and graduated with a BFA and MFA from Yale University School of Art, where he studied photography with Walker Evans. Hendricks was primarily a painter, his work incorporating photography more and more as his style evolved - rendering his subjects with exquisite detail to their clothing, shoes, jewelry, and other accoutrements. In 2008, his work was featured in the major exhibition, Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of Cool, organized by Trevor Schoonmaker, contemporary curator at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, NC. Of Hendricks work, Schoonmaker said,
His bold portrayal of his subject’s attitude and style elevates the common person to celebrity status. Cool, empowering, and sometimes confrontational, Hendricks’ artistic privileging of a culturally complex black body has paved the way for today’s younger generation of artists. In the late 60s in Philadelphia, Hendricks moved into a studio that was formerly occupied by a photographer, and the former occupant “had to get out of town fast” and had left all of his equipment, chemicals, etc. so he (Hendricks) self-taught/introduced himself to the darkroom. By the time he landed at Yale, he had put together a portfolio of photography, and also began to “hang out with the photography people”. He presented the portfolio to Walker Evans, who was impressed because Hendricks had included an image in tondo (a circular image) and also by
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his subject matter. Hendricks was commuting from New Jersey and passing through New York’s Port Authority, capturing images of a colorful cast of characters. Hendricks felt it reminded Evans of his own Subway Series. Hendricks’ interest in photography has been resolute throughout his career. Sometimes he knows the subjects, but other times he meets them by chance.
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One time I met this guy on the street in Philadelphia dressed completely in white holding a black briefcase — a white suit, hat, shoes. I was so attracted to his sense of style I asked if I could photograph him. This was around 1970. I kept the photograph for two or three years, then made a painting using white acrylic, oil and magna paint for a total monochromatic effect. I called it Dr. Kool .
”
-Dialoguemagazine.com Hendricks’ work has been featured in exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Lyman Allyn Art Museum, Connecticut College; Jack Shainman Gallery, NY; Projectile Gallery, NY; Kenmore Galleries, PA; A.C.A. Galleries, NY; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, PA; Mitchell Algus Gallery, NY; Butler Institute of American Art, OH; Woodmere Art Gallery, PA; and the National Academy of Design. It is found in the permanent collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Studio Museum in Harlem; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; and the Nasher Museum of Art, NC. His work is currently showing in the exhibition, Soul of A Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983 at the deYoung Museum in San Francisco, CA and Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts, January 17 – April 12, 2020; Frye Art Museum, Seattle, Washington, May 9 – August 2, 2020; Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, Utah,August 28 – December 13, 2020.
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Barkley Hendricks (1945-2017) Lover’s Leap (Porch View), 1996
oil on canvas 12 inches diameter signed Artist’s label verso with artist’s address; title and date of work Sande Webster Gallery, Philadelphia label verso Provenance: The Collection of Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Maryland Exhibited: Building on Tradition, The Collection of Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Hampton University Museum, October 12, 2013-December 7, 2013. Literature: International Review of African American Art, vol. 24, 3B, Hampton University Museum, VA, p. 11.
$20,000-30,000
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Akin to Hendricks’ engagement with the old masters of European portraiture, his landscape paintings also create a discourse with history while intimately tying into his own experiences. He has routinely traveled to Jamaica for the past thirty years, a place of cultural significance that lends its physical beauty to the formal act of painting. Each piece is adorned with a gilded frame that transforms these encapsulated views into portals to another time. Every painting is made in one long day of sitting, representing a perspective that cannot be duplicated.
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-Jack Shainman Gallery
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Margaret Burroughs (1917-2010) In her dedication to educating others and advocating for African American art, Margaret Burroughs became a cultural leader and role model. Born in St. Rose, Louisiana in 1917, Burroughs and her family followed the Great Migration north to Chicago in 1922. She made the most of many valuable opportunities throughout her lifetime, beginning at Englewood High School, where she first became interested in art, and became the youngest member of George Neal’s Art Crafts Guild. She later studied at the Chicago Normal School. At age 22, she founded the South Side Community Art Center, a community organization that continues to serve as a gallery and workshop studio for artists and students. In the early 1950’s, Burroughs started the Lake Meadows Art Fair where African Americans could showcase and sell their art. Burroughs lived in Mexico for a time, where she studied print making and mural painting with the Taller Editorial de Grafica Popular (People’s Graphic Workshop) under Leopoldo Mendez, a prominent printmaker of the Diego Rivera circle. When she returned to the States, she and her husband Charles founded the DuSable Museum of African American History in their living room. It remained there for nearly a decade until it moved to its own building in Chicago’s Washington Park. Burroughs was also an accomplished poet and author of children’s books. In 1975 she received the President’s Humanitarian Award, and in 1977 was distinguished as one of Chicago’s Most Influential Women by the Chicago Defender. February 1, 1986 was proclaimed “Dr. Margaret Burroughs Day” in Chicago by late Mayor Harold Washington. Burroughs passed away on November 21, 2010. In 2018, the exhibitions The Art and Influence of Dr. Margaret T. Burroughs and The Time Is Now! Art Worlds of Chicago’s South Side, 1960-1980, were presented concurrently; the former at her beloved museum, and the latter at the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. The book South Side Venus: The Legacy of Margaret Burroughs by Mary Ann Cain was also published. Together they provide a closer look at the life and legacy of this remarkable woman who continues to inspire generations.
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Untitled, Female Nude, 1960 bronze with brown and green patina 15-1/4 h x 7-1/2 w x 5 d inches mounted on an acrylic base which is 9-3/4 x 7 x 1 inches signed, “M. Burroughs� and dated 1960 Dr. Burroughs was an accomplished sculptor, although her three dimensional work rarely comes on to the market. This is a significant, early example by her. Provenance: The artist, to a friend and private collector, Chicago.
$7,000-9,000
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Margaret Burroughs (1917-2010) The Students, 1963
bronze with green patina 12 x 13 x 8 inches base 1-1/2 inches high signed and dated Nov 22, 1963
$10,000-15,000
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Jeff Donaldson (1932-2004) Victory in the Valley of Eshu, 1971
color screenprint 40 x 30 inches signed, dated and numbered, 103/280, in pencil Provenance: The artist to fellow artist, Evangeline J. Montgomery Literature: Soul of a Nation, Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983 ,catalog accompanying the exhibition, edited by Mark Godfrey and Zoe Whitley, 2017, p. 90.
$5,000-7,000 Jeff Donaldson was born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and studied at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. He went on to complete his MFA at the Illinois Institute of Technology (Institute of Design, or New Bauhaus), and his Ph.D. at Northwestern University, becoming one of the first African Americans to do so in the nation. Donaldson co-founded AfriCOBRA with Wadsworth Jarrell in Chicago. He also was a major contributor to the Wall of Respect in Chicago (1967). Donaldson served in the Army from 1955-57, and taught in the Chicago Public School system from 1957-59 (Chairman of the art department, Marshall High School, 1959-65). Donaldson was aware that unrelated groups of artists (internationally) were attempting to define a trans-African style/movement or a universal black aesthetic. The formation of AfriCOBRA and the corresponding conferences the group sponsored worldwide, were crucial to the development of the trans-African identity. According to Donaldson, the transAfrican style is characterized by “high energy color, rhythmic linear effects, flat patterning, form-filled composition and picture plane compartmentalization.� Recent exhibitions include, Jeff Donaldson: Dig, which was organized by the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY in 2018; a solo exhibition at Kravets Wehby Gallery, NY in 2017; and is part of Soul of a Nation, Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983 now being held at the deYoung Museum, San Francisco, CA. Photo: Jeff Donaldson, c. 1970; Smithsonian Institution.
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“
It is our hope that intelligent definition of the past and perceptive identification in the present will project nationful direction in the future – look for us there, because that’s where we’re at.
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-Jeff Donaldson, AfriCobra Manifesto
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Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937) Virgin Mary in Meditation, c. 1905 oil on board 12 x 9-1/2 inches signed lower right, H.O. Tanner
Housed in an outstanding period Foster Bros. Marshall Field frame. Provenance: Private Collection, Paris to private dealer, NY. This work is accompanied by a copy of a letter from Dewey F. Mosby, PhD., confirming authenticity and offering further scholarship of the work. Exhibited: Ashe to Amen: African Americans and Biblical Imagery, Museum of Biblical Art, New York, NY, 2013-2014, p. 47, Cat. No. 5; This exhibition traveled to the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture, Baltimore, MD and Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, TN.
