BLACK ART AUCTION - Fall Auction Preview

BLACK ART AUCTION Saturday, November 14, 2020 at 12pm EST

BLACK ART AUCTION Saturday, November 14, 2020 at 12pm EST The lot number of each work is indicated, but this catalog is presented in alphabetical order.

A printed version of the completed catalog will be available the first week of November for $40. To order a printed catalog, please call (317) 986-6048 or email info@blackartauction.com. To guarantee timely delivery of a printed catalog, please submit your order by no later than October 31st.

The “functional” version of this catalog will be available on our website (www.blackartauction.com) on October 30th. At that time, you may register to bid.

You may request condition reports or make general inquiries on lots now—just call or email us.

Bidding will be available by telephone and absentee bids, and will be available online on Invaluable.com and Liveauctioneers.com. You may register to bid via Invaluable right on our website, www.blackartauction.com. If you would like to leave absentee bids or arrange telephone bidding, please call (317) 986-6048 or email info@blackartauction.com.

We are located at 1497 N. Harding Street, Indianapolis, IN 46202.

Front cover: Elizabeth Catlett Front inside cover: James Van Derzee Back cover: Sam Gilliam To download this catalog as a PDF, click the downward facing arrow at the top left corner of the box that encloses the catalog.

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LOT 17 EMMA AMOS (1938-2020) How Time Flies, 2004 serigraph/sugar lift collograph on fabric with digital photos 22-1/2 x 30 inches signed, titled, dated, and numbered 11/50 $2,000-3,000 Amos studied at Antioch College (Ohio), London Central School of Art, and New York University. While still a graduate student, Amos became affiliated with Spiral. Amos worked in painting, printmaking and weaving.

This image, which is in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, was executed at the Experimental Printmaking Institute at Lafayette College (EPI), a unique artist laboratory created by master printmaker, Curlee Raven Holton.

Photo: Becket Logan/Courtesy Ryan Lee

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LOT 7 BENNY ANDREWS (1930-2006) The Reaper, 1975 mixed media and collage on cream wove paper 29 x 21-1/2 inches (image) signed and dated Jan. 11, 1975 $10,000-15,000 Born in Madison, Georgia, the son of sharecroppers, Benny Andrews studied at Fort Valley State College (1948-50). After serving in the Korean War with the United States Air Force, he attended the School of the Art Institute in Chicago (1954-58), studying with Jack Levine and Boris Margo. He was generally viewed as an outsider, unyielding to the trends of abstraction at the time he was developing at the Art Institute. His work focused on figurative social commentary depicting the struggles, atrocities, and everyday occurrences in the world, especially in the African American community. In his drawings, paintings, and collages, Andrews continued to pursue representational art, which has been his focus throughout his long career. “Benny Andrews is a remarkable draftsman whose work is characterized by great economy of means,” Patricia P. Bladon wrote in Folk: The Art of Benny and George Andrews. “He infuses his drawings with the same integrity and passion which characterize his large-scale paintings.”

As his career flourished he continued to speak out on the inequalities facing African American artists and helped found the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition with fellow artist Cliff Joseph.

He spent 29 years teaching art at Queens College and served as the Director of the Visual Arts program, a division of the National Endowment for the Arts (1982-84). His work received both critical praise and commercial acceptance. Elected to the National Academy of Design in 1977, he was awarded premier fellowships and exhibited widely in this country and abroad.

Today, his work is found in the collection of many major museums, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; Detroit Institute of Art; Morris Museum of Art, GA; Hirshorn Museum, Washington D.C.; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. Most recently, his work was featured in the exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power.

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BENNY ANDREWS (1930-2006)

LOT 134 Black Beauty, 1970 acrylic and fabric collage on board 12 x 9 inches, signed and dated on recto signed, dated, and titled verso $6,000-8,000

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BENNY ANDREWS (1930-2006)

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LOT 43 MASON ARCHIE (active, Indianapolis, IN) Untitled (Path Through the Woods), 2013 oil on canvas 24 x 18 inches signed and dated $6,000-8,000 Mason Archie was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio. He began his career as a sign painter, but experimented with realism in his spare time. There was a rich tradition of landscape painting in the eastern half of the state of Indiana to the Ohio border. The Hoosier Group painters (T.C. Steele, Otto Stark, William Forsyth, Richard Gruelle, and John Ottis Adams) along with the talented artists of the “Richmond Group” (painters such as J.E. Bundy and George Baker in Richmond, Indiana, which is located on the Ohio border not far from Dayton) who were active from the late 19th century through the mid-20th century would have been a major influence. While all of these painters were Impressionists, they frequently leaned toward luminism in their style, which is a relevant comparison to this work.

