African American Fine Art Auction

African American Fine Art Auction

2oth Century Art & Design Auction June 1, 2014 10 a.m. CST John Toomey Gallery - Oak Park, IL

Second Session - African American Fine Art Preview Dates Saturday, May 24 - 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Sunday, May 25 - CLOSED Monday, May 26 - CLOSED Tuesday, May 27 - 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Wednesday, May 28 - 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Thursday, May 29 - 10:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m.

Friday, May 30 - 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Saturday, May 31 - 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

For more information please contact Thom Pegg thom@treadwaygallery.com 708.383.5234

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A Message from the Specialist-in-Charge: I am pleased to direct the inaugural sale of art by African Americans at the Toomey/Treadway Auction. It is a natural fit to hold such an auction in Chicago, because of the city’s rich African American cultural heritage. The list of noteworthy visual artists who have lived and worked in Chicago over the years is lengthy, and it’s breadth is matched by the current level of interest and commitment to collecting. I have worked with the Toomey/Treadway Auction as the painting specialist for 12 years (1995-2007) and now return as the specialist of African American Art. This auction house and myself have for many years promoted the interest and sale of African American Art. In 1997, we sold William Edouard Scott’s “Maker of Goblins” for $42,550, a worldrecord price that held for many years. In the same sale, we sold a painting by John Wesley Hardrick for $17,250, another record price.

We sold a tiny Charles Sebree the same year—and virtually nobody had even heard of him before—for $1,200. In 2000, we sold a sculpture

by Sargent Johnson for $40,000, which is now in the Art Institute of Chicago, and later that year sold another for $47,000. My point is that we are not jumping on the bandwagon of selling African American art at auction. In fact, it could be said we did it first—at least to the extent that we focused on this art categorically. These years of experience are essential in giving us the ability to offer to you significant, quality works in this field.

Included in this auction is a work by Charles Henry “Spinky” Alston.

Charles Alston refused to exhibit in the all-black Harmon Foundation exhibition in the 1920s because he wanted to be accepted not as a black painter, but as a good painter. At first, it may seem like a betrayal to Alston to include his work here in an auction which features exclusively African American artists, but it is not. Alston successfully made his point, which was that black artists were every bit as talented as artists of any other race, and that art could be good or bad, regardless of the race of the artist, by his refusal. And here we suggest the same point but from a different direction: by offering quality works (and some absolutely historically significant) and then by making it an exclusive category, make it clear that Charles Alston was indeed right; and in fact, his work was included due to his abilities as an artist.

Thom Pegg

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Lot 591

Lot 590

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LEROY ALLEN (1958-2007)

Leroy Allen earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Kansas in 1977. While working at Hallmark in Kansas City, Missouri, he met a group of talented black artists known as “The Kansas City 6” who inspired him to enroll in painting classes at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1990. He became a noted figurative artist in little more than a decade, his work appearing in many exhibitions and receiving much critical success. He was adept at working in oils, charcoal, watercolors, and pastels, which allowed him to reveal a greater depth of humanity and character in his subjects. Allen’s favorite subjects were young people. “I like the youth, the strength.” A particularly poignant moment in his career occurred when the family of one of his youthful subjects attended the exhibition of the painting, “Sundrops,” at the Mississippi Museum of Art. He was equally talented in his rendering of landscapes, especially those of his favorite fishing spots. “They are a part of me,” he said, “…I see backroads places that most people don’t see.”

Allen participated in the American Watercolor Society’s 133rd Annual Exhibition, NY (2000) and the National Watercolor Society’s 78th Annual Exhibition, CA. He had a solo exhibit at the Stella Jones Gallery in New Orleans, and participated in group shows at the Jazz Museum in Kansas City.

“Winds of Change” was an image created for The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City. The Kansas City Monarchs was the longest-running franchise of the Negro Leagues. Hall of Fame players such as Satchel Paige and Jackie Robinson played on the Monarchs.

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Lot 546

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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 co-founded 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.

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.”

Recent exhibitions that have included his work are, A Force for Change, 2009; On Higher Ground: Selections from the Walter O. Evans Collection, 2001; and Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance, 1998. 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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Lot 553

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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. With influences ranging from Joseph Cornell, Paul Klee, and Kurt Schwitters, he began constructing his own shadow boxes – broken into partitions, using found objects in an abstract arrangement to convey various themes. The theme of gender and its role in social and individual identity appears frequently in Arnold’s work.

In 2012, an exhibition of his work titled, Ralph Arnold Unmasked: From Pop to Political, was held in Loyola University’s Crown Center Gallery. His work may be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Fisk University.

REF: Louise Dunn Yochim, Role and Impact: The Chicago Society of Artists

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Lot 535

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WILLIAM ELLSWORTH ARTIS (1914-1977)

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.

He received a second John Hope prize two years later 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.”

Artis served in the U.S. Army in WWII, and after the war, attended Syracuse University on the G.I. Bill, earning a Master’s Degree by 1951. Toward the end of the 1940’s, his work was becoming more abstract, focusing more on the entire human figure. He exhibited extensively from the 1930s-70s. His work may be found in the collections of Atlanta University, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Hampton University.

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Lot 588

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CASPER BANJO (1937-2008)

Printmaker, sculptor, and educator, Casper Banjo worked in Oakland, California in the 1950’s. He was known for his prints of surreal, amorphous forms often with his trademark brick pattern. Throughout his career, Casper helped install exhibitions at Oakland’s Center for Visual Arts, taught printmaking to homeless artists through the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness, and helped the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame create prints of the hands of famous black filmmakers.

His work has been included in several important exhibitions, including, Impressions/Expressions: Black American Graphics, organized by the Smithsonian Institution, 1979 – 1981 and Aesthetics of Graffiti, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1978. Currently his work is part of an exhibition organized by the Brooklyn Museum entitled, Revolution! Works from the Black Arts Movement, which will be on view from February 5, 2014 – May 3, 2015. The Brooklyn Museum also has his work in their permanent collection.

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Lot 592

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ERNIE BARNES (1938-2009)

Barnes was born and raised in an impoverished part of Durham, North Carolina. He had been interested in art since he was a young boy, and although not initially very athletic, became a high school star football player and track star. He attended North Carolina Central University in his hometown, majoring in art and participating in football and track. Ed Wilson, sculpting professor at North Carolina Central University, taught Barnes to feel his movements while playing football and express that feeling in his work—a lesson Barnes never forgot. Barnes’ paintings, populated as they are with elongated figures reminiscent of Michelangelo’s later work, have been described as Neo-Mannerist. Other scholars have pointed to his use of visual rhythm to sublimate physical tension as evidence of Black Romanticism.

Barnes was drafted by the Baltimore Colts, and eventually had played with the New York Titans, San Diego Chargers, Denver Broncos, and in the Canadian League before retiring. Sonny Werblin, the owner of the NY Jets met the artist in 1965 and began sponsoring his artistic endeavors. His first show, at Grand Central Galleries in New York, was a sellout.

Barnes explained that he painted his expressive, gesturing figures with their eyes closed in reference to society’s preoccupation with skin color and general blindness to the inner essence of the individual. Refusing to forget his Southern familial origins, Barnes finished his paintings with frames made of distressed wood inspired by the ramshackle fence that encircled his childhood home in Durham. It is an addition that Barnes believed his father, an uneducated shipping clerk who passed away before his son’s first solo exhibition, would have appreciated.

His work is found in the collections of the University of California, La Jolla; University of Southern California, and many other private colleges.

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Barthé had entries in the Harmon Foundation’s juried exhibits in 1929, 1930, and 1933, as well as the cooperative show at Delphic Studios in 1935.

Maasai Warrior was one of 18 works included in the Delphic Studios show, and was illustrated in the catalog (a photocopy of the original booklet accompanies the work).

Excerpt from a letter written by the original owner, Ruth Wildau : “In 1968 (I was 14), my parents and I traveled to Jamaica where we met Richmond Barthé. He had a lovely estate where he grew orchids and created all kinds of art. I think the name..was Isola. It was such a charmed afternoon. We left without buying anything, but this was the beginning of a friendship between my parents and Barthé that would last years. In 1985, we went to LA to see ... Richmond Barthé. He was not well at the time..his eyes were indeed the same, and I remembered his hands and how beautiful they were.” (a photocopy of the letter accompanies the work).

Lot 490

Head of a Young Woman is made from dental stone, which is a stronger, denser derivative of plaster manufactured from gypsum under pressure. In it’s raw form, it is white or yellowish, so Barthé added tint directly to the mixture before casting. Dental Stone is preferred to traditional plaster in some cases because it mixes and pours thinner, reducing bubbles, is easier to make smooth details, and when cured, is stronger.