$40,000-60,000
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Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937) Dewey F. Mosby, director emeritus of Colgate’s Picker Art Gallery and author of Henry Ossawa Tanner (1839-1937), wrote this concerning Virgin Mary in Meditation : “the handling, with its vertical brushstrokes and touches of impasto highlights calls to mind Christ at the Home of Martha and Mary especially in the table cloth and background. The treatment of (Virgin) Mary in Meditation calls to mind the earlier Thankful Poor….the pious attitude here is not too far removed from..The Savior. The subtle halo above the head of the pious woman, who seems to be in meditation, suggests the figure is the Virgin Mary. This notion is not mere speculation. We know that beginning around 1900, and continuing until his last works in the 1930s, Tanner painted and drew numerous images of the Virgin Mary.” Mosby suggests that the possible model for the picture is Mrs. Atherton Curtis, which seems likely. Atherton and Louise Curtis were friends and patrons, and Tanner and his wife, Jessie, had spent the autumn of 1902 with the Curtises in Mount Kisco, NY. Tanner painted Portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Atherton Curtis with Still Life (n.d.) which is in the collection of the Smithsonian. It was not unusual for Tanner to appropriate his acquaintances as models—this composition is later seen in a sketch for Christ at the Home of Lazarus (collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art).
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Henry Ossawa Tanner; Interior of Tanner’s studio in Paris, c. 1937; Tanner and the American Art Club, c. 1900, Montparnasse, Paris, Smithsonian Archives of American Art
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Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937) Henry Ossawa Tanner was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1859 to a prominent middle class family. His father was a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and despite his initial misgivings, he supported his son’s education at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Tanner found an early mentor in Thomas Eakins, whose influence is seen in Tanner’s work throughout his career. Upon graduation, Tanner eked out a living by opening a photography studio and teaching at Clark College. In 1891, Tanner left to study and teach in Paris. He attended Academie Julian and studied under Benjamin Constant and JeanPaul Laurens. It was here that he was able to develop his personal style, free from the prejudice found in the United States. Early in his career, he painted genre scenes of African American life. One of his most famous paintings from this period, The Banjo Lesson, demonstrated this intention of breaking the stereotypical caricature mold with its depiction of an older African American male teaching a young boy how to play the banjo, an instrument that had become an object of derision. Despite the rise of modernism, he remained painting in a firmly academic manner and focused entirely on religious subjects for the rest of his career. A trip to North Africa and the Holy Land brought about a mystical quality in his work that furthered his personal style while remaining true to his unwavering academicism. His paintings were shown regularly in the salons in Paris - his painting Resurrection of Lazarus won the Third Class Medal at the Salons des Artistes, Francais, 1897- as well as stateside. Tanner became the mentor for early 20th century African American artists who made pilgrimages to France to study and paint. In 1927, he was inducted into the National Academy of Design.
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His work has been shown in exhibitions at the Philadelphia Art Club; New York Public Library; Vose Galleries, Boston, MA; National Arts Clubs Galleries, NY; Corcoran Gallery Biennial; Century of Progress, Chicago; Philadelphia Art Alliance; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1969, a traveling retrospective of over 80 of Tanner’s paintings, drawings, and studies was held by the Frederick Douglass Institute and the National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington D.C. His work is found in the collections of Atlanta High Museum of Art, GA; Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Collection; Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum; and the National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.
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Hughie Lee Smith (1915-1999) Born in Eustis, Florida in 1915 and raised in both Atlanta and Cleveland, Ohio, Hughie Lee-Smith knew from an early age that art was his mission. His mother encouraged his talent by enrolling him in an art class for gifted students at the Cleveland Museum of Art. At 20, Lee-Smith won a Scholastic magazine competition that allowed him to study at the Art School of the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts. He also studied art at the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1938, art education at Wayne State University in 1952 and 1953, as well as theater and dance. Throughout his career, he taught at several distinguished institutions including the Karamu House, Cleveland in the late 1930’s, Princeton Country Day School, NJ, 1963-65, Howard University, Washington D.C., 1969-71, the Art Student’s League, NYC, 1972-1987, and elsewhere. In 1938-39, Lee-Smith was employed by the Ohio Works Progress Administration. At this time, he did a series of lithographic prints and painted murals at the Great Lakes Naval Station in Illinois. The Cleveland Museum recognized him for drawing in 1938 and for lithographs in 1939-40. His early works were shown mostly in Chicago and Detroit, at the South Side Community Art Center, the Snowdon Gallery, and the Detroit Artist’s Market. Despite many accolades and awards throughout his career, Lee-Smith did not enjoy a major solo exhibition of his work until 50 years after he began painting. His first retrospective was held at the New Jersey State Museum, Trenton in 1988. Just two years before his death, he was featured at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art in Maine. In 1994, he was commissioned to paint the official City Hall portrait of former mayor David Dinkins. He died in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1999 after a long illness. His work can be found in many major collections including the South Side Community Art Center, Chicago; Howard University; the Detroit Institute of Arts, and Wayne State University.
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Rooftops, c. 1961 oil on canvas, 24 x 36 inches, signed. Provenance: Janet Nessler Gallery, 1961; Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm S. Forbes, Far Hills, NJ; Private Collection, NJ; Private Collection, St. Louis, MO. Exhibited: Exhibition II, April 1964; Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm S. Forbes, illustrated p. 16. From the Rooftops: John Sloan and the Art of the New Urban Space, Palmer Museum of Art, Pennsylvania State University, 2019
$40,000-60,000
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Hayward Oubre (1916-2006) Radar Tower, c. 1960
wire 43 x 19 x 16-1/4 inches $10,000-15,000 Hayward Oubre studied with Nancy Elizabeth Prophet in Atlanta, and then met sculptors Elizabeth Catlett and Houston Chandler when he was working on his MFA at the University of Iowa. With a technical ability culled from his stint with the Army engineering corps combined with his ingenious artistry, Oubre set about creating his first wire sculpture, which he submitted for exhibition at the Clark-Atlanta Annuals in 1956. It was rejected, but the following year, he submitted another, won first prize, and the work remains as part of the university’s permanent collection. Often regarded as the “Master of Torque” or the “Master of Stabile”, Oubre received considerable recognition and acclaim for his wire sculptures and earned comparisons to Alexander Calder.
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I am proud to be a black man. I want to be a black who is a damn accomplished man.
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Oubre was interested in science and technology, and likened his sculptures to structural engineering. Post-war America was fascinated with atomic energy, the space race, and other innovations that first sprung from military applications. He exhibited in the Atlanta University Annuals consistently for 20 years and was awarded several prizes. To continue reading about Hayward Oubre: Hayward Oubre (1916-2006), (1916-2006) Tyler Fine Art, 2015.
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“
I use wire hangers like a tailor uses thread.
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�
James Amos Porter (1905-1970) As the first scholar to provide a thorough and critical analysis of the contributions of AfricanAmericans to art, James A. Porter was the father of African-American art history. Born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1905, Porter attended Howard University on an art scholarship. Here he pursued painting, drawing, and art history under the tutelage of the head of the Art Department, James Herring. After graduation, he accepted a position at the university teaching painting and drawing. He remained at Howard University for over 40 years as an instructor, and also as head of the art department and director of the art gallery, where he organized many exhibitions of art by artists of both races and was responsible for enlarging the permanent art collection of Howard University. Between 1927 and 1928, Porter continued his education at the Teachers College, Columbia University, New York and in 1929 studied at the Art Students League of New York under Dimitri Romanovsky and George Bridgman. He was the recipient of an Honorable Mention from the Harmon Foundation in 1929. He was awarded the Schomburg Portrait Prize in 1933 for the painting, Woman Holding A Jug. In the summer of 1935, Porter studied Medieval Archaeology at the Sorbonne in Paris on a scholarship provided by the Carnegie Foundation. In the fall of that same year he traveled to Belgium, Holland, Italy, and Germany to study European painting and African art. Upon his return, he pursued a Master of Arts in art history at New York University, which he received in 1937. Porter’s thesis would later become the foundation for his book, Modern Negro Art, widely considered the most comprehensive source on the contribution of African-American artists in the U.S. from the 18th century to the present. In addition to this book he also published numerous articles including, The Negro Artist and Racial Bias for Art Front in 1936, Robert S. Duncanson, Midwestern Romantic Realist in 1951, and Ten African American Artists of the 19th Century. He contributed to Art in America, Art Quarterly and Encyclopedia of the Arts. With financial assistance from the Rockefeller Foundation, he traveled to Cuba and Haiti in 1945 through 1946 with the purpose of visiting museums and interviewing cultural affairs officers and artists. The information gathered from these sources on the native and independent arts of those countries became an important part of courses taught at Howard University on Latin American art.