Mason Archie was the 2007 recipient of the Creative Renewal Fellowship from The Art Council of Indianapolis/Lilly Endowment and a perennial award winner from 2007-2009 in the Hoosier Salon's Annual Juried Exhibit, one of the oldest competitions in the country. His works are in the collections of the Indiana State Museum, The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American Art, Nationwide Corporation, Wells Fargo, Elanco, Division of Eli Lilly, Eskenazi Health, Community South Hospital, and a host of private collections around the country.

His professional affiliations include the Oil Painters of America, Hoosier Salon Patron Association and Fine Arts Gallery, Portrait Society of America, International Guild of Realism, African-American Visual Artist Guild, and the Dayton Visual Artist Center.

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LOT 79 HERMAN “KOFI” BAILEY (1931-1981) Untitled, c. 1970 charcoal and conté crayon on illustration board 33 x 24 inches (image 36-1/2 x 26-1/2 (board) signed inscribed verso, U.N. N.Y. $3,000-5,000 Herman, also known as "H. Kofi Bailey" and "Kofi X”, was born in Chicago, but grew up in Los Angeles. He studied at Alabama State University, Howard University and University of Southern California (MFA). Bailey was concerned with a pan-African worldview, and as a visual artist believed that creating images of black people would work universally to embrace and celebrate positive attitudes toward black people (in the case of non-blacks) and be self-affirming (in the case of black people themselves). Bailey studied with Alain Locke, Sterling Brown, and James Porter at Howard, and after graduating was closely associated with figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Kwame Nkrumah (Nkrumah was the first Prime Minister and President of Ghana, but he spent 10 years in the United States studying as a young man).

Bailey was best-known for his drawings in charcoal and conte crayon, and the subsequent prints.

He exhibited at the High Museum of Art; Spelman College; Delaware Art Museum; and LewisWaddell Gallery in Los Angeles.

REF: A Century of African American Art, The Paul R. Jones Collection, Delaware Museum, Amalia Amaki; St James Guide to Black Artists; African American Art and Artists, Samella Lewis, p. 146-147.

Photo: Activist Mary Ann Pollar and Herman Kofi Bailey in front of his portrait of George Jackson Photo credit: Cleveland Glover and Earl Harris. Oakland Post. September 1972.

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LOT 124 ERNIE BARNES (1938-2009 ) Untitled, c. 1975 oil on canvas 39 x 46-1/2 inches inscribed verso (in pencil by Jack Palance: “Lily, from Grandpa, Nov. ’87” and a sketch of a face, also presumably drawn by Palance). Actor Jack Palance was a close friend of the artist and collector of his work.

Provenance: The estate of Jack Palance. This work was confirmed by Luz Rodriguez, the co-trustee of the artist’s estate, to be an authentic work by Ernie Barnes. $20,000-30,000

Ernie Barnes began his career as an offensive lineman - playing pro football for six seasons with the San Diego Chargers, the New York Titans, and the Denver Broncos. Eventually, Barnes grew disillusioned with the conflict. In interviews he had been known to say that he hated the violence and physical torment of the sport. He proposed that he take up the position of official artist of the American Football League. The owners agreed and with the support of Sonny Werblin, owner of the Jets, Barnes’ work was brought to the attention of art critics who compared his work to that of George Bellows.

Barnes attended North Carolina College as an art major on full athletic scholarship. Ed Wilson, who taught sculpting, had a remarkable impact on Barnes. First, he taught him about the work of the early 20th century African American artists. Then, he taught him how to translate his athleticism on the field to the canvas. Barnes populated his canvasses with elongated forms full of movement and was influenced by the Italian Mannerist painters, as well as Thomas Hart Benton and Charles White. His personal style was accessible and resonated soundly with people. Many of his paintings were found in the homes of major film and television stars and received national exposure through the television and music industries.