Lot 489

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RICHMOND BARTHÉ (1901-1989)

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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Lot 576

Lot 575

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ROMARE BEARDEN (1911-1988)

Romare Bearden’s family actively participated in the Harlem Renaissance, which provided the artistic and intellectual foundation for him to emerge as an artist of genuine talent, versatility, and conviction. As his early Social Realist works gradually gave way to cubism in the mid 1940’s, he began exploring religious and mythological themes. His first Homeric series, “The Iliad: 16 Variations by Romare Bearden,” was shown in the fall of 1948. Bearden executed these works in ink and watercolor, creating the illusion of movement and action with his lyrical swathes of ink. Even as his techniques evolved, he continued to draw upon mythological themes from epic literature throughout his career, drawing parallels between these and the African American experience. In 1977, he created a series of watercolors and collages based on The Odyssey, in which Bearden used African American subjects to depict the tragic figures and heroes of Homer’s epic work. Most recently, a selection of both sets of remarkable works were part of a traveling exhibition organized by the Smithsonian Institution in 2012, entitled “Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey” 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. His work is included in major public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

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Lot 515

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DORIS BRADLEY B. 20TH CENTURY

Bradley worked as a sculptor and ceramicist from the 1940s-60s. She participated in exhibits at the People’s Art Center, which was located at 3657 Grand Square, St. Louis, MO. Other artists involved with this organization include Donald Charpiot and Houston Chandler. Bradley executed sculpture and ceramic vessels in various mediums, including clay, wood, and metal.

Although the work of Bradley has not seen much exposure in a secondary market, she was a gifted artist, as indicated by the body of work currently held by the family of the artist.

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Lot 538

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SYLVESTER BRITTON (1926-2009)

Born in 1926 on the South Side of Chicago, Sylvester Britton attended the Abraham Lincoln Center, a cultural center in Chicago. He received formal art training in Mexico City at the School of Painting and Sculpture for six years before returning to Chicago in 1952 where he studied at School of the Art Institute. He later traveled to Europe, living and exhibiting work both in Paris and Sweden before earning enough money to travel back to the U.S. 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.

Britton exhibited at the Oak Park Library, Atlanta University, the 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.

Lot 526

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Lot 522

Lot 521 24

MARGARET BURROUGHS (1917-2010)

Margaret Burroughs was born in Louisiana in 1917. Her family moved to the south side of Chicago in 1922. Here, she studied at the Chicago Normal School and received both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art education at the Art Institute of Chicago.

From 1940 to 1968 she was a teacher in the Chicago public schools and a professor of humanities at Kennedy-King College in Chicago from 1969-1979.

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 also lived in Mexico for a time, where she studied printmaking 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, 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.

Throughout her career, Burroughs worked in many mediums, showing special facility in watercolors and linocut printmaking.

For many years, she worked with linoleum block prints to create images evocative of African American culture. She is 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.

Her work can be found in the collections of Howard University, Alabama State Normal School, Atlanta University, DuSable Museum of African American History, Johnson Publishing Company, and the Oakland Museum.

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Lot 564

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Lot 565

WILLIAM SYLVESTER CARTER (1909-1996)

Born in St. Louis, MO, William Sylvester Carter 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 W.P.A. The same year, he exhibited at Howard University Gallery of Art. Carter also worked for the W.P.A in Illinois in 1943, and taught art at the historic South Side Community Center.

His work may be found in the public collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the DuSable Museum of African American History, and the South Side Community Art Center.

Carter’s work, The Card Game , 1950, was recently included in the exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, “They Seek a City, Chicago and the Art of Migration” (see cat., p 87); it also appears in The Black Chicago Renaissance, by Darlene Clark Hine and John McCluskey, Jr.

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Lot 557

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DIEUDONNÉ L. CEDOR B. 1925

Born in L’Anse a Veau on March 8,1925, Cedor joined the Centre d’Art in 1947. He became a teacher the following year and served as a member of the board of directors, but in 1950, a group of artists broke away to form the Foyer des Arts Plastiques . The “Realism of Cruelty” style espoused by Cedor, Exumé, and Emil was essentially a kind of social realism that highlighted the plight of the downtrodden. Cedor has exhibited his work all over the world. In 1967, he and fellow artist Jean Nehemy completed a mural at what was then called the Francois Duvalier International Airport in Port-au-Prince. His work is on permanent display at the museum of Haitian art at St. Pierre college in Port-Au-Prince. He was one of the late president Nixon’s favorite Haitian artists.

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HOUSTON CHANDLER B. 1914

“Resistance of the material is not itself a hindrance…it creates fertile energy in one’s mind.”

Houston Chandler, or “Keg” to his friends and acquaintances, attended Vashon High School and Lincoln University in St Louis.

Chandler was a talented athlete as well as artist, and he competed in the 1934 St Louis relays. He was also a first-rate football player. He continued his education at the University of Iowa, earning both an MA and an MFA. He was the second African-American to earn an MFA from the University of Iowa, the first being his friend and fellow sculptor, Elizabeth Catlett. He studied with Humbert Albrizio, Lester Longman and James LeChay. During the summer of 1946 he resided at 713 S. Capitol St. in Iowa City and the 1946-47 directory listed his address as 29 W. College St. His work, he writes, “is primitive in the sense that he seeks the simplicity that brings out the most powerful line of expression.”

Chandler experimented as an abstract painter, but his most important artistic endeavors were executed as sculpture or prints (aquatints).

He was versatile and proficient in numerous mediums: wood, stone, beaten lead (masks) and ceramic. He found the physicality of printmaking similar to making sculpture, and being the athlete that he was, this appealed to him. He was awarded many prizes at exhibitions for both mediums.

His work can be found in the collections of Atlanta University, the University of Iowa, and the St. Louis Art Museum.

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Lot 517

Lot 518

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RALPH CHESSÉ (1900-1991) face portraits to be added. Chessé linked his physically isolated children by way of a gravel path that guides the eye downward from left to right through the mural and past each child at play.

He continued this approach to figure painting throughout his career.

Moses and the Idolators and Canaan both illustrate this concept. Although there is a narrative to each work, the image appears as a “still”, thus allowing the viewer to contemplate the scene at a desired pace. The character development is static, so betrayal is impossible, and the scene becomes symbolic, instead of a fleeting image that may have been spied out of context.

Ralph Chessé was born in New Orleans and was primarily self-taught as an artist, with the exception of a few months study at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1918. He traveled to Southern California in 1923 and eventually headed north to the Bay Area in the early 1930s, where he painted and worked as a professional puppeteer in children’s theater, an activity he mastered and continued throughout his life.

Chessé worked for the Public Works Art Project in 1933, contributing to the Coit Tower murals in the Telegraph Hill neighborhood of San Francisco.

His fresco reflects his work in children’s theater by depicting children at play, and seems to present its characters in an almost puppet-like manner.

Each child is separated in space and frozen in movement, almost as if they are posing for a picture or pretending to play. Its design was inspired by the work of early American primitive limners, who traveled the land in the years before the spread of photography. They brought along with them canvases pre-painted with bodies––headless bodies waiting for individual

Chessé explored many styles of Modernist painting, and was strongly motivated by color.

In the 1940’s, Chessé painted African-American figures, many of them dock workers, in socialrealist scenes recalling his boyhood in New Orleans. He also used religious themed motifs derived from The Bible. During World War II, he created paintings of the shipyards in the Bay Area.

Later, Chessé moved to Oregon where he painted in a more abstract, but still figurative style, until his death at the age of 90.

He exhibited his paintings at the Gildea Gallery and the Lucien Labaudt Gallery in San Francisco, the Duncan Gallery in New York, and the Marc Antony Gallery in New Orleans. He was a member of the San Francisco Art Association and the Oakland Art Association. His work was included in group exhibitions at the Oakland Art Gallery (now the Oakland Museum of California) and the de Young Museum. A solo exhibition of his work was mounted at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

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Lot 572

Lot 573

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CLAUDE CLARK (1915-2001)

Claude Clark was born in Georgia. He remained connected with the south intellectually even when he had traveled far away.

He earned an undergraduate degree from Sacramento State University in 1958 and a MFA from UC Berkeley in 1962.

From 1939-1942, Claude Clark worked as a printmaker for the WPA in Philadelphia. During the Depression, he shared a studio with Raymond Steth and Dox Thrash.

Bridging the divide between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, Clark’s paintings generally represent black genre in an effort to construct art of socio-political import. His work, with characteristically basic design and color format, offer easily translatable stories that “mirror societal ideals and values.”

Clark was instrumental in establishing the Art Department at Talladega College in Alabama, and taught there from 1948-1955, when he was succeeded by the young David Driskell.

A number of Claude’s paintings from the 1960’s are included in the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center in Wilberforce, Ohio, an institute which showcases African American Art of the Black Arts Movement. Clark’s work can also be found in many public collections including the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, Atlanta University, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. REF: Tradition Redefined, The Larry and Brenda Thompson Collection of African American Art, Brenda Thompson, American Negro Art, Cedric Dover Lot 570

A comparable work is in the collection of David C. Driskell (Narratives of African American Art and Identity, The David C. Driskell Collection, p. 121)

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Lot 540

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IRENE CLARK B. 1927

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.

She was a member of The African-American Historical and Cultural Society and gallery director of the Exhibit Gallery and Studio, Chicago. Her work can be found in the collections of the Oakland Museum of Art, CA and Atlanta University.

A Mansion at Prairie Avenue, 1955 is in the collection of The Art Institute of Chicago (Walter M. Campana Memorial Prize Fund) Writing on African influence, Clark noted, “Generation after generation of Africans have told stories among themselves, and whenever they moved they took their stories.” (originally cited in “African Art, the Diaspora and Beyond”, Chicago: Daniel Parker, 2004 and found in The Black Chicago Renaissance, Darlene Clark Hine and John McCluskey, Jr.)