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Lagos, Nigeria, 1964
oil on canvas 12 x 20 inches signed and dated
Provenance: Private collection, Chicago, IL
$8,000-10,000 In 1963-1964, he took another sabbatical leave to travel in Africa, specifically West Africa, Nigeria, and Egypt. He spent the year painting, collecting various pieces of African art, and gathering materials for a projected book on West African art and architecture. On August 13, 1964, he traveled to Brazil on a grant from Howard University, in search of documentation of the African influence and contribution to Brazilian colonial and modern art and Latin American art and culture. Much of the information and materials he obtained was used in his course African Art and Architecture at Howard University. When he returned to the United States, Porter had accumulated 800 photographs, copious notes and source materials for a book on this subject. Upon his death in 1970, the James A. Porter Gallery of African-American Art was dedicated at the Howard University Gallery of Art. In 1992, this gallery mounted an exhibition of Porter’s work entitled, James A. Porter, Artist and Art Historian: the Memory of his Legacy.
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Gerald Jackson (b. 1936) Duocoin Tapestry, 1969
oil on canvas 54 x 95 inches signed, dated, and titled verso Literature: A similar version of this work was exhibited and illustrated in Afro-American Artists: New York and Boston, The Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists, The Museum of Fine Arts, The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; 1970.
$4,000-6,000 Gerald Jackson was born on Chicago’s South Side and attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago at night for a year before moving to New York in 1963. He won a scholarship to attend the Brooklyn Museum School. At this time he met and hung out with fellow artists Ellsworth Ausby, Bob Thompson, Joe Overstreet, and Emilio Cruz. He had an exhibition at Strike Gallery (Ed Clark and Willem de Kooning had shown there), and in 1968 landed a show at the Allan Stone Gallery. Jackson’s work has been exhibited at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in Afro-American Artists, New York and Boston, 1970 and the Newark Museum in the show Black Artists: Two Generations in 1971. His work was also featured in the 1991 exhibition The Search for Freedom: African American Abstract Painting 1945-1975 at Kenkeleba Gallery, NY. Recently, his works have been in group exhibitions at the Phillips Museum of Art, Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, PA, and Rush Arts Gallery, and the Chelsea Art Museum, all New York. A 1973 illustrated book of his is also in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
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Gerald Jackson (b. 1936) The Genius, 1970 oil on canvas 41-1/2 x 60 inches signed, titled, and dated Provenance: The Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art, San Francisco, CA Literature: The Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art, Tyler Fine Art, 2019, p. 170.
$4,000-6,000
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Nelson Stevens (b. 1938) Self Portrait, c. 1970 woodblock print 9 x 12 inches pencil signed, titled, and numbered 2/7 Artist’s Proof $2,000-3,000 Nelson Steven’s career has spanned over 5 decades and a multitude of media and style, yet has remained consistently grounded in the black experience and his exuberant celebration of color. He began his career painting murals on the walls of jazz clubs in the 1950’s. Stevens received his B.F.A. from Ohio University in 1962, then moved to Cleveland in 1963, where he taught in the public school system and at the Karamu House. By 1969, he had completed his M.F.A. at Kent State University. Stevens recalled during this period he had to convince his teachers and fellow classmates that Black art, as defined by friend and Black Arts scholar and playwright Larry Neal, existed as its own entity - an art that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America - an aesthetic equivalent to the Black Power movement. Prior to the movement, there was no literature to back up Black art as an absolute genre. Murals like the Wall of Respect, painted in 1967 by William “Bill” Walker and other members of the Organization of Black American Culture helped change that. Stevens, now a professor at Northern Illinois University, joined the newly formed art collective AFRICOBRA in 1969, along with Wadsworth Jarrell, Jae Jarrell, Jeff Donaldson, Barbara Jones-Hogu, and Gerald Williams and exhibited widely with them. In addition to his work in the visual arts, Stevens produced the Black culture magazine, Drum at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he was a professor for over 30 years. Stevens’ work may be found in many private and public collections, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington D.C.; Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, NY; and the Art Institute of Chicago. His work is now being shown in the exhibition, Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, which originated at Tate Modern in London, UK. He currently lives and works in Maryland. In 2019, Stevens work was featured in the solo exhibition, Work from the 60’s to the Present held at Kravets Wehby Gallery, NY.
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“
I look at people and see the image in them. My art is anthems in praise of people.
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Nelson Stevens (b. 1938) Primal Force, 2019
serigraph 21 x 20 inches signed and dated by artist; edition 28/86 full margins Master printer: Curlee Raven Holton
$1,200-1,500
Members of Africobra, c.1990
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Nelson Stevens (b. 1938) E + V = C, 1972
pen, ink, colored pencil, watercolor on paper 25-1/2 x 20-1/2 inches signed and dated $6,000-8,000
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Walter Sanford (1912-1987) My Man Has Gone to Sea, 1951 mixed media on board 19 x 14-1/2 inches signed and dated
$1,000-2,000 Born in Detroit in 1912, Walter Sanford moved to Chicago to pursue formal art training at the Art Institute of Chicago under Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. He also spent a year at Detroit’s School of Arts and Crafts under John Carroll. Throughout his career he drew much inspiration from Chicago’s South Side, where he resided for many years. Sanford can be counted among the second wave of artists emerging from the Chicago Renaissance between 1941 and 1960. While he embraced a wide range of styles from naturalism to abstraction, he considered himself an abstract expressionist. By the 1950’s, his work was clearly influenced by Picasso. His tenure in Chicago was punctuated by travels to Las Vegas, Mexico, and France. In 1952, he received the Prix de Paris. Later in his career, he established a studio in Chicago where he began working on a series of portraits of real and imaginary figures inspired by the work of Mexican painters David Siqueiros and Diego Rivera. Sanford has exhibited in more than 20 major shows and had more than two dozen solo exhibitions.
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(detail)
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Charles Ethan Porter (1847-1923) Autumn Landscape with Pumpkins and Haystacks. c. 1892 oil on canvas 17 x 23 inches signed
$7,000-9,000
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Charles Ethan Porter (1847-1923) One of the finest painters of fruit and floral still life compositions in America during the nineteenth century, Charles Ethan Porter, was the first African American admitted into the National Academy of Design in New York. Porter also studied at L’École des Arts Decoratifs in Paris,1881, where he began exploring Impressionism and landscape painting. Mark Twain, a patron of his, helped Porter to secure a place at the school by writing a letter of introduction. Until the very end of his career, Porter had been able to support himself with his earnings as an artist. However, according to the Hartford Black History Project, Porter shared a studio in Rockville, Connecticut with Bavarian artist Gustave Hoffman, who sold Porter’s paintings door-to-door because people would not buy art from a black artist. Porter died poor and in relative obscurity. His work has since found a place in the collections of such major museums as the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; San Antonio Museum of Art, TX; and Birmingham Museum of Art, AL. In 1987, Connecticut Gallery organized a retrospective which secured Porter’s rightful place into the history of American art. A traveling retrospective of Charles Ethan Porter’s work was organized by Hildegard Cummings and the New Britain Museum of American Art in 2008.
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Charles Ethan Porter (1847-1923) Rambling Roses. c. 1885 oil on canvas 20 x 24 inches signed
Provenance: The New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT; label verso; Accession # 1988.34(T) Exhibited: Charles Ethan Porter, The Connecticut Gallery, October 8-November 8, 1987; label Literature: Charles Ethan Porter, Helen Fusscas, 1987 The Robotham rambling roses are unique because of the startling contrast between the white and the red roses. Also the wedge-shaped central form is unusually dominant. (Fusscas, p. 54). Rambling Roses is illustrated, Fig. 44, p. 57.
$12,000-18,000
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Cliff Joseph (b. 1922) Southern Comfort, 1965 oil on board 16 x 16 inches signed and dated
Literature: Stromberg, Robert, “Artist Finds Black Beautiful”, The Jersey Journal, Jan. 8, 1969 Cliff Joseph: Artist and Activist, Tyler Fine Art, 2018. $10,000-20,000 It has been debated whether depictions of lynchings in art create or exacerbate racial hatred. Editors of The Crisis (Feb, 1937) discussed readers’ letters in response to a published picture of the lynching of Lint Shaw at Royston, Georgia (April, 1936), and the general opinion of the readers was that it did. The magazine’s stance was the opposite, declaring, “very often the sheer horror of lynching serves to rouse ordinarily lethargic people into action.” The Crisis, Opportunity, and The Afro-American regularly illustrated both photographs and cartoons of lynchings using various strategies to denounce the crime. The prominent imagery in Southern Comfort, however, is not the lynching, but the central abstract compositional element in the foreground, namely the cross of the Confederate flag and the hooded icons substituting for stars. The flag depicted by Joseph is the Second National Flag of the Confederacy, also known as the Stainless Banner, used from May of 1863- March of 1865. This flag is square, with a red field, a wide blue saltire (St. Andrew’s Cross), bordered in white and thirteen mullets, or five-pointed stars representing the number of Confederate states. The perpetrators of this crime have no power as individuals without the support of institutional racism, symbolized by the Confederate flag. Their faces are cartoon ghouls, owning no human identity. Anonymity is vital to their success and that is maintained only by the tolerance of institutional racism. People do not fear “Joe” or “Bob”; they fear faceless symbols that appear to be greater than human, and those symbols, such as a flag or a white triangular hood have only the power which is allowed them—thus, the “comfort” alluded to in the title is a sham.