In 2019, the California African American Museum (Los Angeles) held a retrospective of Barnes’ work which included art and ephemera documenting his life and career and featured the iconic painting The Sugar Shack.

The North Carolina Museum of History (Raleigh), also held the exhibition, The North Carolina Roots of Artist Ernie Barnes from June 29, 2018-May 27, 2019.

Photo: Ernie Barnes, Self portrait, 1968; Ernie Barnes Family Trust

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ERNIE BARNES (1938-2009 )

LOT 36 Football Players, c. 1975 oil on canvas 36 x 48 inches signed label verso, The Collection of Jack Palance Provenance: Heritage Gallery, Los Angeles to private collection, NJ $30,000-50,000 An article published in the New York Times (May, 1971) about the artist named actor Jack Palance as a major patron, that he owned 18 paintings, and had commissioned fifty more from Barnes.

UTA Artist Space has an exhibition of Barnes’ work scheduled for November 2020. United Talent Agency’s fine art arm, led by Arthur Lewis is the first major talent agency to showcase Los Angeles and international visual artists.

Read more about UTA and Ernie Barnes: https://robbreport.com/lifestyle/news/arthur-lewispromoting-black-artists-future-art-2944355/

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ERNIE BARNES (1938-2009 )

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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 94 Black Madonna,1961 terracotta 5-1/2 inches high signed Literature: Barthé His Life in Art, Samella Lewis, 2009; a larger, similar image titled, Black Madonna, cast in bronze (1986) is pictured, p. 206-207. The date of conception is stated as 1961.

Barthé A Life in Sculpture, Margaret Rose Vendryes, 2008; Vendryes discusses Barthé’s situation in Jamaica in 1964, claiming he was showing paintings and sculptures at a new gallery in Ocho Rios, but sales were inconsistent. The tourist trade, however, was brisk, so Barthé, on the brink of bankruptcy, decided to make smaller versions of popular images (such as Come Unto Me and Black Madonna) in ceramic, thinking the lower cost would appeal to the clientele. This example is likely just that. $5,000-7,000

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RICHMOND BARTHÉ (1901-1989)

LOT 150 Head of a Dancer (Harald Kreutzberg), 1937 cast bronze with brown patina 12-1/4 inches high (without base) signed and numbered 26 Provenance: Purchased by consignor from Adolphus Ealey, Director of the Barnett-Aden Gallery in 1979.

Literature: Barnett-Aden Collection, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1940; p. 40 (a plaster cast) Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art, Beach Institute/King-Tindell Museum, Savannah, GA, 1991; p. 50. (bronze version;dated 1937) Harald Kreutzberg was a dancer and an acquaintance of the artist. Nigel Freeman wrote this regarding this image:

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Kreutzberg is an important figure in both German ballet and modern dance whom Richmond Barthé befriended when he performed in New York in the 1930s. Barthé made several sculptures of the expressive dancer - both bust and figures. Barthé himself had studied Martha Graham dance techniques in an effort to more fully understand the movement and form of dancing figures…. Other bronze casts of this head are in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, the David C. Driskell Collection, the Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art, the Bernard and Shirley Kinsey Collection and the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum.

$20,000-30,000

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RICHMOND BARTHÉ (1901-1989)

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RICHMOND BARTHÉ (1901-1989)

CATALOG NOTE: The following work by Richmond Barthé comes from the collection of Jerry Manpearl and Jan Goodman, Los Angeles. Mr. Manpearl is a real estate, civil rights, and civil litigation lawyer in the state of California. He received his B.A. from UC Berkeley and then his law degree at UCLA, where he met artists Samella Lewis, Ruth Waddy, and E.J. Montgomery.

Samella Lewis first arrived in Southern California in 1966 and took a position teaching at Cal State Long Beach. Two years later, she began working for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as a coordinator of education, but she became disenfranchised with the institution and set out on her own, planning a combination of ambitious projects that would help change the landscape of African American art in the region.

