The Los Angeles Scene

BLACK ART AUCTION

June 4, 2022 at 12pm EST

the los angeles scene

In fall 1966, UCLA’s Dickson Art Center inaugurated its new building with the exhibition The Negro in American Art. Although the exhibition was national in scope, a significant portion of the artists were from Los Angeles and were part of a group working with Noah Purifoy and the Watts Tower Art Center to reclaim the remains of the Watts rebellion, which had taken place one year earlier, by using them to make art. (Ann Philbin, Director Hammer Museum, Now Dig This!, catalog to the exhibition, p. 9) In the 1960s and 70s, a vibrant art scene had developed in L.A. The stage was set by pioneers such as Charles White, Betye Saar, William Pajaud and Mel Edwards a decade earlier. Starting as a nearly homegrown effort, the artists were holding exhibitions in their homes, churches, and community centers. A handful of artists, including Pajaud, rented a space and started a co-op gallery called Eleven Associated (there were eleven participating members). That only lasted a year, but it was still a step forward. Another important event was Pajaud’s appointment as art director to the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company, the largest African American-owned business in the city. Golden State commissioned murals, purchased artwork done by black artists, and made their collection accessible as an educational tool, producing printed catalogs and offering public tours.

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Alonzo and Dale Davis, artists and founders of the Brockman Gallery began presenting important exhibitions of the work of local black artists in 1967. Samella Lewis and Ruth Waddy published a two volume book, Black Artists on Art, and Lewis founded Black Art: An International Quarterly (1976), which later evolved into International Review of African American Art (published by Hampton University).

Suzanne Jackson, another artist and student of Charles White, opened Gallery 32. Only open for two years, Gallery 32 contributed to creating milestones in the success of black art in the city. One such exhibition was the Sapphire Show in 1970, purportedly the first show focusing on black women artists in Los Angeles.

Many of the artists whose work is represented in the auction were part of this evolution.

Some names are very recognizable, such as Charles White, but other artists remain mostly unknown to a national audience, such as Charles Dickson. The purpose of this spotlight is simply to offer some introductory information on each artist and possibly spur further investigation. Some of these artists worked closely together at points in their careers, but certainly they were not operating under a universal manifesto. There are also many other important figures to the L.A. scene whose work is not included in this particular sale.

There are many good resources for information on the art scene in L.A. in the 1960s-1970s, and some of the best comes from Kellie Jones, a Professor in Art History and Archaeology in African American Studies at Columbia University. Look for her books or email me for a suggested reading list.

-Thom Pegg

CHARLES DICKSON (B. 1947) Watts Towers, 2005 cast resin, metal rod 9-1/2 x 8 x 3-1/2 inches signed, titled, and dated Provenance: Private collection, Los Angeles $2,000-3,000 Charles Dickson (b. 1947) was born in Los Angeles and grew up attending the public school system. He worked as an instructor at the Communicative Arts Academy in Compton, 1971-). Dickson sculpts in a variety of media including wood, stone, and bronze. Largely self-taught, Dickson is inspired by classical art and the ancient cultures of Africa and Mexico.

The artist incorporates his unique life experiences and surrounding urban environment to create pieces that express different perspectives of the African-American experience. Charles Dickson has been awarded several public commissions throughout southern California, and his work was also included in the following exhibitions:

California Sate Fair, Sacramento, 1968 Annual Watts Arts Festival, 1968-1972 Los Angeles Collects; Works by over Thirty Artists from Fifteen Private Collections, The Museum of African American Art, Los Angeles, October 9-December 27, 1987 West Coast 74, The Black Image, The Crocker Art Gallery, Sacramento, CA Oh Speak, Speak (installation, 1971, with John Outterbridge, Dale Davis, and Elliot Pinkney) L.A. Object & David Hammons Body Prints, Tilton Gallery, New York, 2007/2011 L.A. Blacksmith, California African American Museum, 2019 Hard Edged: Geometrical Abstraction and Beyond, California African American Museum, 2015

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CHARLES WHITE (1918-1979) Born in 1918 in Chicago, Charles White was initially an introverted child, preferring to retreat into a world of reading and drawing. As he grew older, 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 a postslavery 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 in 2018.

This exhibition traveled to the Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2019.

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Young Woman, 1963-1964 lithograph 13-1/4 x 16-3/4 inches signed, titled, dated and numbered $6,000-8,000

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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 designcentered 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 printmaking, 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 negativelycharged 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.

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;

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.

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Keep for Old Memoirs, 1976 offset lithograph on cream wove paper 14-1/2 x 18-3/4 inches Printed and published by Cirrus Editions, Los Angeles.