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Lot 561

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Lot 563

Lot 562

GLOUCESTER CALIMAN COXE (1907-1999)

Known for his experimental abstract art, Gloucester Caliman Coxe was considered the “dean of Louisville’s African American artists”, a community which included such future luminaries as Bob Thompson and Sam Gilliam. Coxe made a living as an illustrator, worked for local theaters, and created training aids at the Fort Knox Army Base before entering the University of Louisville, in his 40’s, to study art. He was the first African American to receive the Allen R. Hite scholarship and the first black fine arts graduate of the university. Coxe established the Louisville Art Workshop in 1959, where artists of all races could create and show their work. He exhibited at the Smith-Mason Gallery, Washington D.C. in the 1970’s. In 1995, a retrospective of his work was held at his alma mater. Most recently, in 2013, a selection of his work was shown at the Kentucky Center for African American Heritage.

His work is in the collection of the Johnson Publishing Company (Chicago).

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Lot 519

(details)

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ALLAN ROHAN CRITE (1910-2007)

Allan Rohan Crite was born in New Jersey, but 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 in 1936. Crite is known for his lively street scenes with people outdoors engaged in activities, primarily set 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.

Crite reverently depicted actual locations in his artwork and normal daily activities of the people living there. In Shawmut Avenue, Boston , a shop owner watches children playing on a hot day, as well-dressed figures walk by with a purpose. The children are closely watched by parents and older siblings. While this is a depiction of a literal scene , Crite offers it up as a symbol of success for the African American assimilation into normal, productive, American life.

REF: Allan Rohan Crite, Artist-Reporter of the African American Community, Julie Levin Caro (catalog to the exhibition at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle Washington).

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Lot 582

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CHARLES DAVIS 1912-1967)

Employed as an easel painter with the Illinois Art Project, Charles Vincent Davis was known for his portrayals of the people and places of his beloved Bronzeville on the South side of Chicago. Davis briefly attended classes at the Art Institute and Hull House in Chicago in 1940. He was a founder and one of the first group of instructors at the South Side Community Art Center in 1940. Davis was a frequent exhibitor at the Art Institute of Chicago, showed with the Chicago Artists Group, and had work in the American Negro Exposition, 1940.

In 2008, Davis’ work was part of an exhibition entitled, “Convergence: Jewish and African American Artists in Depression-era Chicago” at the Koehnline Museum of Art, Illinois. His work is part of the permanent collection at the South Side Community Art Center.

When asked why he chose Bronzeville as his subject matter, Davis replied “I live here because I have a deep sympathy for the people who live here. These people and the whole neighborhood have something to say. I want to paint real people and real places.”

REF: Chicago Modern 1893-1945, Pursuit of the New, Elizabeth Kennedy (exhibition catalog for the Terra Museum 2004)

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Lot 600

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BEAUFORD DELANEY (1901-1979)

Beauford and Darthea Invitation card for 1973 exhibit at Galerie Darthea Speyer Courtesy of Galerie Darthea Speyer

Beauford Delaney was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, one of ten children, and older brother to artist Joseph Delaney. 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 the mid-1920s.

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 Institution, and Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, MA. In Narratives of African American Art and Identity, The David C. Driskell Collection, it is written, “Delaney’s relationship with abstraction predates the notorious Abstract Expressionist movement, positioning him as a forerunner of one of the most ideological and stylistic developments in twentieth-century American art.”

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It seems that the title of this work, “Bon Naissance Howard” (Good Birth Howard) is directly connected to Delaney’s relationship with African American classical composer, Howard Swanson. Swanson returned to Paris in 1952 and remained until 1966. Delaney painted “Portrait of Howard Swanson” in 1967 (collection of Museum of Modern Art). Swanson’s career was boosted in 1950 when Marian Anderson performed his song based on a Langston Hughes poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” at Carnegie Hall. One of Swanson’s most notable compositions, “Symphony No. 3” was written in 1969. The horizontal lines and circles within drawn by Delaney on the verso seem to symbolize a musical scale and notes.

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BEAUFORD DELANEY (1901-1979)

Lot 600 (verso)

Portrait of Howard Swanson c. 1967 oil on canvas 39” x 31.75” Collection of MOMA

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Lot 534

Lot 533

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JOSEPH DELANEY (1904-1991)

Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1904, the younger brother of Beauford Delaney, Joseph Delaney moved to New York City in 1930 where he enrolled at the Art Student’s League. During the Great Depression, he painted many portraits on commission and was employed by the WPA. Beginning in 1931, Delaney became a regular exhibitor at the Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibit where he offered portrait sketches executed during the event. His work shows a great love of New York City wher he remained for 55 years capturing dynamic urban scenes and diverse figures depicted in a loose, exaggerated style.

In 1985, Delaney returned to Knoxville, where he was named artist-in-residence at the University of Tennessee, until his death in 1991. His work can be found in the major collections of the Indianapolis Museum of Art; Alain Locke Society, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J; Clark Atlanta University, Atlanta, GA; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; and the Harlem State Office Building Art Collection, New York.

REF: Life in the City: The Art of Joseph Delaney, catalog for the exhibition: Ewing Gallery, University of Tennessee, 2004.

Frederick Moffatt.

Lot 583

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Lot 491*

Lot 477

Lot 488*

*Dr. Jontyle Theresa Robinson writes (concerning the two works on paper included in this sale), “..these drawings reveal that while Douglas’ works may appear minimalist, abstracted and distilled, his arrival at such abstractions took preparation. These drawings (dating between, perhaps 1927-1936) appear to (be an) outworking of ideas that are, ultimately, finalized in paintings.� She also notes the provenance of the estate of Doug Crutchfield as significant. Crutchfield was an African American dancer originally from Cincinnati, who lived in Denmark at the time of his death. Crutchfield, Ronald Burns (artist) and Ves Harper (choreographer and costume designer) all lived in Copenhagen and maintained art collections.

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AARON DOUGLAS (1899-1979) 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. The Toiler is an example of this style executed on a smaller scale. The power of its message retains the intensity of his murals with its use of vivid colors and strong figural element placed at the forefront.

Aaron Douglas, is the artist most closely associated with the Harlem Renaissance and was known for a signature style that forged elements of African Art with a modern European aesthetic.

After studying and teaching in the Midwest, he moved to New York City 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.

Aaron Douglas received two Rosenwald Fellowships, one for study in France and the other to tour Haiti and the American South. It was possibly on the second, in 1937, when he visited the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, that he painted The Toiler. The original owner of the work was a nurse at the John A. Andrew Hospital in Tuskegee (the occupation of her husband is unknown, as is the connection to the artist).

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 Murals and drawings were his primary focus early University; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington in his career. He did illustrations for a number of publications, including Opportunity and The Crisis. D.C.; and the de Young Museum, San Francisco.

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

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Lot 486

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WILLIAM MCKNIGHT FARROW (1885-1967)

Farrow was born in Dayton, Ohio and attended high school in Indianapolis, where he met W.E. Scott, who encouraged him to attend the Art Institute of Chicago, which he did from 1909-1918.

After his education, he remained at the Art Institute of Chicago to teach ( he was the first African American instructor ) as well as serve as supervisor of the print shop and assistant to the curator of temporary and contemporary exhibitions.

Farrow was an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance as a source of inspiration and guidance for African American artists of the mid-twentieth century. In addition to supporting the study of African American visual arts, he wrote “Art for the Home,” a weekly column for the Chicago Defender, and many articles on African American artists. He helped establish the Chicago Art League in 1923 (an all-black artist association) and served as its president. Farrow’s organization put together the exhibition, “The Negro in Art Week” in 1927. Farrow curated and showed some of his own works in it. His paintings and illustrations were often used as covers for The Crisis. He also produced technical illustrations for textbooks used in Chicago public schools.

Farrow’s exhibitions include the Lincoln Expo, Chicago; Tanner Art League; Art Institute of Chicago; Chicago Art League; New York City Public Library; National Gallery; Century of Progress; Harmon Foundation, 1928, 1930, 1931,1935; American Negro Exposition, 1940; the National Academy of Design; and the Albright Art Gallery, 1944.

Paintings by Farrow seldom come to the market, and this is a fine example of his academic style and traditional subject matter.

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Lot 567

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Lot 568

TOM FEELINGS (1933-2003)

Tom Feelings, a native of Brooklyn, New York, attended the school of Visual Arts for two years and then joined the Air Force in 1953, working in London as a staff artist for the Graphics Division of the Third Air Force. In 1958, he created a weekly comic strip, ‘’Tommy Traveler in the World of Negro History,’’ which ran in The New York Age, a Harlem-based newspaper.

Feelings traveled to Ghana and Guyana early in his career, and spent his time in both countries illustrating, teaching and consulting. When he returned from his first trip to Africa, he began illustrating books with African and African-American themes. To Be a Slave, written

by Julius Lester and illustrated by Feelings, was chosen as the 1969 Newberry Honor Book, and was the first book of its kind to receive such an award. He illustrated twenty books in his career.

The School of Visual Arts recognized him with its Outstanding Achievement Award in 1974. He has received eight Certificates of Merit from The Society of Illustrators, along with a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship Grant in 1982.