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Thomas Sills (1914-2000) Pleasant, c. 1966 oil and benzene on canvas 42 x 49 inches signed Literature: Exhibition of Contemporary Paintings and Sculpture by AfroAmerican Artists, Wilmington, DE, 1971; Presented by Aesthetics Dynamics. The Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art, Tyler Fine Art, 2019, p. 111. Selections from the Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art, Tyler Fine Art, 2019, p. 79.
$20,000-30,000 African American abstract expressionist artist Thomas Sills was born in Castalia, North Carolina in 1914 and began painting in 1952 at the age of 38. In 1957 he won the prestigious William and Noma Copley Foundation Award and held solo exhibitions at the Betty Parsons Gallery, NY; Paul Kantor Gallery, CA; and Bodley Gallery, NY. His work was also included in many group exhibitions including the Fourth Annual Artists Annual at Stable Gallery, NY. The Stable Gallery was the center of Abstract Expressionism in New York City in the 1950’s and home to artists Robert Indiana, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Hans Hofmann, Willem deKooning, Andy Warhol, and Lee Krasner. Click here for a short video of Thomas Sills explaining his process in the film, Black Artists in America, v.3 which was produced in 1973 by Dr. Oakley N. Holmes.
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Thomas Sills (1914-2000) Signal, c. 1963
oil and benzene on canvas 48 x 50 inches signed titled verso Possibly exhibited at Jeanne Reynal and Thomas Sills at the New School for Social Research, NY, 1963.
$20,000-30,000
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Charles Sebree (1914-1985) St. Joseph With Shepherd, c. 1946 oil on board 16 x 12 inches signed and titled $4,000-6,000 Charles Sebree was born and raised in Kentucky until the age of ten, when he and his mother moved north to Chicago. By the age of 14 he was carving out his own rough existence in the midst of the Great Depression. At this time, the Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago featured his drawing, Seated Boy on the cover of their magazine. He went on to train formally at the Chicago School of Design and the Art Institute of Chicago and used his interests in European modernism and African sculpture to forge his own individual style; one which evoked a mystical quality similar to old world Byzantine enamels and Russian icon paintings. He was the only African American artist represented by Katherine Kuh among a group which consisted of a majority of leading European modernists. Between 1936 and 1938 Sebree worked for the WPA easel division, participated in the South Side Community Arts Center, and was involved with the Cube Theater. He maintained a strong interest in the theater due to his friendship with Katherine Dunham. Guided by her influence, he explored set and costume design, theatrical production, writing, and dance, while continuing to paint. Sebree was also close with a group of bohemian artists from Chicago and Wisconsin, which included Magic Realist painters Gertrude Abercrombie, John Pratt, John Wilde, Karl Priebe, and others. Sebree began writing plays in earnest in 1949- his most well received work was Mrs. Patterson, which opened on Broadway in 1954 starring none other than Eartha Kitt. In addition to all of his creative endeavors, Sebree also collaborated with Harlem Renaissance author Countee Cullen by illustrating his narrative poem, The Lost Zoo (A Rhyme for the Young But Not Too Young). Sebree’s work has been featured in multiple exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago and was also featured at Katharine Kuh Galleries, Chicago Artists Group Galleries, American Negro Exposition, South Side Community Art Center, Howard University, Chicago Public Library, Kenkeleba House, and the Woodmere Art Museum. His work is found in many prominent collections including Howard University, Smithsonian American Art Museum, St. Louis Art Museum, and University of Chicago.
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Charles Sebree (1914-1985) Two Figures in an Alleyway, c. 1938 oil on masonite 20 x 24 inches signed $6,500-8,500
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Sam Middeton (1927-2015) Mixed media artist, Sam Middleton was one of a group of expatriate African Americans who enjoyed success in Europe in the 1960’s. Middleton was born in New York City and grew up in Harlem near the Savoy Ballroom. This notable venue provided much inspiration for his future collages. His love of music - classical and jazz - was integral to his very life - he was known to carry an unwieldy turntable and collection of records with him wherever he traveled. He joined the Merchant Marines in 1944. Upon his return to New York City in the 1950s, he relocated to Greenwich Village, meeting and befriending a small group of African American artists including Walter Williams, Clifford Jackson, Harvey Cropper, and Herb Gentry - all of whom would expatriate to Europe in the next decade In the early 1950s, Middleton was part of New York’s Cedar Tavern scene, which included his friends Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline. Kline encouraged Middleton to apply to the John Hay Whitney Foundation and advised him to seek artistic success outside New York. Middleton received a scholarship for one year of study at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel, otherwise he was largely self-taught. It was there in 1957, that he began experimenting with collage. His work was shown at Contemporary Arts Gallery in 1958 and again in 1960. The Whitney Museum of American Art showed four of his works in Young America 1960: Thirty American Painters Under 36. Between 1959 and 1961, Middleton lived in Europe, exhibiting in Spain, Sweden, and Denmark. Much of his artistic material was gleaned from ephemera he collected as he moved from city to city. In 1962 he decided to make a home in the Netherlands. His later work brought the Dutch landscape into his collages. Middleton remained in the Netherlands for the rest of his life. He showed extensively there and other locales throughout Europe, but was not forgotten in the States. In 1970, his work was shown in the exhibition, Afro-American Artists Abroad at the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin and in 1983, the Studio Museum in Harlem held the exhibition An Ocean Apart: American Artists Abroad which also included Herb Gentry, Cliff Jackson, and Walter Williams. His work is found in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, NL; Fisk University, Nashville, TN; Brooklyn Museum, NY, as well as many others. Photo: Middleton, Cliff Jackson, and Harvey Cropper in Stocklholm, Sweden, 1960; Sam Middleton Estate. Unidentified photographer; © Sam Middleton Estate 300
Untitled, 1989;
mixed media collage on paper 30-1/2 x 41 inches signed and dated Provenance: Private Collection, Amsterdam, NL
$4,000-6,000
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William Majors (1930-1982) Untitled Abstraction, 1958-60 oil on board 30 x 24 inches
Provenance: The Collection of Betty Joan Owsley, Indianapolis, IN Exhibited: A Shared Heritage: Art by Four African Americans, p.104; from the essay, William Majors: Aspirations and Beliefs, Harriet Warkel.
$20,000-30,000 Several of Majors’s early works exhibit an affinity to abstract expressionism, the first American art movement to become an international style. It developed around 1943 and was at its peak by the time Majors left the sanitarium* in 1953. Influences from this movement can be seen in Majors’s paintings of the late 1950s, such as Burning Bush, #3, and Untitled Abstraction. Rather than deriving his imagery primarily from the unconscious mind as many abstract expressionists did, Majors based his work on his observations of nature, the human form, and the world around him. In Untitled Abstraction, 1958-1960 Majors’s vigorous strokes of orange and red hover over a geometrically composed area of blue-green and off-white, reminiscent of a sandy beach on a hot day. Harriet Warkel, in her essay, William Majors: Aspirations and Beliefs, A Shared Heritage, Art by Four African Americans, pp.101-104, catalog accompanying the exhibition which originated at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1996. Photo: The artist, Dartmouth College, NH; Artist-in-Residence, 1977. Courtesy of Susan Stedman Majors (Illustrated: A Shared Heritage, Art by Four African Americans, p, 179.)
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James L. Wells (1902-1993) Artist and educator, James Lesesne Wells was born in 1902 in Atlanta, Georgia and was raised largely in Florida. In a very auspicious beginning to a long career in the arts, the young Wells, at the age of 13, won first prize in painting and a second prize in woodworking at the Florida State Fair. He went on to study at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania for one year. Wells studied drawing with George Lawrence Nelson at the National Academy of Design. He then transferred to Columbia University in New York where he majored in art education. Wells was greatly influenced by African sculptural forms and the work of the German Expressionists, in particular Albrect Durer, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Otto Mueller, and Emile Nolde; Cubists, and the Fauves. He worked in a variety of media at this time, although printmaking was a favorite. He created block prints for the publications Survey Graphic, Opportunity, and Plays and Pageants of Negro Life. HIs work was included in an exhibition of International Modernists in April 1929 at the New Art Circle Gallery owned by J.B. Neumann. Wells was the recipient of a Harmon Foundation Gold Medal in 1931 for his painting, Flight Into Egypt, and in 1933 won a first prize at the Harmon Foundation for a woodcut titled Escape of the Spies from Canaan. He received a position at Howard University in the crafts department teaching clay modeling, ceramics, sculpture, metal , and block printing. Wells spent two years making a case to move his position and linoleum printing to the College of Fine Arts. The print as an art form, did not yet garner much respect. It was considered a lesser art form to painting and sculpting, but Wells appreciated it for its accessibility. During the Depression, Wells served as the director of what was to become the Harlem Community Art Center, teaching classes for children and adults. Palmer Hayden and Georgette Seabrooke were his assistants. At this time, he dedicated himself entirely to printmaking. Wells continued to hone his technical ability by working with Frank Nankivell and spent a year working in Stanley Hayter’s Atelier 17, then the most innovative center of etching and printmaking in the nation. Wells continued to paint and create prints throughout the rest of his career. In 1961, the Smithsonian Institution held a solo exhibition of his prints, and another solo exhibition was held at Fisk University in 1973. The Washington Project for the Arts presented an exhibition of his oils and prints in 1986. The show was also presented at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
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Flower Vendor, 1928 woodcut 9-3/4 x 13-1/4 inches (image) signed, titled, and dated Artist’s Proof Provenance: The Collection of Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Maryland Exhibited: Building on Tradition, The Collection of Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Hampton University Museum, October 12, 2013-December 7, 2013. Literature: International Review of African American Art, vol. 24, 3B, Hampton University Museum, VA, p. 13.