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NATHANIEL “SONNY” BUSTION (B. 1942) Ceramic planter, 1976 ceramic vase, hand painted and glazed 15 inches (high) 12 inches (diameter) signed “Sonny Bustion” and dated Provenance: private collection, Los Angeles, CA $1,000-2,000 Bustion was born in Alabama and studied at Colorado State University and the Belgium Antwerp Academy of Art before moving to Los Angeles to study at the Otis Art Institute. He exhibited at the Watts Summer Festival, Gallery 32, Brockman Gallery, USC, the Otis Art Institute and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles 1972: A Panorama of Black Artists). He later taught art at the Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles City College and Pomona College. His work was included in the collection of the Johnson Publishing Company.

Society must respect and acknowledge the importance of the various cultures before we can become a universal culture -- something we have always been and forgot and gave up along the journey. The challenge our ethics are embedded in our aesthetics. The universe and nation is the Artwork. We are the Artists.

Bustion, similarly to many of the L.A. based artists working in the latter quarter of the 20th century, explored various mediums—painting, printmaking, assemblage, ceramics and sculpture.

Photo: https://lasentinel.net/meet-local-artistnathaniel-bustion.html

My work grows out of ideas, emotions, power, forms and images within a total universe. I deal with deep suffering, emotions, happiness and man in his environment.

Lewis/Waddy, Black Artists on Art ; vol 2, p.

114.

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BARBARA WESSON (20TH century) Woman in a Blue Skirt, c. 1990 oil and glazes on canvas 20 x 16 inches signed Provenance: private collection, Los Angeles $1,500-2,000

alike. In fact, Ernie Barnes made an effort to participate in her Crenshaw exhibit year after year.

Her work has been featured in: African American Artists in Los Angeles: A Survey Exhibition: Pathways 1966-1989, California African American Museum, 2005

Barbara Wesson grew up in South Central Los Angeles. As a student of acting at Los Angeles City College she began painting as a hobby. This hobby grew into a thriving business as she not only began to sell more of her art, but also began seeking out and creating new places to show it.

Sisters in Spirit: The Power of Seven, 626 Gallery, CA, 2007

In the early 1980s, she founded the Bunker Hill Art League, a group of more than 300 minority artists in the Los Angeles area. Together they discussed the business of art including marketing strategy and solutions. Wesson recognized it was necessary to create new spaces for artists of color to showcase their work and made it happen. Her shows attracted artists and patrons

Visual Voice, Riverside Art Museum, CA, 2016; curated by Charles Bibbs and Bernard Stanley Hoyes. (This show also included works

by Nathaniel Bustion, Charles Dickson, Ernie Barnes, Charles White, Noah Purifoy, Samella Lewis, and William Pajaud)

Black Artists on Tour: The African American Aesthetic, Riverside Metropolitan Museum, CA, 2007

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TIMOTHY WASHINGTON (b. 1946) Untitled (Couple), c. 2000 scratchboard drawing/etching in colors 33-1/2 x 15-1/2 inches Provenance: private collection, Los Angeles, CA $6,000-8,000 “I am dealing with message art: it is informative and relates to a poster in that it gives information. However, I want the information to be discovered; therefore the message is subtle. I try to ask questions and make the viewer think and in turn look closer.”

Excerpt from Three Graphic Artists: Charles White, David Hammons, Timothy Washington, LA County Museum of Art, 1971.

Washington grew up in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, not far from Simon Rodia’s towers and studied art at the Chouinard Art School (now Cal Arts; BFA, 1969). Washington, along with his contemporaries, David Hammons, Betye Saar, Noah Purifoy, John Outterbridge, and Dan Concholar, favored assemblage using found materials to express social black consciousness.

He exhibited at Brockman and Gallery 32 in Los Angeles.

Washington’s work was featured in these important exhibitions: Soul of a Nation, Art in the Age of Black Power, Tate Modern, UK, 2017

19 Sixties, A Cultural Awakening Re-evaluated, 1965-1975, California African American Museum, Los Angeles, 1989

African American Artists in Los Angeles: A Survey Exhibition: Pathways (1966-1989), California African American Museum, Los Angeles, 2005 Common Ground, California African American Museum, Los Angeles, 2008 Los Angeles 1972: A Panorama of Black Artists, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1972 Eleven from California, Studio Museum in Harlem, 1972 The following video provides an an in-depth exploration of Los Angeles–based artist Timothy Washington and was produced in 2021 in anticipation of the exhibition Black American Portraits and on the 50th anniversary of Three Graphic Artists: Charles White, David Hammons, Timothy Washington (January 26– March 7, 1971) at LACMA Artist in Focus: Timothy Washington

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SAMELLA LEWIS (b. 1924) Over the course of a distinguished multi-faceted career, artist, art historian, museum curator, and activist, Samella Sanders Lewis became a peerless advocate for African American involvement in the arts. While she works in a variety of media, Lewis is best known as a printmaker. Often utilizing the human figure, her oeuvre speaks to the struggle and strength of the African American community.