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Lot 551

Lot 549

Lot 550

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SAM GILLIAM B. 1933

Since the 1960’s, Sam Gilliam has consistently worked in the abstract, exploring color, texture, and form with new and innovative techniques and media. He initially rose to prominence when he removed his richly pigmented canvases from their stretchers, draping them on walls or suspending them from the ceilings. With each new exhibition space, the canvas could be rearranged.

By the late seventies, Gilliam drew influence from jazz musicians such as Miles Davis and John Coltrane. He started producing dynamic geometric collages, which he called “Black Paintings.” In the 1980s, Gilliam’s style changed dramatically to quilted paintings reminiscent of African patchwork quilts from his childhood. His most recent works are textured paintings that incorporate metal forms. Gilliam’s ability to move beyond the draped canvas, coupled with his ability to adopt new series keeps the viewers interested and engaged. This has assured his prominence in the art world as an exciting and innovative contemporary painter.

Gilliam’s work can be found in the collections of the Museum of African Art, Washington D.C.; Museum of Modern Art; Phillips Collection; Washington Gallery of Modern Art; National Collection of Fine Arts; Corcoran Gallery; Howard University; Carnegie Institute; and the Walker Art Center, MN. Relevant examples of his work are illustrated in: Collecting African American Art, Halima Taha; African American Art and Artists, Samella Lewis; Tradition Redefined, The Larry and Brenda Thompson Collection of African American Art, Brenda Thompson; African American Art, Harlem Renaissance Civil Rights Era and Beyond, Richard Powell and Virginia Mecklenburg; Narratives of African American Art and Identity, The David C. Driskell Collection.

Lot 596

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Lot 524

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BERNARD GOSS B. 1913

Painter, muralist, and printmaker Bernard Goss was born in Sedalia, Missouri. He studied at the University of Iowa, as well as the Art Institute of Chicago and the Institute of Design.

He married fellow artist Margaret Burroughs in 1939, and their coach-house flat became a social center, dubbed “little Bohemia,” for a wide and interracial circle of friends and colleagues. Burroughs and Goss worked together to help establish the South Side Community Art Center which opened in 1940, and later founded the Du Sable Museum of Black History. Goss’s 1939 painting “Musicians”, appeared in Alain Locke’s, The Negro in Art. Goss exhibited at the Little Gallery, Iowa, 1934; Student Salon, IA, 1935; Illinois Federal Art Project; Library of Congress, 1940; American Negro Expostion, 1940; Tanner Art Gallery, 1940; Howard University, 1941; and the South Side Community Art Center, 1941,1945.

He was most recently included in the exhibit, “Convergence: Jewish and African American Artists in Depression-era Chicago” at the Koehnline Museum of Art at Oakton Community College (2008).

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Lot 594

Lot 595 60

PHILLIP HAMPTON B. 1922

Artist and educator Phillip Hampton was born in 1922 and studied art at Drake University and the Kansas City Art Institute. Hampton had been painting for a number of years, focusing on figurative work and street scenes, painted in Savannah, Georgia, but it wasn’t until the 1960’s that he began to explore abstraction, where he found that he was allowed to address the philosophical without the typical representational constraints. He continues to approach art in this way, inspired by the self-imposed question, “What is reality, and what makes reality real?”. Hampton also taken a scientific approach in examining various types of media and their properties.

Most recently, a solo exhibition of his work titled, “A Celebration of Vision: The Art of Phillip Hampton,” was held at the Sheldon Art Galleries, St. Louis, MO in 2005. Hampton was one of three artists featured in the 2008 exhibition, “African American Abstraction: St. Louis Connections,” at the Saint Louis Art Museum.

Several of his early works appear in American Negro Art, Cedric Dover.

Lot 593 61

Lot 485

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JOHN W. HARDRICK (1891-1968)

John W. Hardrick was best known as an accomplished portrait painter and landscape artist. His distinctive landscapes, Impressionist in style, drew inspiration from William Forsyth, his instructor at the John Herron School of Art and member of the Hoosier Group. Hardrick made many trips to Brown County, Indiana, registering the details of the countryside with his mind, rather than a sketchbook. He painted from memory, mixing his own colors and applying the paint thickly and expressively, embellishing the scene somewhat with his own energy and imagination.

Hardrick painted portraits of many of the well-known citizens of Indianapolis, both white and African American, as well as working as a WPA muralist in 1933-34. Because of his prodigious talent, throughout his career he often received community support. He participated in the Hoosier Salons in 1929, 1931, and 1934 and the 2nd Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Negro Art in San Diego.

His most well known work, Little Brown Girl, was purchased by a group of Indianapolis African-American citizens and donated to the John Herron Art Institute.

REF: A Shared Heritage: Art by Four African Americans , catalog to the exhibit at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, by Harriet Warkel and Bill Taylor. 1996. A similar work is illustrated on p. 44.

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Lot 558

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LEON HICKS B. 1933

An acclaimed engraver and draughtsman, Leon Hicks is known for his portraits and exploration of everyday life.

Since the sixties, Mr. Hicks has distinguished himself as an artist and educator. He emerged during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, producing powerful images rooted in self-discovery and social consciousness. By the late 1970s, he was preoccupied with autonomous form and giving his full attention to investigating the language of engraving. Throughout his career, Mr. Hicks has remained a committed student of art history, learning and mastering engraving techniques pioneered by giants like Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijin (1606-1669), and Mauricio Lasansky (b.1914), with whom he studied at the State University of Iowa.

His prints have been included in many exhibitions, including, “Impressional Expressions: Black American Graphics” at the Smithsonian Institution and The Studio Museum in Harlem. An edition of the work, Black Boy, was featured in the exhibition titled, “Leon Hicks: The Ingenious Line,” organized by Fisk University in 2012.

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Lot 510

Lot 516

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EARL J. HOOKS B. 1927

Sculptor and ceramicist, Earl J. Hooks began his career teaching crafts and ceramics in an adult recreation program in Washington D.C. Previously, he had studied at Howard University, 1949, attended Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and received graduate certificates from Rochester Institute of Technology and the School of American Craftsman in New York. He served as both a professor and chair of the art department at Fisk University from 1961-67 and taught at Indiana University Northwest Campus from 1954-61.

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. 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.

His work is found in the collections of the Barnett-Aden Gallery, Washington D.C.; De Pauw University, Indiana; Howard University; Illinois State University; Milliken University; and the University of Alabama, Montibello.

REF: Narratives of African American Art and Identity, The David C. Driskell Collection.

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Lot 542

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BERRY HORTON (1917-1987)

Lot 543

Berry Horton worked as a nude model for the Art Institute of Chicago during the 1930’s, and trained at the South Side Community Art Center with many of his friends such as George and Frank Neal, William McBride, Jacob Lawrence, and William Carter. His abstract nude studies were inspired by the artist Model Balls held during the 1930’s and 1940’s to raise money to support the South Side Community Center.

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Lot 559

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HUMBERT HOWARD (1905-1990)

Philadelphia native, Humbert Howard, attended Howard University from 1932 to 1934, studying under James A. Porter. He also attended the University of Pennsylvania in 1937. Howard continued to sharpen his craft by working with the WPA, and later studied art at the Barnes Foundation from 1956 to 1961.

By 1950, he became known as the “dean” of black artists in Philadelphia. He served as the promotional chairman of the exhibition committee of Philadelphia’s Pyramid Club from 1940-1958. The Pyramid Club, founded in 1937, was a social club for black Philadelphians.

Howard’s own work was influenced by post-impressionist and cubist modes. He exhibited extensively, showing at: the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1950, 1952, and 1953, with a one-man show in 1951; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1954; the Philadelphia Art Alliance, 1958 (one-man); the Philadelphia Sketch Club; the Philadelphia Pyramid Club (one-man); Temple University; the Free Public Library of Philadelphia; Howard University (oneman); the William Penn Memorial Museum, 1970 and 1977; and the International Academy of Arts and Letters in 1970, where he won a Silver Medal.

The artist’s work is in numerous public and private collections, including: the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and Howard University.

A similar example may be seen in Tradition Redefined: The Larry and Brenda Thompson Collection of African American Art, Brenda Thompson.

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Lot 520

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WILL HARVEY HUNT B. 1910

Born in Indianapolis in 1910, Will Harvey Hunt studied at the John Herron School under William Forsyth, Donald Magnus Mattison, and Henrik Martin Mayer. He exhibited at the Hoosier Salon in 1935, 1936, and 1938. His painting, Tornado won the “Outstanding Picture of the Exhibition” prize (or the John C. Schaffer Prize of $500) in the 1935 show. The same year Hunt won the Mary Milliken Award at the John Herron Art School for The Kitchen. His work can be found in the collection of Northwestern University, Chicago.

Hunt’s work was included in the exhibit “Indiana Realities, Regionalist Paintings 1930-1945” from the Robert L. and Ellie E. Haan Collection at the Indiana State Museum in 2011.

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Lot 604

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RASHID JOHNSON B. 1977 senting outfits worn by African American politicians.

The exhibition, “The Production of Escapism: A Solo Project by Rashid Johnson” was held at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art in 2005, and curated by Christopher West. Here he addressed distraction and relief from reality through art and fantasy, using photos, video and site-specific installation to study escapist tendencies, often with a sense of humor that bordered on absurd.