First, she and Ruth Waddy published two books, Black Artists on Art (2 volumes, in 1969 and 1971). These books help connect working black artists across the country as well as familiarize the public with their work. Secondly, she formed the Museum of African American Art, now located at 4005 Crenshaw Blvd, in the Macy’s Building, Los Angeles, CA. Lewis opened a place called The Gallery on Redondo Blvd, and with the moral and financial support of her sister Millie, and a small group of friends, they opened the museum. The group was operating on a shoestring, and leaned on their friend, Jerry Manpearl, to act as their lawyer to help with these projects.

The year was 1976, the same year Richmond Barthé arrived in Pasadena, with the entirety of his personal belongings: a television and a modeling table. Charles White and his wife had found him a small apartment. Barthé was an acquaintance of the actor/director Ivan Dixon, and Dixon introduced his friend to Samella Lewis shortly after his [Barthé’s] arrival in L.A. Two years later (1978), Dixon introduced Barthé to a co-worker, Nanette Turner, who decided to interview him and submit an article to the Inner City Cultural Center, who published a multicultural magazine of the arts. Dixon was directing an episode of the television show, The Rockford Files, and upon hearing the story of Barthé and reading the article, actor James Garner (the star of the show), requested a meeting with the artist.

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RICHMOND BARTHÉ (1901-1989)

Barthé was involved in an issue of possible copyright infringement, as a collector wanted to reproduce two of his images—seemingly without permission. Within the circle of acquaintances, Jerry Manpearl was contacted to help the artist. Manpearl aided Barthé in properly copyrighting his images so they would not fall into the public domain, and set up a trust to protect the accounts of the artist. The trio of Lewis, Garner, and Manpearl turned the elderly artist’s life around. Once copyrighted, Garner funded the casting of editions of Barthé’s sculptures, under the supervision of the artist. The revenue from these sculptures, supplemented by financial support from Garner (Mr. Manpearl, stated in an interview that Garner put Barthé on his payroll for the remainder of the artist’s life) provided support for the artist. Barthé celebrated his 81st birthday in 1982 on the set of The Rockford Files, and five years later, in 1987, the Museum of African American Art honored him for his achievements in the art world.

Jerry Manpearl is the co-founder of the Paul Robeson Community Wellness Center in Los Angeles and President of the Southern California World Trade Association. He clerked for the Chief Justice of the California Courts of Appeal. Through his interest in the visual arts, Manpearl has lent his services to many artists, including Elizabeth Catlett and Samella Lewis, both of whom, like Barthé, are represented in his collection. s

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RICHMOND BARTHÉ (1901-1989)

LOT 27 Dreamer, modeled in 1963/cast in 1986 bronze on a marble base 16 inches high signed and dated 86, A/P Literature: Barthé A Life in Sculpture, Margaret Rose Vendryes, 2008; This image in clay is found on p. 67, fig 5.23.

Barthé His Life in Art, Samella Lewis, 2009; pp. 88-89 (titled, Athlete Resting. Lewis states the date of conception as 1948) Vendryes writes that Meditation and The Dreamer are both portraits of Barthé’s friend and hired model, Lucien Levers. Both of these contemplative nudes were conceived in Jamaica (the casting was, for the images offered here, done in the U.S.) $27,000-32,000

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RICHMOND BARTHÉ (1901-1989)

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ROMARE BEARDEN (1911-1988) Romare Bearden was born in 1912 in Charlotte, North Carolina, but raised largely in New York City. His parents were active participants in the Harlem Renaissance, (his mother was the New York editor of the Chicago Defender), which provided the artistic and intellectual foundation for him to emerge as an artist of genuine talent, versatility, and conviction. Bearden studied at New York University, the Art Students League with George Grosz, and Columbia University. He was involved with the earliest incarnation of the Harlem Artists Guild and Charles Alston’s 306 group.

After serving with the army, he was able to travel to Paris and study at the Sorbonne. When he returned from his travel, his work became more abstract. His early Social Realist works gradually gave way to cubism in the mid 1940’s while he began exploring religious and mythological themes.

In the early 1960’s, Bearden joined the artist collective Spiral. He began making collages as “an attempt to redefine the image of man in terms of the black experience.” Bearden’s early collages were composed primarily of magazine and newspaper cuttings. Together with his Projections, which were enlarged photostatic copies of these collages, they mark a turning point in his career and received critical praise.

