Featuring nearly 500 lots of art and objects from the collection of renowned curator and scholar and advocate of Southern outsider and contemporary art William “Bill” Fagaly (1938-2021), sold to benefit Prospect New Orleans’ William A. Fagaly Memorial Fund for Social Impact.
The Fagaly collection includes outsider and contemporary art from the many artists he befriended and championed early on. It also includes “world folk art” (so termed by Bill, himself, within his extensive card catalogue), baskets and crafts by Native American and other Indigenous Peoples, Pre-Columbian artifacts, and African art—a once under-represented category Bill pioneered and significantly expanded during his five-decade-long tenure at the New Orleans Museum of Art.
Bill Fagaly was a curator of African art at NOMA, a founder of the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, and a founder of Prospect New Orleans, the triennial exhibition that was the first large-scale international art event of its kind in the US.