Lewis began her education in her hometown of New Orleans, at Dillard University, but on the advice of her professor, Elizabeth Catlett, she transferred to Hampton University. After graduating, she taught at several universities and in 1968, Lewis became the education coordinator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a position she hoped to use to increase exhibition opportunities for black artists. Repeated clashes with museum administrators over the hiring of more staff of African descent led Lewis to resign.

She would go on to establish three independent art galleries and, in 1976, founded the Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles, where she served as senior curator until 1986.

Soon after she left LACMA, Lewis began teaching at Scripps College in Claremont, California (1969–1984), and, in another first, became the college’s first tenured African American professor.

When she and fellow artist-scholar Ruth Waddy sought to publish their landmark two-volume guide on African American artists, Black Artists on Art (1969 and 1971), Lewis co-founded Contemporary Crafts Gallery, the first African American–owned art publishing house.

She also founded the noted academic journal, International Review of African American Art, in 1976.

REF: The Johnson Collection, Spartanburg, SC.

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Untitled, Portrait of a Man, 1958 charcoal and pencil on paper 8-1/4 x 5-3/4 inches signed and dated $2,500-4,500

The Farmer, 2006 serigraph 40 x 22 inches signed, numbered, titled, blind stamp , edition of 60 $4,000-6,000

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AFRASHE ASUNGI (contemporary) Sometimes, We Be So Cool, 1981-1983 set of three color lithographs 29-1/2 x 18 inches (image, slight variation in sizes between images) 30 x 22 inches (sheet) signed, titled, and dated; one is dedicated to Varnette Honeywood $1,200-1,800 Afrashe Asungi, or just Asungi, was active in Los Angeles in the 1970s-1980s. She earned her B.A., focusing on printmaking, from Wayne State University (Detroit); she also studied graphic art and illustration at the California College of Design, and earned two Master’s degrees: MFA from the University of Chicago and MSW from California State University, Long Beach.

As a student, she was influenced by important Detroit artists, such as James Lee (see two works by Lee in this auction), Charles McGee, Allie McGee and Carl Owens.

Her work is included in the private and public collections of Eartha Kitt, Ed Bradley, Varnette Honeywood (featured in this sale), Spellman College, Watts Towers Art Center, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

AfraShe worked at the Brockman Gallery and showed with David Hammons, Betye Saar, Senga Negudi, Samella Lewis, Ruth Waddy, Suzanne Jackson and many other important L.A.-based black artists.

As a graphic artist, she has completed projects for the California African American Art Museum, University of Chicago Press, Brockman Gallery and the Watts Towers Art Center.

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NOAH PURIFOY (1917-2004) Important Los Angeles-based sculptor. Purifoy was born in Snow Hill, Alabama, and moved with his family to Birmingham when he was five.

He studied at Alabama State Teacher’s College in Montgomery (B.S., 1939), and then worked as a woodworking teacher at Tuscaloosa High School for three years. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy, and after his discharge in 1946, continued his education at Atlanta University (M.A. in Social Sciences, 1948). He moved to Los Angeles in 1950 and enrolled at the Chouinard Art Institute B.F.A. 1954). He began working as a professional artist/ furniture designer in 1956; his background in social work, as well as his early experiences with growing up in the South influenced his choice of subjects in his fine art.

He co-founded and served as the first director of the Watts Tower Art Center (1964-1966).

The venue was an important hub of artistic activity and opportunity for artists and residents of the community. The Watts riots of 1965 shaped Purifoy’s artistic agenda, both in content and choice of medium, as he moved toward assemblage and a socially-charged aesthetic. In 1966, with his inclusion in the group exhibition, 66 Signs of Neon, Purifoy devoted all of his efforts into fine art, and no longer worked as a designer.

Purifoy’s…work explores the relationships between Dada assemblage practices, African sculptural traditions, and black folk art. Purifoy’s works are rich with myriad influences and inspirations. Commentaries on social conditions, the art world, and humanity itself come together in abstract forms that refer to multiple sculptural traditions, from ancient African masks to contemporary art practices. Color and texture, often brought about by the use of oxidized and rusted metals, create visually varied surfaces that demonstrate stunning workmanship.