More recently, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago 2012, held “Rashid Johnson: Message to Our Folks”, which was both a retrospective and Johnson’s first major museum solo exhibition. This exhibit recently traveled to the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum (at Washington University in St Louis).

Rashid Johnson was born in Evanston, Illinois, and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College, Chicago. He first received critical attention when his work was included in the exhibition, “Freestyle” at the Studio Museum in Harlem, curated by Thelma Golden in 2001. The same year, two photographs were accepted into the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Exhibitions that followed were, “Chickenbones and Watermelon Seeds: The African American Experience as Abstract Art” in which the artist used stereotypical African American food culture items, placing them on photographic paper and exposing them to light through an iron reactive process.

“Manumission Papers” (2002), so-named for the papers freed slaves were required to carry to prove their status.

Johnson showed photographic abstracts of feet, hands and elbows. This was considered a study in racial identity because the parts were not identifiable.

“Seeing in the Dark”, and exhibit at Winston-Salem State University (Diggs Gallery), focused on his images of homeless men. In conjunction with the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, he exhibited “The Evolution of the Negro Political Costume” in 2004, pre-

Johnson uses nearly every medium in his work, and in that way, cleverly avoids limitation. That being said, the majority of his body of work is based in sculpture or photography. Introductory Image to a Twenty Image Suicide Documentary is equally literature, sculpture, photography and installation. It is an appropriation of a Elliot Erwitt photograph for Magnum, taken in 1950, which Julie Rodrigues Widholm, curator for the show at the MCA, suggests in the catalog for the exhibit, “(is) perhaps an oblique reference to the mass suicide at the end of Beatty’s novel.” She is referencing author Paul Beatty, an African American writer whose first novel, White Boy Shuffle , was a seminal text for Rashid Johnson, and which ends with a suicide. Another work

by Johnson, Fatherhood as Described by Paul Beatty (2011) is one of his “shelf” works, and has various objects arranged on a literal shelf. The Erwitt photo appears in this work as well, directly below three copies of Bill Cosby’s book Fatherhood. The appropriation has a double meaning, as do most of Johnson’s symbolic references: the ultimate act of escape and also the concern for what hope exists for future generations.

Johnson’s artistic endeavors, like Beatty’s literature, always address identity, both as an individual and as a race--and how those definitions coincide and conflict for each.

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Lot 530

Lot 544

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FREDERICK D. JONES, JR. (1914-2004)

Painter and printmaker, Frederick D. Jones, Jr. studied at Clark University in Atlanta and later at the Art Institute of Chicago with George Neal, the first African-American to teach at the institute, and Eldzier Cortor. He is best known for his numerous paintings of jazz figures, including Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, and Pee Wee Russell. He exhibited at the South Side Community Art Center in Chicago, and widely in the South throughout the 1940’s.

In 1943, he won the purchase award in 1943 at Atlanta University.

Jones worked for a time with Hale Woodruff while in Georgia.

He exhibited at Atlanta University, 1942 and 1943; Xavier University, 1963; and the Art Institute of Chicago, 1946-49 and 1951. His work can be found in the collections of Atlanta University and the Evans-Tibbs Collection in Washington D.C. REF: Tradition Redefined, The Larry and Brenda Thompson Collection of African American Art, Brenda Thompson, American Negro Art, Cedric Dover.

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(detail)

Lot 531

(detail)

(detail)

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FREDERICK D. JONES, JR. (1914-2004)

(detail)

Lot 532

(detail)

(detail)

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Lot 536

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SARGENT JOHNSON (1888-1967) of small scale ceramic heads, primarily of children.

He became a regular exhibitor in the Harmon Foundation exhibitions between 1926 to 1935.

Brooklyn Museum

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

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 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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Lot 581

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BENI E. KOSH (1917-1993)

Born in 1917, Charles Elmer Harris changed his name to Beni E. Kosh in the 1960’s. His name translates to “Son of Ethiopia.” He was based in Cleveland and studied under Paul Travis at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Kosh was also affiliated with both the Sho-Nuff Art Group and the Karamu House. The Sho-Nuff Art Group was a group of seven African American artists working in Cleveland; the Karamu House was founded in 1927 as The Playhouse Settlement by Rowena and Russell Jelliffes. It’s name was later changed to “Karamu”, which is Swahili for “a place of joyful meeting”. Its mission was to establish interracial harmony and aid in the advancement of black artists. Other artists who worked at Karamu included Charles Sallee, Jr., Hughie Lee-Smith, Elmer Brown, William E. Smith, Fred Carlo, Curtis Tann and Rozell Ingram.

Kosh rarely exhibited or sold his work while he was alive. Fortunately, his work was “rediscovered” days after his death when hundreds of paintings were rescued, catalogued, and sold. He has been included in shows at Cleveland State University, Butler Institute of American Art, and the Riffe Gallery.

He was also featured in the catalog, Yet We Still Rise, African-American Art in Cleveland, 1920-1970 , Cleveland State University (1996).

In 1995, Steven Litt, writing for the Plain Dealer, describes Kosh’s work: “Harris at his best was a powerful artist with a keen eye and a knack for painting both abstractions and representational imagery...His identity as an African American comes through strongly not only in his choice of neighborhood scenes but in the inspiration he drew from African art and from contemporary African American artists including (Jacob) Lawrence.”

This lot is accompanied by a photocopy of a letter from Sherrie Chicatelli of Bingham & Vance Gallery, the group who originally bought the entire body of the artist’s work. She writes that she believes the work was done in 1967. It is also accompanied by a photocopy of a letter from Michael White, who was the Mayor of Cleveland in 1995, proclaiming April 7, 1995 as officially “Beni E. Kosh Day”.

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Lot 514

Lot 513

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DOYLE LANE B. 1925

Doyle Lane was born in New Orleans, and studied at Los Angeles City College and the University of Southern California. One of his early employers was the L. H. Butcher Company for whom he was a studio craftsman and glaze technician.

A long-time resident of Los Angeles, Doyle Lane is known for pottery, beadwork and glazed clay paintings in abstract expressionist style.

Lane’s vessels reveal the simplistic beauty of form and their unadorned nature.

He also experimented with glazes that gave the impression of natural formations such as running water, rocks with cracks and fissures, and blowing grasses.

Making beads became a happy diversion for Lane from the labor intensive work with large clay pieces, and many of his beads, resembling small precious stones, he used for jewelry.

“Lane’s truth to materials, an integral part of all his art processes, thus continues in his work with beads, and he makes their small shapes as dynamic as his clay paintings and glazed pots.”

REF: St. James Guide to Black Artists, Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins, "Doyle Lane", pp. 313-314

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Lot 537

Jacob Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey to parents whom had moved up from the South to find work. He was interested in art at an early age and after dropping out of high school, began training with Charles Alston at the Harlem Community Center. His work started gaining attention throughout the 1930s, and in 1940, he painted what would become his best-known narratives, The Migration Series, a series of works based on the northern migration of southern blacks to the north. He joined Edith Halpert’s roster of artists represented at the Downtown Gallery in New York City in 1941. 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 tech at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. He

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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.

Jacob Lawrence spent six months at Hillside Hospital, a mental health facility in Queens, New York in 1949-50, and executed a series of works based on his experiences there. Lawrence remarked that his hospital experience “was one of the most important periods of my life. It opened up a whole new avenue for me; it was...a very deep experience.”

JACOB LAWRENCE (1917-2000) The result made art critics gasp and report excitedly on his new maturity and purpose.

There is a general agreement among art experts that the new pictures are emotionally richer, technically more advanced, and socially more significant than Lawrence’s previous work. The Hillside paintings are characterized by sharper personalization, keener insight, surer organization and a higher untiy of substance and pattern.

In Over the Line, The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence, Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins writes in her essay titled, The Critical Context of Jacob Lawrence’s Early Works, “Lawrence spoke in a very guarded manner, like many other artists who have been thrust into the limelight. He rarely offered social, emotional, or stylistic interpretations of his work.”

“While under doctors’ care and removed from the fast-paced art world, Lawrence had time for reflection.” “Critics responded to the paintings by viewing Lawrence’s mental anguish as a catalyst for an intellectual breakthrough. Many echoed the opinion of an ARTnews author who wrote about the Hillside paintings: ‘While his vivid patterning and dynamic actions are very much in evidence, there is one striking change: while formerly characterization was achieved by heightened gesture, the burden of expression is now shifted to a stylized facial expression.’”

LeFalle-Collins points to an article that appeared in Ebony six months after his release from the hospital: “He was conscious that he had one illustrious predecessor in Vincent Van Gogh who created works of enduring vitality during his confinement in the insane asylum in France. It was inevitable that an artist of Lawrence’s integrity and courage should tackle the challenging theme offered by his experience in a mental institution.

There are many critics who feel that the new paintings have projected him into the front ranks of America’s foremost artists....Dr, Emmanuel Klein, Lawrence’s doctor and friend, insists that the paintings cannot be credited to the painter’s illness. ‘The paintings’, Dr. Klein says, ‘express the healthiest portion of his personality.’ “ She also offers a quote from one of his dealers, Charles Alan: “He composes more freely, but less instinctively, and with far more sophistication. ...most significant, this increased technical authority seems merely a manifestation of the artist’s desire to broaden the scope of his subject matter, his liberty to explore new realms that combine fact and fantasy, to delve more penetratingly into subjects that he had already treated more cursorily and mainly for their decorative possibilities in earlier works.”