Bearden achieved success in a wide array of media and techniques, including watercolor, gouache, oil, drawing, monotype, and edition prints. He also made designs for record albums, costumes and stage sets, and book illustrations. Bearden opened Cinque Gallery with fellow artists Norman Lewis and Ernest Crichlow and was founding member of the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Black Academy of Arts and Letters. His work is included in major public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY. Recent exhibitions of his work include: Romare Bearden: Artist as Activist and Visionary, showing from January 30, 2020 - May 1, 2020 at the David C. Driskell Center, University of Maryland College Park, MD; Abstract Romare Bearden, February 13, 2020 - March 28, 2020, DC Moore Gallery, NY; and Something Over Something Else: Romare Bearden’s Profile Series, February 28, 2020 –May 24, 2020, Cincinnati Art Museum. His work is also part of the exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983.

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ROMARE BEARDEN (1911-1988)

LOT 96 Storyville Series, c. 1975 monotype (unique) 28 x 39-1/2 inches signed $20,000-30,000 From: www.metmuseum.org, describing a similar Bearden monotype print from their collection:

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Storyville was the official red-light district of New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century, and its houses of prostitution often featured live music. Although Bearden had never been to New Orleans when he made this print, the image of a half-dressed prostitute and a piano player in an adjoining room, may have been inspired by E. J. Bellocq’s photographs, Storyville Portraits, exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art a few years earlier. Evoking the illicit nature of such places, Bearden’s composition is appropriately camouflaged by the highly speckled surface and swirling brushstrokes produced by the monotype technique. In this instance, he brushed and spattered the solvent benzene onto a painted sheet of plastic, thus removing any paint it touched. He then transferred the painted composition to a piece of paper using a printing press, creating a single, unique print.

Ernest Joseph Bellocq (1873-1949) gained a reputation in New Orleans for his scenes of opium dens in Chinatown and prostitutes of Storyville. He died and was buried in the St Louis Cemetery No. 3, and most of his photographs and negatives were destroyed; however, the Storyville negatives were found and purchased by a young photographer named Lee Friedlander. These were eventually shown in an exhibit at MoMA in 1970.

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ROMARE BEARDEN (1911-1988)

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ROMARE BEARDEN (1911-1988)

LOT 89 Untitled (from the Iliad series), c. 1948 watercolor, gouache, brush and ink on cream wove paper 24 x 18 inches (image) signed $20,000-30,000 Bearden’s 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.

A review in ArtNews praised the watercolors as fully developed.

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Planes of color penetrate each other, in no way subdued from their former radiance, but with a more mature and subtler relationship…In the scenes of lament, color is used for its lyric powers, bright but with the special pure, deep quality of Gothic stained glass.

Bearden’s best work in watercolor was done in 1948, including such splendors as Woman Seated on Rock and the series of sixteen variations on The Illiad that showed in a solo exhibition at the Niveau Gallery in November of that year. The Illiad variations brought Bearden’s work of these years to its culmination. Structurally, they were far tighter than the works of the earlier series… They were in no way tied to specific scenes or episodes in the Homeric epic, but were truly Bearden’s ‘variations’ on them; the musical overtone of the word is probably intentional.

Again the colors were prismatic, enclosed by the architectonics of the lines separating them.

Bearden likened the intervals between colors to the lead in a stained glass of Chartres cathedral.

The lead holds the colors together, both literally and figuratively.

REF: Romare Bearden, His Life and Art, Myron Schwartzman, 1990 Photo: Bearden in his studio; Romare Bearden Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

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ROMARE BEARDEN (1911-1988)

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ROMARE BEARDEN (1911-1988)

LOT 4 The Fall of Troy, from the Odysseus Suite, 1979 color screenprint on wove paper 18-1/4 x 22-1/4 inches signed and numbered GG#63 Literature: A Graphic Odyssey: Romare Bearden as Printmaker, Gail Geburd and Alex Rosenberg, 1992.