In 1972, Purifoy, disillusioned with the lack of change following the Watts riots, dropped out of the art world, and began working as a social worker at Central City Mental Health, the city’s first mental health clinic devoted to the welfare of the African American community. He left the majority of his installation for 66 Signs of Neon in his front yard, and eventually put it out with the trash. In 1976, at the request of Governor Jerry Brown, he became the first black artist to join the California Arts Council, where he served for 11 years shaping issues of public art policy.

In 1989, at the age of 72, he moved to Joshua Tree, CA, where he created a personal sculptural environment to surround himself.

Exhibitions: 66 Signs of Neon, (1966-1972), traveling group exhibition.

Los Angeles Collects; Works by over Thirty Artists from Fifteen Private Collections, The Museum of African American Art, Los Angeles.

(October 9-December 27, 1987).

Black Art: The Black Experience. Occidental College, 1971.

Los Angeles 1972; A Panorama of Black Artists, LACMA Contemporary Black Artists in America; Whitney Museum of American Art, 1971.

Noah Purifoy: Outside and in the Open, California African American Museum, Los Angeles, 1997.

L.A. Object & David Hammons Body Prints, Tilton Gallery, New York, 2007/2011

Connie H. Choi, Now Dig This!, p. 211-212

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Adinkra Symbols (series of 10), c. 1970 torch-cut iron panels (set of 10) 24 x 24 inches (each) unsigned These were displayed outdoors as intended Provenance: private collection, Los Angeles $10,000-15,000

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JOHN T. RIDDLE, JR. (1934-2002) 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.

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 earned his MFA in 1973.

Riddle’s work, Gradual Troop Withdrawal (1970), was included in Soul of a Nation Art in the Age of Black Power (the leg of the exhibit at The Broad).

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 work may be found in the collections of the Oakland Museum, High Museum of Art, and the California African American Museum.

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.

The Ballot, 1986 color serigraph 26-1/2 x 20-3/4 inches (image) 29 x 23 inches signed, dated, and numbered 93/200 $1,500-2,500

- Andrea Gyorody, Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1960-1980, p. 212. Catalog accompanying the exhibition at The Getty, 2011

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ALONZO DAVIS (b. 1942) Davis grew up near Tuskegee University where his father was a professor and his mother a librarian. The family moved from Alabama to Los Angeles in 1955. He studied art at Pepperdine University and earned an MFA in printmaking at the Otis Art Institute, under Charles White. In 1967, he and his brother Dale, opened the Brockman Gallery in L.A., which featured the works of contemporary black artists such as Charles White, John Biggers, Elizabeth Catlett, Romare Bearden Mel Edwards and David Hammons.

Davis exhibited his own work at Brockman, as well as at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Los Angles County Museum, Laguna Beach Art Association and the Watts Summer Art Festival.

In Lewis / Waddy’s Black Artists on Art, v. 2, p.

105, Davis says: I am involved in making visual statements not literary ones. It is for the viewer to interpret.

Thus, I have chosen a few words to give an indication as to what my art deals with or is affected by at this time: direction, decision, pressure, black/white, morality, unity, change, feelings, politics, humor, symbols, heritage.

Photo: Alonzo Davis in his Los Angeles studio, 1970; Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1960-1980, Kellie Jones, Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles, 2011: p. 222.

Now is the Time, 1988 color screenprint 26 x 40 inches signed, titled, dated and numbered, 20/55 blind stamp SHG Provenance: private collection, Los Angeles, CA $800-1,200

SANDRA ROWE (b. 1940)

Sandra Rowe was born in Richmond, Indiana.

She studied art at Merced College (A.A., 1974); California State University, Fresno (B.A. 1977); University California Irvine (M.A., 1980). Her themes include the psychology of relationships between people and between the conscious and subconscious of one’s own identity. Rowe credits the the impact of her teachers Charles Gaines, the first black artist in the Leo Castelli gallery, who ‘jogged her brain to consider linear versus nonlinear form’, and Terry Allen, who taught her that ‘expectations of art can be different’, in further shaping her views on art. (Gumbo Ya Ya, King-Hammond, p. 237).

She was given a retrospective, Traversing the Circle, at the Riverside Art Museum in 1993, and exhibited at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles. In 1987, she was the first Artist-in-Residence at the California AfroAmerican Museum in Los Angeles. She also exhibited at the Santa Monica Museum of Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the National Museum for Women in the Arts, among many others.

The Save box (2001) addresses the issue of AIDS, and a plea for the help and attention needed to conquer it. Rowe writes on the bottom of the box, “Africa is the birth land of all of us.”