$2,000-2,500 REF: A History of African American Artists From 1792 to the Present, Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson, Pantheon Books, NY, 1993.
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Evangeline Montgomery (b. 1933) Untitled (Abstract), c. 1975 oil on canvas 36 x 24 inches signed verso
$3,000-5,000 Evangeline Juliet, “EJ” Montgomery was born in New York. Her father was a Baptist minister and her mother a homemaker. As a teenager, she discovered her affinity for creating art when she received a paint set as a gift. Montgomery graduated from Seward High School in New York City. In 1955, she moved to Los Angeles with her husband and studied at the Los Angeles City College (1955-58) and Cal Sate, Los Angeles (1958-62). Montgomery lived in Nigeria from 1962-1965. Upon her return, she earned a BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1969. She also studied at UC Berkeley (1968-70). EJ worked as an artist in several mediums, including printmaking, painting, sculpture, ceramics, and jewelry design. She was also a very important administrator and advocate of African American art. She worked as a curator at the Oakland Museum from 1968-1974, and organized the retrospective show on the work of Sargent Johnson. Montgomery was impressed with Johnson’s work in enamel and successfully executed works of her own in that medium. Montgomery moved to Washington, D.C. in 1980 to work as a community affairs director for WHMM-TV. Shortly thereafter, in 1983, she began working with the United States Department of State as a program development officer for the Arts America Program, organizing overseas exhibitions for American artists—including African American artists.
Photo: The artist, 1973; Oakland Post Photograph Collection, MS 169, African American Museum and Library at Oakland, Oakland Public Library. Oakland, California.
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Evangeline Montgomery (b. 1933) The Window, 2010
serigraph 29-3/4 x 21-3/4 inches pencil signed, titled, dated and numbered 7/10
$600-800
“
In EJ’s improvisational take on nature, we see similarities with Alma Thomas’s work. Overlapping colors to build a sense of depth and a rich surface is a device that both Alma and EJ deploy. Each artist defines a fore, middle, and background in her works. Another commonality is the rhythmic syncopation within the pictorial space. I, too, have ventured into creating new scapes, and after years of doing so I coined the term “scapeologist” for myself as an inventor of scapes. Creating new worlds allows the artist to take complete control of her ideas and composition. Possibly, it fosters the need to make sense of the world we live in. In focusing in on EJ’s process of mark making to achieve expressive tactile surfaces, along with some of her decisions around color and composition, I wanted to speak to the divergent themes of release, or allowing oneself to be expressive, and control, or choreograph the use of gesture and color. This is a balancing act. Evangeline “EJ” Montgomery ably performs this dance as she invites us to witness the drama of nature.
”
-Nanette Carter, Conversations Part II, Magnetic Fields Expanding American Abstraction 1960s to Today, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, 2017; p. 59
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Hale Woodruff (1900-1980) Selections from the Atlanta Period, c. 1931-1946
portfolio of eight linoleum cut prints, loose, and housed in the original portfolio 19 x 15 inches, sheet, full margins numbered 277/300 Printed by Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop, New York in 1996, blind stamp lower left. Published by artist’s wife and estate, blind stamp lower right. Includes: African Headdress, Old Church, Coming Home, Relics, By Parties Unknown, Giddap, Trusty on a Mule, and Sunday Promenade
$6,000-8,000 Hale Woodruff began his career studying at the John Herron Institute in Indianapolis. He had enjoyed some degree of success and exhibited frequently in Indianapolis and in Chicago by the time he won a Harmon Foundation prize in 1926. This award financed a trip to Paris. Woodruff was deeply influenced by the European modernists, especially Cézanne. He spent a great deal of time with the poet Countee Cullen and painter Palmer Hayden while in Paris. Cullen was there on a Guggenheim Fellowship and Hayden, a Harmon Foundation gold medal prize he won the year previously. Woodruff was encouraged to start a collection of African art by Alain Locke, who accompanied him to the Paris flea markets. In 1931, Woodruff returned to the United States and began teaching art at Atlanta University. It was Woodruff who was responsible for that department’s frequent designation as the École des Beaux Arts of the black South in later years. As he excelled as chairman of the art department at Atlanta University, his reputation also grew as one of the most talented African-American artists of the Depression era.
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Woodruff moved to New York in 1946, where he taught in the art department at New York University from 1947 until his retirement in 1968. During the mid-1960s Woodruff and fellow artist Romare Bearden were instrumental in starting Spiral, a collaboration of African-American artists working in New York. Woodruff’s New York works were greatly influenced by abstract expressionism and the painters of the New York School who were active during the late 1940s and 1950s. Among his associates were Adolf Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, and Jackson Pollock. Following a long and distinguished career that took him from Paris to New York via the Deep South, Woodruff died in New York in 1980.
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Hale Woodruff (1900-1980) Selections from the Atlanta Period, c. 1931-1946 (continued)
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Romare Bearden (1911-1988) Romare Bearden was born in 1912 in Charlotte, North Carolina, but raised largely in New York City. His parents were active participants in the Harlem Renaissance, (his mother was the New York editor of the Chicago Defender), which provided the artistic and intellectual foundation for him to emerge as an artist of genuine talent, versatility, and conviction. Bearden studied at New York University, the Art Students League with George Grosz, and Columbia University. He was involved with the earliest incarnation of the Harlem Artists Guild and Charles Alston’s 306 group. After serving with the army, he was able to travel to Paris and study at the Sorbonne. When he returned from his travel, his work became more abstract. His early Social Realist works gradually gave way to cubism in the mid 1940’s while he began exploring religious and mythological themes. In the early 1960’s, Bearden joined the artist collective Spiral. He began making collages as “an attempt to redefine the image of man in terms of the black experience.” Bearden’s early collages were composed primarily of magazine and newspaper cuttings. Together with his Projections, which were enlarged photostatic copies of these collages, they mark a turning point in his career and received critical praise. Bearden achieved success in a wide array of media and techniques, including watercolor, gouache, oil, drawing, monotype, and edition prints. He also made designs for record albums, costumes and stage sets, and book illustrations. Bearden opened Cinque Gallery with fellow artists Norman Lewis and Ernest Crichlow and was founding member of the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Black Academy of Arts and Letters. His work is included in major public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY. Current exhibitions of his work include: Romare Bearden: Artist as Activist and Visionary, showing from January 30, 2020 - May 1, 2020 at the David C. Driskell Center, University of Maryland College Park, MD; Abstract Romare Bearden, February 13, 2020 - March 28, 2020, DC Moore Gallery, NY; and Something Over Something Else: Romare Bearden’s Profile Series, February 28, 2020 –May 24, 2020, Cincinnati Art Museum. His work is also part of the exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983, which is now showing at the deYoung Museum in San Francisco until March 15, 2020.
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Out Chorus,1979-80
photo etching on Arches paper, 12 x 16 inches (image), 22 x 30 inches (full sheet), signed and numbered 197/200 in pencil. Provenance:
The Estate of Clara Meek, Houston, TX
REF: A Graphic Odyssey: Romare Bearden as Printmaker. Edited by Gail Gelburd. Published by the University of Pennsylvania Press; p.6, 97b, Fig 1. $5,000-7,000
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Romare Bearden (1911-1988) The Falling Star, 1980
color lithograph 23-1/4 x 18 inches (full margins) signed, titled, and numbered 112/175 Provenance: Collection of Dr. Lindley T. Smith, Virginia
$3,000-5,000
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Romare Bearden (1911-1988) Quilting Time, 1979 color lithograph 18 x 23-1/8 inches signed and numbered 11/12 H/C Provenance: Collection of Dr. Lindley T. Smith, Virginia
$5,500-7,500
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Romare Bearden (1911-1988) Pepper Jelly Lady, 1975
color lithograph 25-3/4 x 21-1/8 inches signed and numbered 121/150 Provenance: Collection of Dr. Lindley T. Smith, Virginia
$4,500-5,500
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Allan Rohan Crite (1910-2007) Black Nativity, c. 1930 brass, plaster, and bronze relief 7 x 4 x 1 inches signed Literature: The Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art, Tyler Fine Art, 2019, p. 43.