And Howard Devree of the New York Times: “Lawrence’s people have emerged from a kind of mask-like anonymity into personalization, his color has become more subtle and his organizations are, if anything, surer than before...There is a new lift in a number of the pictures and most of them may be definitely classed among his best work.”

Psychiatric Therapy was first exhibited by Lawrence at his representative gallery, The Downtown Gallery, in October of 1950.

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Lot 529

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HUGHIE LEE SMITH (1915-1999)

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 Southside Community Center, the Snowdon Gallery, and the Detroit Artist’s Market.

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, 196365, Howard University, Washington D.C., 196971, the Art Student’s League, NYC, 1972-1987, and elsewhere.

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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NORMAN LEWIS (1909-1979)

Although Norman Lewis began his career predominantly as a social realist, he grew increasingly dissatisfied with the genre’s ability to affect palpable 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 may be 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 will be featured in an upcoming exhibition titled, “Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis” in 2015 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

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HENRI LINTON B. 1944

Henri Linton currently serves as chairman of the Art Department at the University of Arkansas, Pine Bluff. He joined the faculty in 1969 and became chairman in 1980. He specializes in landscapes from an aerial perspective, either from airplanes or mountaintops.

Linton studied at the Columbus (Ohio) College of Art and Design, The University of Alabama, Boston University School of Fine and Applied Art, and the University of Cincinnati.

“I paint landscapes because they are everywhere I go,” explained Linton. “There is so much of it. They give me a frame of reference.

They tell me where I am. They tell me that I am alive when I awake in the morning. The beauty and power of nature makes me feel good to be alive.... I want my paintings to evoke the same feeling.”

Linton says his paintings can be viewed as abstractions of light, patterns and mass, and how those elements come together as an abstract equivalent of a beautiful landscape.

Linton’s work has been featured in exhibitions at the Gibbes Art Gallery, 1979; Huntsville Museum of Art, 1979; Junor Gallery, 2008; Walton Arts Center, 2004; and the Southeast Arkansas Arts and Sciences Center, 2000, 2010.

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WINIFRED MASON B. 1912

Winifred Mason Chenet was born in Brooklyn and graduated from New York University in 1936. She began teaching classes at the Children’s Aid Society in Harlem, as well as making copper jewelry in her studio at home in her spare time. She made her first piece of jewelry in 1940 – a pendant in bronze, copper, and silver. It became clear quite soon that her artistry was going to be in high demand. Even as orders increased, she tried to ensure that each piece was unique, unless a customer requested matched pieces.

Mason-Chenet believed that jewelry should be complimentary to the specific individual and conform to the body of the wearer. She created her own tools in order to hand craft each piece in this way.

By 1943, she began to receive orders from exclusive department stores and as demand increased, she was forced to enlist help, including a young Art Smith. Her work was featured in many exhibitions, and her clientele had grown to include such luminaries as Billie Holiday, who was photographed in Ebony, (1946) wearing Mason’s jewelry. The article, titled, “Copper Christmas”, was a feature story on Mason and her work. The caption to one photo reads, “many of her designs are drawn from Abstraction and West Indies patterns.” In fact, in 1945, Mason was awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship and used the funds to travel to the West Indies “to gather folk material and basic art patterns used by the West Indians and to express these feelings in jewelry.”

While her modernistic, abstract pieces always had a Caribbean influence, when she returned, newly married, she opened a new store called the Haitian Bazaar. She debuted a new line of jewelry called Vodou d’Haiti which featured symbols she had observed in her travels. She began signing the pieces “Chenet” when the line was sold to Bloomingdale’s New York. She later returned with her husband, Jean, to Haiti and together they opened a jewelry store there. In 1963, he was murdered by the Tonton Macoute, and Mason-Chenet was forced into hiding, managing to return to the United States with the help of the embassy. She lived a quiet life until her death.

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JIMMIE LEE MOSELY (1927-1974)

Jimmie Lee Mosely was born in Lakeland, Florida. He was drafted into the Navy immediately following high school and served two years. He returned and studied at Texas Southern University (then known as Texas State University for Negroes) and Pennsylvania State University. Mosely worked as a painter, sculptor and printmaker. He was a member of the National Conference of Artists, and exhibited at the Philadelphia Civic Center Museum; the Smith-Mason Gallery, Washington D.C.; Jonade Gallery, Baltimore; Atlanta University; Illinois State University; and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. His work is found in the collections of the Johnson Publishing Company, Atlanta University, Illinois State University, and the Du Sable Museum, Chicago. The University of Maryland Eastern Shore established the Mosely Gallery in 1986 to honor its first chairman.

Mosely once remarked, “I am an artist; I have something to say: I hope I have said it well.�

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GUS NALL (1919-1995)

Gus Nall studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and in Paris. Fellow Chicagoans, Eldzier Cortor and Archibald Motley particularly influenced him. He was featured in Art Gallery Magazine (1968, “The AfroAmerican Issue”), Fine Arts & the Black American (Indiana University), as well as Carol Myers’ “Black Power in the Arts”. His work, Lincoln Speaks to Freedmen on the Steps of the Capital at Richmond, is in the collection of the DuSable Museum of African-American History.

REF: Afro-American Artists, A Bio-bibliography Directory, Cedarholm, 1973.

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HAYWARD OUBRÉ (1916-2006)

Haywood Oubre was known primarily for his wire sculptures made by hand with ordinary clothes hangers, but he was also a prolific painter and printmaker.

Oubre graduated from Dillard University in New Orleans as the school’s first art major. He went on to receive a M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. He taught at Alabama State University and was instrumental in the growth of the art department at Winston Salem State University. During his tenure he received a copyright for revising the color wheel developed by Wolfgang von Goethe in the 19th century. In 2013, a retrospective of his work was organized by the Greenville County Museum of Art in South Carolina.

His work is found in the collections of Winston Salem State University, Atlanta University, the University of Delaware, the High Museum of Art, and Metropolitan Museum of Art. Oubre’s subject matter usually addressed current issues or religious themes. The two paintings represented here clearly address issues of the times (1960s): the Vietnam War and aerospace technology.

On February 1, 1961, the United States tests the first Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile and on December 11, 1961, the first U.S. helicopters arrive in Saigon. On March 21, 1968, students at Howard University protested the war by shouting down an address attempted by the head of the Selective Service System by shouting “America is the Black man’s battleground!”

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CARL POPE (B. 1961)

writing project. Palimpsest, commissioned by the Wadsworth Athenaeum with grants from the Warhol and Lannan foundations, was included in the Whitney Biennial 2000 exhibition.

Pope’s most recent installation of letterpress posters called The Bad Air Smelled of Roses explores the concept of Phenomenology as seen in the writings of Martin Heidigger, a German philosopher of the early 20th century. Pope uses the medium of letterpress posters because they represent a presumptuous idea--they seem official. People look at the printed posters as a source of information and even direction. What Pope offers, however, is misdirection , so the viewer is required to reconsider. Another artist who explores phenomenology in a similar fashion is Shepard Fairey, with his OBEY THE GIANT Carl Pope’s artistic practice is committed to propaganda campaign. Fairey created a fictional, the idea of art as a catalyst for individual and but official-looking image, presented via stickers collective transformation. His photographic and and graffiti pasters, in an attempt to unbalance multi media investigations of the socio-economic the viewer and provoke reflection. Most of Pope’s landscape of Indianapolis earned critical acclaim subject matter, or what he might be inclined to at prestigious venues like the Museum of Modern call, “anti-subject matter” is concerned with his Art and the Museum of Contemporary Photography identity as an African American. Borrowing from in Chicago. The installation “The Black the writings of Alain Locke (The New Negro, Community: An Ailing Body” received support 1925) and Hubert Harrison (The Voice) and his from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and “New Negro Movement”, Pope questions the role the National Endowment for the Arts in 1993. and identity of the African American today. He accomplishes this, not by offering solutions or prePope frequently works in large-scale public art supposed identities, but by questioning everything and collaborates with communities and cities to and being provocative---and then as Heidigger stimulate public dialogue and revitalization. He explained the usefulness of Phenomenology, expanded his public art practice with projects “letting things manifest themselves”. Some people in Hartford, Ct, Atlanta and New York for “Black might find several of the messages offensive, Male” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. but Pope challenges them to question the very In 1996, Pope produced Palimpsest, a video/ perspective from which that reaction emanates.

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CHARLES ETHAN PORTER (1874-1923)

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.

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.

was at Fleury. As an aspiring landscapist with little money, Porter would have found it prudent to settle in one place. Evidence that his landscape painting flourished in France is offered in Landscape with Grain Stacks.” “Landscape with Grain Stacks shows Porter’s development as a landscapist. His early known landscapes---undoubtedly studio productions--are painted in intense dark colors, with little detail and no sense of natural light. In France, Porter painted outdoors, though like many plein-artists he added finishing touches in the studio. He now embraced his era’s preference for a prominent, detailed foreground. Depth and distance are established partly by traditional perspective but also by an Impressionist high horizon that pulls the eye to the top of the picture.