In this series of prints, the artist creates a bridge between classical mythology and African American culture. The subjects, he argues, are timeless and point to the universality of the human condition. It is the story of a traveler’s search for a way home. Bearden approached this theme of The Odyssey in various mediums in the 1970s. In Homer’s tale, Odysseus is no longer seeking victory in battle but a reunion with family and a homecoming. Bearden relates the story to a historical timeline in African American history: the Middle Passage in the 17th-18th centuries, the survival of slavery until Emancipation at the end of the Civil War, the Great Migration, the struggles of Jim Crow, and finally, a restoration from exile to a place of dignity. (REF: Andrew Alexander, in a review of Black Odyssey, Carlos Museum, 2013).

2,000-3,000

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ROMARE BEARDEN (1911-1988)

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ROMARE BEARDEN (1911-1988)

LOT 165 Firebirds, 1979 color screenprint 22 x 15 inches signed and numbered 28/300 in pencil GG #83 after Junction Piquette, 1971 Illustrated: A Graphic Odyssey: Romare Bearden as Printmaker, Gelburd and Rosenberg, p. 18 Provenance: The collection of Faith Grobman, NJ $2,000-3,000 This print is in the Paul R. Jones Collection at the University of Delaware; the Museum of Art and Archeology at the University of Missouri; and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

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ROMARE BEARDEN (1911-1988)

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CLEVELAND BELLOW (1946-2009)

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LOT 25

Catch a Falling Star (Tammi Terrell), 1973 acrylic and screenprint on board 36 x 80 inches signed and dated $35,000-45,000

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CLEVELAND BELLOW (1946-2009)

Tammi Terrell

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CLEVELAND BELLOW (1946-2009)

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Some of have labeled my particular style as social protest, but I beg to differ. If I would label my work at all, it would be called social reality.

Cleveland Bellow, Black Artists on Art v. 2, Lewis/Waddy, , p. 102-103 Cleveland Bellow worked primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area. He studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland (BFA, MA). He also worked as an intern at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. He worked as a painter, graphic designer, curator and consultant. He exhibited at the Oakland Museum, San Francisco Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art and many other venues around the Bay Area.

Tammi Terrell was a star singer for Motown Records during the 1960s, and sang with Marvin Gaye on several Top 40 singles, including Ain’t No Mountain High Enough and Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing.

On October 14, 1967, as the two were performing at Hampden-Sydney College, Terrell collapsed in to Gaye’s arms. Later it was discovered she had a brain tumor and after a series of unsuccessful surgeries, she succumbed to the illness (March 16, 1970) at the age of just 24. Her death devastated Gaye, and it is said that the event led him to depression and drug abuse. Gaye’s masterpiece, What’s Going On, released in 1971, was in part themed around his reaction to his friend’s death.

The visual symbolism of Catch a Falling Star is powerful and emotional. The progressively strengthening star is conversely mirrored with the halo-like image above the subject’s head fading. Bellow frequently combined elements of silkscreen and acrylic paint to formulate his images. Another well-known work by Bellow, Catch Eve , employed the same technique as this work (REF: West Coast ’74: The Black Image, Crocker Art Gallery Association, 1974, catalog accompanying the exhibit).

Bellow’s work was recently included in the exhibition, Soul of a Nation Art in the Age of Black Power which is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston until August 30, 2020.

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CLEVELAND BELLOW (1946-2009)

Cleveland Bellow pictured with his work Catch Some California Time, 1973; Black Art: an International Quarterly, v. 2, no. 3, Spring 1978, p.39

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CLEVELAND BELLOW (1946-2009)

Photo: Soul of a Nation Art in the Age of Black Power, Godfrey, Mark, et al.,D.A.P/ Distributed Art Publishers Inc, 2017; p.59.

Originally from the Oakland Post Photograph Collection, MS 169, African American Museum and Library at Oakland, Oakland Public Library Who is Cleveland Bellow?