$6,000-8,000 Allan Rohan Crite was born in New Jersey and moved with his family to Boston as an infant. His interest in art was encouraged at an early age. He graduated from English High School in 1929 and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1936. Crite was one of the first artists to observe and depict average African Americans engaged in their daily activities, primarily in the South End, Cambridge and Roxbury neighborhoods of Boston. According to Crite, “I’ve only done one piece of work in my whole life..I wanted to paint people of color as normal humans. I tell the story of man through the black figure.” Crite rejected the images of artists like Archibald Motley, Jr. and Palmer Hayden because he felt they were inaccurate in their portrayal of African American life--at least, in that those images were universal symbols. He earned the title of “reporter-artist”, rendering his subjects and scenery with such fine detail they appear almost like color photographs. A devout Episcopalian, his work soon began to exhibit strong religious themes as well, depicting blacks in interpretations of Biblical stories and African American spirituals. Crite also wrote and illustrated several books, created hand-tooled brass panels that once adorned a monastery, and designed and painted vestments and banners for St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Cambridge. His illustrations were published for many years in the 1970s and 80s as covers for Sunday service leaflets. Crite’s work is exhibited at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington D.C.; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Art Institute of Chicago.
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Eldzier Cortor (1916-2015) Jewels Theme V, 1985 color mezzotint with etching and aquatint 23 x 16-1/4 inches (image size), full margins signed, titled, dated, and inscribed, T/P 2/State Provenance: The Collection of Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Maryland
$6,000-8,000 Literature: One of the country’s most respected African American artists, Cortor spent years studying diasporan peoples in the American South and the Caribbean, and, over the years, amalgamated various aspects of women of the African Diaspora into his prototypical black female. Eldzier Cortor was one of the first black male artists to explore the beauty and intensity of black womanhood. Sensuous and melancholy women of color inhabit Cotor’s intimate spaces. Seated in a stylized interior, the elongated, gracefully introspective woman of [Jewels/Theme V] represents Cortor’s idealized black female. Adrienne L. Childs (object entries), Narratives of African American Art and Identity: The David C. Driskell Collection, p. 138. Note: T/P (Trial Proof) - These prints are made during the process of adjusting and developing the image. Even though technically they are unfinished prints, in the art market they are worth much more than the regularly editioned work because they reveal the process of the artist in creating the finished work.
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Eldzier Cortor (1916-2015) Eldzier Cortor was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1916. His family moved to Chicago in 1917 where Cortor was to play a large role in the Chicago Black Renaissance of the 1930’s and 1940’s. In 1936, he attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and later studied at Chicago’s Institute of Design under Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. He worked for the WPA Federal Arts Project in the 1930’s and in 1941, co-founded the South Side Community Art Center on South Michigan Avenue. After winning two successive Rosenwald Grants, he traveled to the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia and the Carolinas. It was here that he began to paint the women of the Gullah community as the archetype of African American culture, with their long, elegant necks and colorful head scarves. He focused on “classical composition”, making his figures resemble African sculpture. In 1946, LIFE magazine published one of these semi-nude female figures. In 1949, Cortor received a Guggenheim Fellowship and traveled to the West Indies to paint in Jamaica and Cuba before settling in Haiti for two years. There he taught classes at the Centre d’Art in Port au Prince. Cortor worked up until his death in 2015 at the age of 99. Recent exhibitions of his work have been held at the South Side Community Art Center in 2014; Eldzier Cortor Coming Home, an exhibition of prints, was held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston held a joint exhibition of the works of Cortor and John Wilson in 2017. His work is found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Howard University. Photo: The artist, 1949, taken by Gordon Parks.
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David Driskell (1931-2020) Artist, curator, scholar and distinguished professor emeritus David Driskell was born in Eatonton, GA in 1931. He completed the art program at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, in 1953. He went on to attend Howard University and received his MFA from the Catholic University of America, Washington D.C. Prof. Driskell explored post-graduate study in art history at The Netherlands Institute for the History of Art in The Hague. He began his career as an educator at Talledega College in 1955. In 1977, he joined the faculty at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he remained for the rest of his career. Upon his retirement, the David C. Driskell Center was established to honor his legacy and dedication to preserving the rich heritage of African American visual art and culture. In 1976, Prof. Driskell curated the important exhibition, Two Centuries of Black American Art: 1750- 1950, which was held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He has authored multiple exhibition catalogs throughout his career. As an artist, he works in collage and mixed media -oil paint, acrylic, egg tempera, gouache, ink, marker, and collage on paper and on canvas (stretched and unstretched). Prof. Driskell has worked with the Experimental Printmaking Institute of Lafayette college and Raven Editions. The exhibition, Evolution: Five Decades of Printmaking by David C. Driskell, held in 2009 at the High Museum of Art, GA was the first exhibition to highlight his printwork. Prof. Driskell’s work has recently been included in David Driskell: Artist & Scholar of the African American Experience, Oct. 2019 - Jan. 2020, Morris Museum of Art, GA; David Driskell: Resonance, Paintings 1965-2002, 2019, DC Moore Gallery, NY. His work may be seen now in the following exhibitions: Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition, Feb. 29 - May 24, 2020, Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.; Tell Me Your Story, Feb. 8 - May 17, 2020, Kunsthal Kade, Amsterdam; The Seasons, Nov. 16, 2019 - March 1, 2020, Nassau County Museum of Art, NY; and Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA
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The Young Herbalist, 2000 color lithograph, 25 x 19 inches, signed, titled, dated, and numbered 2/60 Provenance: Private collection, Atlanta, GA $1,500-2,000
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David Driskell (1931-2020) Wheel in a Wheel, 1993
collage and mixed media on paper 6-1/2 x 6-3/4 inches signed, titled, and dated label verso Midtown Payson Galleries, NY, exhibited Jun 9 - July 23,1993 Provenance: The Estate of Kathlyn “Elaine� Moragne.
$2,000-3,000
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James VanDerZee (1886-1983) Marcus Garvey Parade, 1924
photograph 5 x 7 inches signed and dated
Literature: James VanDerZee (1886-1983): The Collection of Steven Yager, Tyler Fine Art, 2019, p. 22. $2,000-3,000 James Van Der Zee was a Harlem photographer whose studio approach contrasted the photojournalistic style of Gordon Parks and the social realism of Aaron Siskind. His success was largely based on his portraits of middle-class black families in Harlem, which sought to convey a sense of dignity and self assurance in the sitter. It has been said that the successful recipe for a Van Der Zee image was equal part authentic pride of the sitter and equal part carefully constructed artifice—courtesy of the photographer. In 1924, Van Der Zee was commissioned as the official photographer of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). It was Van Der Zee’s responsibility to not simply document the activities of Garvey and the movement, but portray them in a strictly positive light. Van Der Zee executed thousands of photographs of meetings and parades, some of which were made into a calendar. His work is found in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Williams College Museum of Art, MA; and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, among others.
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James VanDerZee (1886-1983) Nude, New York,
1923 sepia-toned silver print 9-1/2 x 7-1/2 inches signed, titled, and dated Provenance: Collection of Dr. Lindley T. Smith, Virginia
$2,500-3,500
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Phillip Hampton (1922-2016) Untitled, c. 1967
acrylic and strings on canvas 48 x 38 inches signed Provenance: The estate of the artist. Literature: Phillip J. Hampton, Tyler Fine Art, 2017, p. 48.
$6,000-8,000 Born in 1922 in Kansas City, Missouri, Phillip Hampton studied art at the Kansas City Art Institute. Throughout his career, he inspired, not only with his art, but with his teaching. He was an associate professor of art and design at Savannah State College between 1952 and 1969, and associate professor of painting and design at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. His work has been exhibited at Atlanta University, 1958; Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah, GA, 1959; National Watercolor and Print Competition, Knoxville, TN, 1964; Lincoln University, 1966; Beaux Arts Guild, Tuskegee Institute, AL, 1967(purchase award), A&M University, 1968; Savannah Art Association, 1969; Smith-Mason Gallery, Washington D.C., 1971. Most recently, he was featured in the exhibition African American Abstractions: St. Louis Connections at the St. Louis Art Museum, 2008; as well as an exhibition at the Regional Arts Commission Gallery in St. Louis, 2009. Hampton continues to approach art from an analytical and scientific point of view, his work inspired by the self-imposed question, “What is reality and what makes reality real?”