The light is naturalistic, both at ground level and in the sky, where some clouds spell rain. The palette and rural subject matter relate to Barbizon painting, which progressive American artists in Porter’s day embraced for its tonal harmonies and evocative power.”

Charles Ethan Porter, African-American Master of Still Life, New Britain Museum of American Art, Hildegard Cummings, 2007. (full page illustration, p. 59).

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 (a copy of this catalog accompanies the lot).

“Porter...believed that some of his best work was done in the French countryside. Most likely he

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GREGORY D. RIDLEY, JR. (1925-2004)

Born in Smyrna, Georgia, Greg Ridley, was best known for his metalwork, created later in his life. His metal reliefs, with figures in profile and their rhythmic narration, are influenced by Aaron Douglas, with whom he studied at Fisk University. Ridley attained an undergraduate degree at Tennessee State University and a master’s degree from the University of Louisville. Today, a pair of Ridley’s copper repoussé sculpted panels decorate the entrance to the Carl Van Vechten Gallery of Fine Arts at Fisk. In 1998, he was commissioned by the Nashville Public Library to create 80 copper panels depicting the history of Nashville. In 2003, the Nashville Public Library held a retrospective exhibition of his work, “Gregory Ridley: From the Hands of a Master.”

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O.L. SAMUELS (B. 1931)

Self-taught folk artist, Ossie Lee Samuels, was born in 1931 in Georgia. At the age of 8, he left home, embarking on a series of odd jobs that included farmer, professional boxer, and tree surgeon. Samuels was seriously injured in an accident as a tree surgeon, and while he recuperated, turned to wood carving to combat depression.

He is known for his layers of painstakingly painted dots of paint in wild and expressive colors. His subjects are dreamlike images and mythical creatures, each with it’s own wild tale of its existence.

His work may be found in the collections of the Arkansas Arts Center, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Gadsden Art Center.

Provenance: The Jonathan Demme Collection (Director Jonathan Demme spent three decades collecting “outsider” art from Haiti and other Caribbean countries, as well as the United States, South America, and Africa.)

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PETION SAVAIN (1906-1973)

Petion Savain was teaching the trade of tinsmithing when he met William E. Scott, an African American painter who was visiting Haiti in 1930 on a Rosenwald Fellowship grant. Scott encouraged Savain to seek out and depict scenes of local life. He also introduced him to the Port au Prince literary salon that surrounded the publication of the magazine, Revue Indigene. Savain’s studio soon became the meeting place of the literary avant garde. In 1939, he wrote the novel, Damballah’s House, illustrated with his own linocuts. Shortly after Scott left Haiti, Savain mounted an exhibit of approximately 50 of his own works. He also won the IBM competition in 1939 that would decide what artist would represent Haiti in the Golden Gate Exposition in San Francisco exhibit “Contemporary Art of the Western Hemisphere”.

Savain moved to New York in 1940 and studied at the Art Student’s League and the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village for the next three years. He returned to Haiti in 1946 to write a newspaper column and paint prolific scenes of Haitian life.

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WILLIAM EDOUARD SCOTT (1884-1964)

Born in Indianapolis in 1884, William Edouard Scott became one of the most prolific mural, portrait, and genre artists to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance.

After graduating from the Art Institute of Chicago, he traveled to France, where he met and spent time under the tutelage of Henry O. Tanner. Scott enrolled as a student at the Académie Julian, and had works accepted at the Salon de la Société des Artistes Francais in Paris, the second African-American after Tanner to do so. His work in Europe focused on French genre scenes, especially peasant life. When he returned to the States, he applied this French academic tradition to genre scenes painted of southern African Americans. Scott also painted portraits of important African American figures Frederick Douglas, Booker T. Washington, and George Washington Carver and illustrated several covers for The Crisis. Scott accomplished all of these things while supporting himself painting portraits and murals. Woman with a Blue Fan was most likely one of these extraordinary portraits. It was painted on the cusp of another remarkable journey for Scott, for in 1931, he received the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship to study and paint in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He spent over a year here and completed over 144 works depicting peasant life. After his return, he painted murals celebrating African American history and culture.

Throughout his career, Scott remained devoted to traditional, academic methods of painting and realistic style. His work may be found in the collections of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Du Sable Museum of African American History, the New York Public Library, and Fisk University.

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CHARLES SEBREE (1914-1985) Sebree was born and raised in Kentucky until, at the age of ten, he and his mother became part of the Great Migration 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.

Camille Billops

Between 1936 and 1938 he worked for the WPA easel division, participated in the South Side Community Arts Center, and was involved with the Cube Theater.

Sebree 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 ran 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.

His work is found in many prominent collections including Howard University, the Smithsonian Institute, the St. Louis Art Museum, and the University of Chicago.

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JEWEL SIMON (1911-1996)

Born in Houston, Texas, Jewel Simon relocated to Atlanta in 1939, living and working there until her death in 1996. She was the first African American to receive a B.F.A. from the Atlanta School of Art. At Atlanta University, Simon studied sculpture under Alice Dunbar and painting under Hale Woodruff, whose influence can be seen in her modernist oil paintings. Simon was featured regularly in group exhibitions at Atlanta University. Most recently, her work was part of the exhibition titled, “Tradition Redefined: The Larry and Brenda Thompson Collection of African American Art�, which is currently on tour. Her work may be found in the collections of Howard University, Atlanta University, Spelman College, Clark College, Chicago University and the High Museum of Art. REF: Tradition Redefined: The Larry and Brenda Thompson Collection of African American Art, Brenda Thompson; American Negro Art, Cedric Dover; Black Artists, Lewis and Waddy; The Art of Black American Women: Works of Twenty-Four Artists of the Twentieth Century, Henkes; Gumbo Ya Ya: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Women Artists, King-Hammond; Dictionary of Texas Artists, Grauer.

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ARTHUR SMITH (1917-1982) “There may be great ups and downs and periods in which I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. I’ve felt at times I’d rather have a job income, certainly, and less of the problems, but this is what I do.” a young black dancer and choreographer, Tally Beatty, he was introduced to many talented and influential African American artists in the city, including James Baldwin, Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte and painter, Charles Sebree.

Smith’s often accessorized the avant-garde dance troupes of Talley Beatty and Pearl Primus with his work, and the visual demands of creating designs for theater, likely influenced him to begin making pieces on a much larger scale.

On several occasions in the 1950s, Smith received pictorial coverage in fashion magazines, such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. His shop was mentioned in The New Yorker’s shopping guide.

Art Smith was a Jamaican born in Cuba in 1917.

When he was 3 years old, his family immigrated to Brooklyn, NY. He showed artistic prowess while very young, and by the time he had finished high school, he was set on being involved in the arts, although not certain what discipline. He majored in sculpture at the Cooper Union, graduating in 1940. He had been working for the National Youth Administration and Junior Achievement before taking a night course in jewelry-making at New York University. He struck up a friendship with Winifred Mason who had a small jewelry studio and store in Greenwich Village. She became his mentor and hired him as a full time assistant. By 1946, he opened his own studio and shop, selling his pieces there as well as to the many of the exclusive department stores and boutiques of the era. Through his friendship with

Smith believed that the wearer was an essential part of his jewelry, equally as important as the copper, silver, or other material component that went into its creation.

Smith’s modernist jewelry drew influence from trends in painting and sculpture; surrealism and biomorphism, constructivism and primitivism. He created a wearable art that was just as home in an art gallery as it was in a boutique. In 1969, an exhibition of his work was held at New York’s Museum of Contemporary Crafts. In 1990, “Arthur Smith, A Jeweler’s Retrospective” was held at the Jamaica Arts Center in New York (guest curated

by Camille Billops). Most recently, in 2008, the Brooklyn Museum held an exhibition of his work entitled, “From Village to Vogue.”

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Robot was recently included in the exhibit, “Thelma Johnson Streat: Faith in an Ultimate Freedom.� The fully illustrated catalog may be seen at www.tfa-exhibits.com .

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THELMA JOHNSON STREAT (1911-1959)

Thelma Johnson Streat was a multi-talented painter and dancer who focused her career on promoting ideas of multiculturalism and raising the social awareness of inequalities among the lines of gender and race.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Streat worked with the WPA executing murals in San Francisco. She worked closely with Diego Rivera on the Art in Action mural in 1940. She continued to use the genre of murals to address social inequality toward African Americans in the early 1940s, after she arrived in Chicago. By the mid-1940s, her style became increasingly abstract, taking on a neo-primitivist feel, appropriating symbolism from many diverse cultures in an effort to communicate more universally. This turn in style has caused her work to be associated (in retrospect) with the Abstract Expressionists of the late 1940s and early 1950s.

In 1946, Streat added another dimension to her work: dance.

Her multi-dimensional performances and exhibits were the first of their kind, with Streat performing modern dance movements in front of paintings she had done that were thematically associated.

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THELMA JOHNSON STREAT (1911-1959)

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Black Kings was recently included in the exhibit, “Thelma Johnson Streat: Faith in an Ultimate Freedom.” The fully illustrated catalog may be seen at www.tfa-exhibits.com .

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ALLEN STRINGFELLOW (1923-2004)

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 silkscreened 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.

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.

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FREDDIE STYLES B. 1944

The ritual of rural living that requires a dependence on nature and the surrounding for subsistence had a profound effect on Freddie Styles, and continues to influence his painting.