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DAWOUD BEY (b.1953) Photographs from the Harlem USA portfolio, 2005 carbon pigment prints on acid free Hanhemühle Rag paper, printed by Black Point Editions, Chicago, 2005, from photographer’s original negatives and vintage prints 20 x 16 inches (sheet size) from an edition of 15 with 5 Artist Proofs all signed, dated, and numbered 1/15 verso

LOT 37

A Woman Waiting in the Doorway, 1976 carbon pigment print on acid free Hanhemühle Rag paper 6-3/8 x 9-1/2 inches (image) 20 x 16 inches (sheet) signed, dated, and numbered 1/15 verso $5,000-7,000

LOT 106

A Woman and Two Boys Passing, 1978 carbon pigment print on acid free Hanhemühle Rag paper 6-3/8 x 9-1/2 inches (image) 20 x 16 inches (sheet) signed, dated, and numbered 1/15 verso $5,000-7,000 Bey grew up in Queens, NY and went to the Benjamin Cardozo High School. He studied at the School of Visual Arts in the late 1970s, before earning his BFA in photography at Empire State College, and an MFA from Yale University in 1993. Bey’s earliest images, in the style of street photography, documented the day-to-day life of the people living in Harlem (Harlem USA , 19751979). He exhibited them at the Studio Museum in Harlem at the completion of the project (in 2012, the Art Institute of Chicago mounted an exhibit of the photos and added several that had not been included in the first showing).

Bey’s style of documentary photography develops a close relationship with the subject— frequently young people, because Bey believes the look and behavior of the young people of a particular neighborhood reveals much about the overall vibe of a place. He has exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, Cleveland Museum of Art, High Museum, Detroit Institute of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art among others.

He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts , and is currently a Professor of Art at Columbia College in Chicago (since 1998).

Photo: Dawoud Bey at Lake Erie, 2018; Mike Majewski.

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DAWOUD BEY (b.1953)

LOT 62

At a Tent Revival Meeting, 1977 carbon pigment print on acid free Hanhemühle Rag paper 6-3/8 x 9-1/2 inches (image) 20 x 16 inches (sheet) signed, dated, and numbered 1/15 verso $5,000-7,000

LOT 86

Mr. Moore’s Bar-B-Que, 125th Street, 1976 carbon pigment print on acid free Hanhemühle Rag paper 6-3/8 x 9-1/2 inches (image) 20 x 16 inches (sheet) signed, dated, and numbered 1/15 verso $5,000-7,000

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DAWOUD BEY (b.1953)

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DAWOUD BEY (b.1953)

LOT 151

Two Women at a Parade, 1978 carbon pigment print on acid free Hanhemühle Rag paper 6-3/8 x 9-1/2 inches (image) 20 x 16 inches (sheet) signed, dated, and numbered 1/15 verso $5,000-7,000

LOT 139

A Woman With Hanging Overalls, 1978 carbon pigment print on acid free Hanhemühle Rag paper 6-3/8 x 9-1/2 inches (image) 20 x 16 inches (sheet) signed, dated, and numbered 1/15 verso $5,000-7,000

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DAWOUD BEY (b.1953)

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DAWOUD BEY (b.1953)

LOT 2 A Man in a Bowler Hat, 1976 carbon pigment print on acid free Hanhemühle Rag paper 6-3/8 x 9-1/2 inches (image) 20 x 16 inches (sheet) signed, dated, and numbered 1/15 verso $5,000-7,000

LOT 168

A Woman and Child in a Doorway, 1976 carbon pigment print on acid free Hanhemühle Rag paper 9-1/2 x 6-3/8 inches (image) 20 x 16 inches (sheet) signed, dated, and numbered 1/15 verso $5,000-7,000

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DAWOUD BEY (b.1953)

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JOHN BIGGERS (1924-2001) Born in North Carolina in 1924, John Biggers’ body of work experienced a constant evolution throughout his career. He was an accomplished draftsmen as well as muralist - adept at weaving southern African-American and African culture together - incorporating sacred geometry and complex symbolic elements.

Biggers attended Hampton Institute (University) in the early 1940s, and befriended Charles White and Elizabeth Catlett. Much of his early work was social realist - depicting the everyday hard work and perseverance of the African American community.

“

In 1949, Biggers moved to Houston, TX and chaired the art department at Texas State University (later Texas Southern).

The artist yearned to penetrate the invisible but very real curtain which seemed to separate American blacks from Africans. For 15 years, he tried and failed to get fellowships to Africa.

Finally he made it in 1957, on a UNESCO grant which provided seven months of living and traveling through Ghana and western Nigeria.

“I had a magnificent sense of coming home, of belonging,” he says - and he doesn’t mean it sentimentally.