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Phillip Hampton has been devoted throughout his long artistic career to investigations of abstract form and its relationship with objects from the visible world. He sees reality as that which is perceived via our sense, and that which is cerebral—derived from dreams, experiences or ideas. The aggregate forms that emerge from both levels of reality unite in the artist’s…paintings. Hampton studies the techniques of the old masters, the art of life and the unique spatial qualities of Asian art, employing the spatial and formal systems in his work.
”
“New Acquisitions”, The Saint Louis Art Museum Magazine (Spring, 2000): 13: Print.
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James Bolivar Needham (1850-1931) James Bolivar Needham spent over sixty years recording the city of Chicago, where he settled in 1867. His oeuvre consisted of marine and waterfront scenes, many of them of the Chicago River, which was one of the busiest waterways in the world at the time he lived there. Needham received little attention, however, until the Chicago Daily News carried a feature article on him shortly after his death in 1931 at the age of eighty-one. In this article, the writer depicted him as a shy, humble artist who painted simply for his pleasure. This description likely held truth because Needham is not mentioned in any records of early Black American artists in Chicago. Needham was born in Chatham, Ontario, a terminus of the Underground Railroad. He worked his way around the Great Lakes as a hand on lumber schooners. In Chicago, he made a living as a janitor and a house and decorative painter. At his death, according to his death certificate, he was working as a caretaker of the Lambert Tree estate on Chicago’s north side. He had little formal training, although he may have taken classes briefly at the Art Institute of Chicago and studied with Lorado Taft. Needham rarely signed his paintings because he did not intend to sell them. He left his mark on each work with a unique diamond configuration on the verso, noting the location painted and the boats depicted. Many of his paintings have been lost or destroyed in a fire. The remaining works are primarily small in size, painted on finely woven linen and mounted on panel. Of the quality of his work, Elizabeth Kennedy writes:
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Only someone who felt completely at home on the river could have painted it with such tenderness . . . Needham’s pictures are almost all unconventionally and un-self-consciously composed. While many are ‘portraits’ of ships, others make the viewer who is unfamiliar with activity on the river wonder exactly what the paintings depict.
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In 1998, Robert Henry Adams Fine Art, Chicago, IL, held the first exhibition dedicated to his work. Literature: James Bolivar Needham, Robert Henry Adams Fine Art, Chicago, IL, 1998 Chicago Modern, 1893-1945, Pursuit of the New, Elizabeth Kennedy, Terra Foundation for American Art, 2004, p. 134.
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Chicago River Scene, c. 1905 oil on board 10 x 11-1/2 inches signed
Provenance: Private Collection, Chicago
$12,000-15,000
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Lois Mailou Jones (1905-1998) Lois Mailou Jones’ career spanned seven decades, and her paintings represented a variety of artistic techniques and themes as her style evolved. Her work remained consistent in her thoughtful use of color and strong sense of design, both of which were instilled in her through her extensive education at institutions such as the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, the Boston Normal Art School, and the Designer’s Art School of Boston. At the beginning of her career, Jones submitted textile designs through a white classmate that were used by major textile firms. She went to work at Palmer Memorial Institute in North Carolina, helping to establish an art department. Professor James Herring was so impressed with her work, that he asked her to join the faculty at Howard University. Jones held a position here for the next 47 years. A number of her students went on to have extremely successful careers in art, including Elizabeth Catlett and David Driskell. In 1937, Jones went to Paris for a years sabbatical. She attended the Academie Julian and began painting plein air. She would continue to return to Paris throughout her life; like other African American artists of the time, she felt a freedom there that was profound. Jones found another spiritual home in Haiti. In 1954, she was invited to visit and paint the country’s landscape and the people. The works she produced in this period are her most widely known works. Jones was equally at home painting French landscapes and figure studies. Her work is found in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Metropolitan Museum, NY; and the National Palace, Haiti. The Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC, organized the exhibition Lois Mailou Jones: A Life in Vibrant Color in 2011. In 2013, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston held a show of 30 paintings and drawings showing her versatility and mastery of techinique. Her work was also included in the exhibition, I, Too, Sing America: The Harlem Renaissance at 100, held at the Columbus Museum of Art, OH, in 2018.
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Untitled (Landscape), c. 1950
oil on board 19-1/2 x 23-1/2 inches signed and inscribed France
Provenance: Private Collection, San Diego, CA This painting depicts the Heidelberg Castle which is located in Germany on the Neckar River, a tributary of the Rhine. While this painting is of a German landscape, it was completed while the artist was living and painting in France, hence the inscription.
$6,000-8,000
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Lois Mailou Jones (1905-1998) Untitled (African Masks), 1996 color screenprint 20-5/8 x 16-5/8 inches (full sheet) 16 x 12-7/8 inches (image) signed and numbered 2/60
$1,500-2,500
Untitled (African Dancers), 1996 color screenprint 20-1/2 x 16-5/8 inches (full sheet) 16 x 12-7/8 inches (image) signed and numbered 2/60 $1,500-2,500 These silkscreens represent the series of five silkscreen prints by Jones inspired by the poetry of Léopold Sédar Senghor and published by the Limited Editions Club. Senghor was born in French West Africa and was the first black member ever inducted into the French Academy. In 1960, he was unanimously elected the first president of Senegal (and re-elected four times). As a poet, he represented the literary and artistic expression of the black African experience. With Aimé Césaire, Senghor co-founded the Négritude movement, which promotes distinctly African cultural values and aesthetics, in opposition to the influence of French colonialism and European exploitation. Jones and Senghor were mutual admirers of each others art. In 1970, Jones traveled to Africa with a grant from Howard University and visited eleven African countries. During her visit she would lecture about African-American art and met and interviewed African artists about their work. She would return several times over the next decade. Jones’s work is held in many important collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Howard University, Washington D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; and the Phillips Collection, Washington D.C. Retrospective exhibitions include, Lois Mailou Jones, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2013; The World of Loïs Mailou Jones, Meridian House International, Washington, DC, 1990; Reflective Moments, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston, 1973; Lois Mailou Jones: Forty Years of Painting: 1932-1972, Howard University Gallery of Art, Howard University, Washington, DC, 1972.
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Lois Mailou Jones (1905-1998) Untitled (Portrait of LĂŠopold SĂŠdar Senghor),1996 color screenprint 20-5/8 x 16-5/8 inches (full sheet) 16 x 12-7/8 inches (image) signed and numbered 2/60
$1,500-2,500
Untitled (Portrait of a Woman), 1996 color screenprint 20-1/2 x 16-5/8 inches (full sheet) 16 x 12-7/8 inches (image) signed and numbered 2/60
$1,500-2,500
Untitled (Winter Night), 1996 color screenprint 20-1/2 x 16-5/8 inches (full sheet) 16 x 12-7/8 inches (image) signed and numbered 2/60 $1,500-2,500
Untitled (Jazz Ensemble), 1996
color screenprint 20-1/2 x 16-5/8 inches (full sheet) 16 x 12-7/8 inches (image) signed and numbered 2/60
$1,500-2,500 Provenance: Collection of Dr. Lindley T. Smith, Virginia
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James Herring (1887-1969) Museum Interior, c. 1950 oil on board 12 x 10 inches signed
Provenance: The Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art, San Francisco, CA Literature:
The Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art, Tyler Fine Art, 2019, p. 61.
Selections from the Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art, Tyler Fine Art, 2019, p. 81.
$3,000-5,000 James Herring was a very important figure in the development of both the academic and commercial aspects of African American art in the first part of the twentieth century. Herring founded the Howard University Art Department in 1922 and served as a mentor to artists/educators David Driskell, James Porter, and Alma Thomas. Along with Alonzo Aden, he opened the Barnett Aden Gallery in 1943, one of the few institutions dedicated to the collection, preservation, and exhibition of African American art. Museum Interior is an excellent example of Herring’s traditional style of painting, and the subject is a nod to his deep involvement in the scholarly side of the art world. Herring’s work was shown at the Harmon Foundation, NY, 1933; American Negro Exposition, Chicago, 1940; The Negro Artist Comes of Age, Albany Institute of History and Art, NY, 1945; Salute to the Barnett-Aden Collection, Morgan State College, Baltimore, MD; and Narratives of African American Art and Identity: The David C. Driskell Collection, University of Maryland, College Park. Photo: Professor James V. Herring working with students in life painting class at Howard University, 1953. (Gallery of Art Archives, Howard University, Photo Credit Andre Richardson).