Flashes of nature appear in abstraction, expressed in new and innovative ways. For his “Roots” series, he substituted azalea roots for the traditional paintbrush. In other works he is known to press multiple sheets of crumpled fax paper with metallic inks onto a gessoed paper surface.

Freddie Styles is a graduate of Morris Brown College and lives in Atlanta. He has served as an artist-in-residence at Clark Atlanta University, Clayton State University, and Spelman College. He was the Director of City Gallery East in Atlanta, GA from 2003-2008. Styles has received several purchase awards from the Atlanta Life Insurance Company. In 2001, he was awarded a King Baudouin Foundation Cultural Exchange Program grant through the Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta to work and study in Belgium. Museum group exhibitions include the High Museum in Atlanta, GA, and the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, GA. His work can be found in the collections of Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, The Paul Jones Collection, State of Georgia Art Collection, King and Spalding LLP, Clark Atlanta University, Spelman College, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia.

His work was featured in Tradition Redefined: The Larry and Brenda Thompson Collection of African American Art, Brenda Thompson. Thompson writes, “In Working Roots series, Styles drenched root stems with pigment to apply layers of color on the surface of the painting, creating a work both literally and figuratively rooted in nature.” She also mentions that Styles was an award-winning horticulturalist.

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BOB THOMPSON (1937-1966)

of Art, Dayton Art Institute, Denver Art Museum, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1937, Bob Thompson studied art at the University of Louisville and Boston University before moving to New York in 1959. Between 1961 and 1966, he traveled the European continent, immersing himself in museums and painting. He produced approximately 1000 paintings and drawings in a career cut short by his untimely death in Rome.

His first solo exhibition was held at the Delancey Street Gallery, NY in 1960. From there he exhibited widely, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Dayton Art Institute, and the Martha Jackson Gallery, NY. In 1998, the Whitney Museum of American Art held a major traveling retrospective of his work featuring over 100 of his paintings.

Bob Thompson’s father was killed in an automobile accident when Bob was 13 years old, and his death had a traumatic effect on the entire family.

His sister, Phyllis, became Bob’s mother Bessie’s “nurse-daughter”, because Bessie had developed diabetes. Bob developed a series of illnesses including severe headaches which plagued him his entire life. In an attempt to comfort Bob, the family decided he should move to Louisville with his other sister, Cecile, and her husband Robert Holmes, who worked as a cartographer at Fort Knox. Bob became close to Holmes and frequently created drawings to present to him (Holmes).

The subjects of these wonderfully intimate drawings are, in Mother and Child, his sister Phyllis and her son Tim Cooper. Pictured in the four drawings of children are Tim Cooper, Tim’s brother, Jeff, and their two sisters, Cicely (named after her aunt, Cecile and her grandfather--Bob’s dad-- Cecil) and Stephanie. The single figure in the other work is Phyllis Marie Holmes, the daughter of Bob’s sister, Cecile and Robert Holmes. Bob’s sisters each named a child after their sibling.

REF: Bob Thompson, Thelma Golden (catalog for the exhibition at The Whitney Museum of Art, 1998)

Thompson’s work may be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Brooklyn Museum

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BEN WIGFALL B. 1930

Artist and educator, Ben Wigfall, is known for painting and printmaking. He has exhibited widely, including the American Federation of Arts traveling exhibition, 1951-53; the Norfolk Museum of Arts & Sciences, the Virginia Museum of Fine Art; the Virginia Artists Show, 1951; the Hampton Institute, 1953; and the Brooklyn Museum, 1955.

Wigfall received a VMFA fellowship to attend Hampton Institute and, during his 1949–50 winter vacation, worked in the museum’s design department, creating silk-screen posters for its statewide traveling exhibitions. Wigfall’s Chimneys —a painting inspired by his native city—was purchased for the collection from VMFA’s juried exhibition “Virginia Artists, ’51.” A twenty-one-year-old student and fellow at the time, Wigfall became the youngest winner of the purchase prize.

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WALTER WILLIAMS (1920-1998)

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 June 1998.

His work is included in the collections of many prominent institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, Howard University, and the National Gallery of Arts, Washington D.C. Terry Dintenfass was a long-time New York gallery owner who, when nearly all artists showing in New York galleries were white, represented several black artists, including Jacob Lawrence, Raymond Saunders, Richard Hunt and Walter Williams. She also represented the estate of Horace Pippin.

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Although Hale Woodruff had won several prestigious awards early in his career, it wasn’t until the 1930’s that his individual style began to take shape. His work shifted from provincial landscapes and figure studies to social realist scenes and stylized landscapes. In 1935, he experienced a career breakthrough when two of his woodcuts appeared in a major exhibition entitled, “An Art Commentary on Lynching” at the Arthur U. Newton Galleries in New York City.

for Atlanta University. In the mid 1960’s, Woodruff formed the group, Spiral, with Romare Bearden, Charles Alston, and Norman Lewis to explore their common cultural experiences as black artists . His last major exhibition was presented by the Studio Museum in Harlem, 1979 . Woodruff’s work may be found in the collections of Atlanta University, Spelman College, New York University, the Library of Congress, and the Harmon Foundation.

In 1936, Woodruff received a grant that allowed him to assist Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. His work with Rivera and support from the Federal Arts Project compelled him to undertake his famous Amistad murals for Talladega College, Alabama, which were installed in 1939.

Currently, these murals are touring the country as a part of the exhibition, “Rising Up: Hale Woodruff’s Murals at Talledega College.” In addition to the murals, the exhibition also includes 40 additional works by Woodruff: smaller paintings, mural studies, and linocut prints that date from roughly the same period.

This set is found in numerous New York collections, including the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Later in his career, his work began to take on influence from the abstract expressionist movement and included more African imagery. He completed large mural commissions for the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company in Los Angeles as well as

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About Robert Blackburn and The Printmaking Workshop: Robert Blackburn was mentored and shaped

by Harlem Renaissance artists including Charles Alston, Augusta Savage, and James Lesesne Wells. As a teenager he participated in the Harlem Arts Workshop, the Uptown Art Laboratory, and the Harlem arts salon known as “306.” Lithography classes offered at the WPA-sponsored Harlem Community Art Center introduced him to the art of printmaking.

HALE WOODRUFF (1900-1980)

acquired his own lithographic press In 1948, he opened his own studio in Chelsea, printing for artists and encouraging his friends to experiment in lithography. In 1950, when the innovative Parisian printmaking studio, Atelier 17 returned to Europe after a war-time hiatus in New York, Blackburn installed an intaglio press at his shop a few blocks away. Between 1951 and 1952, he worked with Barnet on a groundbreaking suite of color lithographs that were featured in the contemporary art journal ARTnews.

The center, initiated by Savage and artist and writer, Gwendolyn Bennett, became a model for Blackburn’s own workshop years later. Key to Blackburn’s artistic development were his lithography teacher, Riva Helfond, and his friend, the artist Ronald Joseph.

Following his high school graduation in 1940, Blackburn attended the Art Students League in New York on scholarship until 1943. There he worked with painter and printmaker Will Barnet, who became a life-long friend. For four years, Blackburn freelanced as a graphic artist for institutions including the philanthropic Harmon Foundation, the China Institute of America, and Associated American Artists, while his vision of a career in printmaking developed. By late 1947, he had

During the mid 1950s Robert Blackburn’s printmaking workshop was run by a loose cooperative of artistfriends while he spent a year and a half in Europe. After his return, he was hired in 1957 as the first master printer at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE). At ULAE, he printed for an emerging generation of artists including Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaler, and Robert Rauschenberg.

During this active period, Blackburn’s color graphics reached a creative and technical zenith. In 1963, he began to operate his own Manhattan workshop full time, providing an open graphics studio for artists of diverse social and economic backgrounds, ethnicities, styles, and levels of expertise.

Under his direction, the Printmaking Workshop became one of the most vital collaborative art studios in the world.

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PURVIS YOUNG (1943-2010)

Entirely self-educated outsider artist from the Overtown neighborhood of Miami. His work was characterized by a blending of collage and paint applied to found surfaces. Purvis Young was born into poverty in 1943. He never finished high school, but read whatever he could get his hands on at the library every possible moment. After a stint in prison in the 1960’s, he became inspired by Vietnam War demonstrations and protest art, especially the Wall of Respect mural in Chicago, painted by members of the Black Arts Movement. He created his own mural along a deserted stretch of Goodbread Alley in Overtown, tacking up his own paintings. After two years, his work began to draw attention from tourists, the media, and eventually, the owner of the Miami Art Museum, who briefly became Young’s patron.

Young’s magic realist paintings featured primitive calligraphic lines, often crowds of angels watching over turbulent cityscapes.

His personal iconography included horses, which represented freedom, angels and large floating heads which represented hope and the goodness inherent in people, and round blue shapes which represented an all-seeing establishment.

His intriguing personal journey was the subject of the documentary, Purvis of Overtown, in 2006. The exhibition, “ 30 Americans,” at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. featured his work in 2012. Young’s work may be found in the collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Provenance: The Jonathan Demme Collection (Director Jonathan Demme spent three decades collecting “outsider” art from Haiti and other Caribbean countries, as well as the United States, South America, and Africa.)

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