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Save Box, 2001 mixed media assemblage (box) 9 x 6 x 2 inches signed, dated, titled Provenance: private collection, Los Angeles $600-800

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DANIEL LARUE JOHNSON (1938-2017) Born in Los Angeles in 1938, Johnson studied at the Chouinard Art School and the California Institute of Arts, Los Angeles. He moved to New York, where he befriended Willem de Kooning, and with the latter’s help, was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship with which he used to study in Paris with sculptor, Alberto Giacometti.

He is closely associated with Los Angeles’s African American artist movement of the mid20th century, which developed as a response to the country’s social, political, and economic changes. His varied body of work includes assemblages, expressionist and hard-edge abstract paintings, and colorful, minimalist sculptures. His work is included in the collections of Pasadena Art Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. Johnson was included in the show, The Search of Freedom, African American Abstract Painting 1945-1975, Kenkeleba Gallery; also: Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 19601980, Hammer Museum, 2011; and Witness, Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties, Brooklyn Museum, 2014; His work is illustrated in The Afro-American Artist, A Search for Identity, Elsa Honig Fine, 1982; 5 + 1, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1969; and The Deluxe Show, Houston, 1971 His work also appeared in Soul of a Nation Art in the Age of Black Power at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, 2020.

Photo: Daniel LaRue Johnson with his painted sculptures, French & Co. Gallery, New York 1970.

Photo from sassyj.net

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Untitled, c. 1970 oil on canvas 60-1/4 x 60 inches signed (several times) verso $ 20,000-30,000

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WILLIAM PAJAUD (1925-2015) William Pajaud was born in New Orleans and lived there until he finished the ninth grade. Even though he was young, his experiences in that city shaped his subject matter as a painter later in his life. Pajaud moved with his mother to Chattanooga for a year, and there he experienced a racially motivated beating. A year later, his mother landed a teaching job at Texas College, so they moved, once again, to Tyler, TX. Just a teenager, he was subjected to another racially motivated act of violence. Later he commented that his art was a reaction to how a person copes with these kinds of challenges experienced throughout his life.

Pajaud earned a BFA from Xavier University in New Orleans. Eventually he moved to Los Angeles in 1948, and enrolled at the Chouinard Art Institute. He exhibited in the 1950s-60s, he exhibited at Heritage Gallery, Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Esther Robles Gallery. He also participated in a co-op group known as Eleven Associated. The artists, including Beulah Woodard, Alice Gafford, and Curtis Tann who rented a space on South Hill Street in an attempt to gain more visibility for their work. The group, while historically significant, did not last long.

and Pajaud also convinced them to build an impressive collection of African American art.

Pajaud exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Pasadena Art Museum; deYoung Art Museum, San Francisco; Atlanta University; University of Iowa.

Pajaud was appointed as an art director for Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company in 1957, the largest African American-owned business in Los Angeles. Golden State was known for supporting African American artists,

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Tetas de Cabra, San Carlos, 1980 watercolor on paper 19-12 x 29-1/2 signed, dated, and titled $1,000-2,000

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JENNIFER J RAY (20th century) Spectrum Run, c. 1974 acrylic on canvas; to be hung diagonally (per artist orientation on verso) 29 x 29 inches signed and titled verso Provenance: private collection, Los Angeles Ray was active as a hard-edge abstract painter in Los Angeles in the 1960s-1970s. $3,000-5,000 Little is known about the life and work of Jennifer J. Ray, although it is clear that she worked as a hard-edge abstractionist for several years in the Los Angeles area. The works offered in the auction come from the estate of a prominent Los Angeles artist who was friend to many of the local black artists active in the 1960s-80s.

Ray’s work was featured in Black Art: an International Quarterly in 1978 , Volume 2, Number 2, pp. 30-31. There are four works pictured that are very similar to the paintings in the auction.

Unfortunately, there is no text to accompany the images other than a description of the work. It is not unreasonable to assume that Samella Lewis was familiar with Ray’s work, given that she presented her as the “profile” artist in the magazine.

The only other reference found was for a two artist collaborative exhibition at the City Gallery at the Chasten Arts Center in Atlanta, Georgia in 1999 (with Lisa Tuttle).

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JENNIFER J RAY (20th century) Momentum, c. 1974 acrylic on masonite 30 x 30 inches signed and titled verso $3,000-5,000

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JENNIFER J RAY (20th century) Untitled, c. 1974 acrylic on canvas 30 x 24 inches identified verso

Provenance: private collection, Los Angeles $3,000-5,000

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JENNIFER J RAY (20th century) Untitled, 1974 acrylic on canvas board 18 x 24 inches signed and dated verso $2,000-3,000 Untitled, Abstract, c. 1974 acrylic on canvas 24 x 18 inches identified verso Provenance: private collection, Los Angeles $2,000-3,000

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