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Claude Clark (1915-2001) Rhododendrons, 1938-39 oil on board 10 x 9 inches signed, titled, and dated $2,000-3,000 Claude Clark was born in Rockingham, Georgia in 1915 on a tenant farm. He and his family moved to Philadelphia in 1923 where he attended Roxborough High School. He began writing poetry and painting and was encouraged to show his work at church. After graduation, he studied at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art, 1935-39, and at the Barnes Foundation, 1939-44. Clark studied the Barnes Collection and drew from it the characteristics that made his art so iconic. He mixed his own paints from dry pigment and oil and experimented with textures - becoming known for his heavy impastos applied with a palette knife. During the Depression, Clark worked as a printmaker for the WPA in Philadelphia and shared a studio with Raymond Steth and Dox Thrash. He was instrumental in establishing the Art Department at Talladega College in Alabama, and taught there from 1948-1955, when he was succeeded by David Driskell. Clark then moved to Oakland in 1958, where he attended Sacramento University (BA) and the University of California, Berkeley (MFA). Clark’s black studies curriculum for Merritt College, Oakland, became the model for other programs in California. To accompany it, he published A Black Art Perspective: A Black Teacher’s Guide to a Black Visual Art Curriculum in 1969. Clark’s work is found in many public collections including the Saint Louis Art Museum, MO; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Atlanta University, GA; MH de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, CA; and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington D.C. REF: Tradition Redefined, The Larry and Brenda Thompson Collection of African American Art, David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, 2009. American Negro Art, Cedric Dover, New York: Graphic Society, 1972.
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Raymond Saunders (b. 1934) Born in 1934 in Pittsburgh, Saunders studied at the University of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Barnes Foundation, the Carnegie Institute of Technology, and the California College of the Arts (CCA). Saunders wrote his pamphlet Black is a Color in 1967 after attaining his MFA from California College of Arts in 1961. He questioned the value of categorizing art solely by race. Throughout his career, his work has remained abstract. The use of a variety of media including elements of collage and text allows him to construct a social narrative within the composition.
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Racial hang-ups are extraneous to art. No artist can afford to let them obscure what runs through all art–the living root and the ever-growing aesthetic record of human spiritual and intellectual experience. Can’t we get clear of these degrading limitations, and recognize the wider reality of art, where color is the means and not the end? [sic]
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–Raymond Saunders, in his 1967 pamphlet Black is a Color Saunders made his NY debut in 1962 and was represented by Terry Dintenfass Gallery early in his career, where he had shows from 1966-72 and 1986. The gallery was known for representing Jacob Lawrence and Horace Pippin as well as Social Realist painters . He has gone on to exhibit widely nationally and internationally. Important group exhibitions include Afro-American Artists: New York and Boston, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 1970; Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties, Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY, 2014; Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980, Hammer Museum of Art, University of California-Los Angeles, 2012; and Tradition and Conflict: Images of a Turbulent Decade 1963-1973, Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, 1985. In 2015, the Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery at the University of California, Santa Cruz, held the exhibition, Raymond Saunders: Black is a Color. He continues to live and work in Oakland, California. Saunders’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Carnegie Institute Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and many other public and private collections.
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Untitled, 1968 oil and collage on canvas 52 x 40 inches signed Provenance: Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York; Private Collection, NY by descent to Eric Weil, NY; John and Susan Horseman Collection of American Art $20,000-30,000 349
Frederick D. Jones, Jr. (1913-1996) Fred Jones’ modernist watercolor compositions often revealed the influence of Eldzier Cortor, a mentor of his at the Art Institute of Chicago. Jones’s canvasses often held tall, languid African American women in other-wordly surroundings. Jones’s work is a remarkable synthesis of elements and influences that he was exposed to throughout his life, as well as an innate sense of design and sensitivity to his subjects. His indelible style was shaped first at Morehouse and Spelman Colleges and Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta, Georgia. During this time, Hale Woodruff took him under his wing, along with fellow artist Wilmer Jennings. Jones was one of the lucky students who Woodfuff selected to assist him with murals for Talledega University. Jones went on to study at the Art Institute of Chicago, with the financial help of a generous patron, Harrison Jones, an executive at Coca Cola. He studied painting with Louis Ritman, an American Impressionist with Paris connections. The Chicago and Vicinity Exhibitions featured Jones’s work from 1946-1951. He focused on the technical aspects of color, applying it to his art - the telling of the story of Black struggle. An interview quoted Jones as saying that Cortor “taught him that he could make the struggle beautiful.” Jones was also involved with the South Side Community Art Center, serving as an assistant director in 1947 - Rex Goreleigh was the director. Jones entered work in the Atlanta University Annual in 1942 and, in 1943, won its Second Purchase Award for Watercolor in 1943 for the painting, Wash Day. From 1943-46, he served in the US Navy along with fellow artist, Hughie LeeSmith. When he returned to the Art Institute, the First Church of Deliverance, Chicago commissioned him to paint two murals. Jones continued to work at Coca-Cola, painting in his spare time. He exhibited in the Atlanta University Annuals 18 times between 1942 and 1961 and participated for many years in the 57th Street Art Fair in Chicago.
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The Girl in the Yellow Dress, c. 1950
oil on board 30 x 8 inches signed
Provenance: The Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art, San Francisco, CA Literature: The Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art, Tyler FIne Art, 2019, p. 78. Selections From the Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art, Tyler FIne Art, 2019, p. 71.
$2,500-3,500 Jones’s work has been featured in many prestigious exhibitions including The Flowering: African-American Artists and Friends in 1940s Chicago: A Look at the South Side Community Art Center, Illinois State Museum, Chicago, IL, 1993; Two Black Artists of the FDR Era: Marion Perkins, Frederick D. Jones, DuSable Museum of African American History, Chicago, IL, 1990; and The Great Migration: The Evolution of African American Art, 1790-1945, Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, OH, 2000. In 2018, the Smart Museum, Chicago, IL, included his work in the exhibition, The Time is Now! Art Worlds of Chicago’s South Side 1960-1980.
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Sylvester Britton (1926-2009) The Apostle, 1996-97 acrylic on canvas 74-1/2 x 43 inches signed and dated
$8,000-10,000 Sylvester Britton was born in 1926 on the South Side of Chicago. He attended the Abraham Lincoln Center, a cultural center in Chicago, and received formal art training in Mexico City at the School of Painting and Sculpture. When Britton returned to Chicago, he studied at the School of the Art Institute. He later traveled to Europe, living and exhibiting work both in Paris and Sweden before earning enough money to move back to Chicago by making Christmas cards. When he returned to the United States, he was instrumental in the revival of the South Side Community Art Center and became its gallery director. He was also a regular exhibitor at the 57th Street Art Fair in Chicago. Britton exhibited works at Oak Park Library, Chicago, IL; Atlanta University; Art Institute of Chicago; and the South Side Community Art Center. He was awarded the Eisendrath Prize from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1956. Most recently, in 2018, the Smart Museum, Chicago, IL, included his work in the exhibition, The Time is Now! Art Worlds of Chicago’s South Side 1960-1980. Illustrations of his work appear in the catalog, pp. 72,139. His work is illustrated in The Black Chicago Renaissance by Darlene Clark Hine and John McCluskey, Jr. , University of Illinois Press, 2012, cat #10:28, 10:29.
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Sylvester Britton (1926-2009) Lady in Red, 1993
acrylic on canvas 36 x 24 inches signed and dated titled verso
Provenance: The Estate of Kathlyn “Elaine� Moragne.
$4,000-6,000
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Columbus Knox (1923-1999) Farm Workers, c. 1975 watercolor on paper 14-1/2 x 20-1/2 inches signed Perakis Frames, Philadelphia, label verso, dated 1975
$1,500-2,500 Columbus Knox was born in Philadelphia in 1923. He attended Central High School, and was awarded a scholarship to attend the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Arts (now the University of the Arts in Philadelphia). One of his first paintings Charging Warriors was listed in Who’s Who in Black Art. Knox worked primarily in acrylics, oil and watercolor.
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His use of light within his extraordinary circular, vertical and horizontal line movement gave his figures strength, power and life. Due to Knox’s concentrated use of vibrant colors and masterful brush strokes, figures in his paintings evoked an ethereal sense of the divine.
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-Gallery owner and curator, Keith Scriven Knox was commissioned to do paintings for collectors and corporations, including one of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for a Philadelphia high school. His other award-winning pieces include Pebbles, Inez’s Communion, Dancing Watusi and Black Madonna. Knox worked as an art director for the Philadelphia based U.S. Naval Supply Depot, and was a graphic designer and illustrator for other government agencies. In the 1980s, he retired as a visual media specialist for the Federal Office of Mining and Safety. Knox was a beloved presence at the annual Rittenhouse Square Fine Art Show in Philadelphia and was represented in major exhibitions like AfroAmerican Artists, 1800-1969, Philadelphia School District and the Museum of the Philadelphia Civic Center; Philadelphia Collects: Works on Paper, Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts, 2008; and In Search of Missing Masters: The Lewis Tanner Moore Collection of African American Art, Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia.
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