“I recognized at once the Africanisms in our life in America, which we simply had not been able to recognize and to claim,” Biggers asserts. The sight of African men and women building their own houses, hewing and shaping their own ax handles, weaving their own quilts, making their own chairs, impressed him deeply. “And it reminded me of my own childhood times in North Carolina.”

-Ann Holmes, It is Almost Genetic, The ARTGallery Magazine, April 1970, p. 38.

Biggers’ work may be found in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, NY; Atlanta University, GA; Barnett-Aden Collection, Washington D.C.; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Howard University, Washington D.C.; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

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LOT 102 Brown Family (Family of Six), 1986 lithograph printed in brown on cream wove paper 21-3/4 x 26 inches signed, titled, dated, and numbered 27/50 Provenance: The collection of Faith Grobman, NJ. $4,500-6,500

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JOHN BIGGERS (1924-2001)

LOT 77 The Seed, 1983 lithograph on Arches rag paper 32 x 36-1/2 inches signed, titled, dated, and numbered 60/100 from the illustration for Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, 1966 Provenance: Dr. and Mrs. Robert Galloway, TX Literature: A Life on Paper: The Drawings and Lithographs of John Thomas Biggers, Olive Jensen Theisen, 2006; p. 66. $3,000-5,000

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JOHN BIGGERS (1924-2001)

LOT 53

Upper Room, 1984 lithograph 38 x 26 inches image 42 x 29-1/2 inches (sheet) Signed, titled, dated, numbered 40/50 and inscribed “S.E.” in pencil, lower margin.

Printed by Hand Graphics, Santa Fe, NM, with the blind stamp lower right $8,500-9,500

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JOHN BIGGERS (1924-2001)

LOT 161 Family Ark, 1992 color offset lithograph triptych 29-3/8 x 13-15/16 inches (left panel, image/sheet) 29-3/8 x 21-9/16 inches (center panel, image/sheet) 29-3/8 x 13-15/16 inches (right panel, image/sheet) signed in the plate, right panel $5,500-7,500

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JOHN BIGGERS (1924-2001)

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LOT 63 MCARTHUR BINION (b. 1946) Untitled, 1980 five color lithograph 16 x 24 inches (image) 22-1/2 x 30 inches (sheet) signed, dated, and numbered 26/50 $1,500-2,500 Binion was born in Macon, Mississippi, and studied at Wayne State University and Cranbrook in Detroit (he was the first African American to achieve a M.F.A. from Cranbrook).

Active since the 1970s, Binion’s work is abstract minimalism.

He identifies as a “Rural modernist” and has said that his work “begins at a crossroads—at the intersection of Bebop improvisation and Abstract Expressionism”.

Binion pulls stylistic tropes common to folk artists as well, borrowing quilting patterns, layering photographic imagery and motifs and grids. He does all this while using one implement: his characteristic “crayon,” or paint stick, which allowed him to move past oil paint. “In 1972 when I started to use them, they were basically industrial marking sticks,” he recalls. Binion effectively converts an elementary tool into a refined hand-held instrument. He thrives in the effort of that conversion, having developed an ornate and labored approach that demands strenuous hours, and—as Binion has noted—resonates with the cotton-picking of his childhood. He had to train himself to be ambidextrous to negotiate hand fatigue, and works an entire surface of a painting in one sitting, before returning to rework that surface the next day or week or month. Some works take years to complete. This approach carries over to his print-making as well, exemplified by the image here.

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LOT 56 ALEXANDER SKUNDER BOGHOSSIAN (1937-2003) Untitled, c. 1978 acrylic and metallic paint on tar paper laid down on board (original) 43 x 28 inches signed and dated Provenance: Dr. and Mrs. Robert Galloway, TX $20,000-30,000

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ALEXANDER SKUNDER BOGHOSSIAN (1937-2003)

The New York Times, reporting the artist’s death in 2003, described Boghossian as “an artist who played an important role in introducing European modernist styles into Africa and who, as a longtime resident of the United States, became one of the best-known African modern artists in the West.” It is quite likely that Boghossian would have objected to this description or at least to the danger of over-simplification. Elizabeth Giorgis, a contributing editor for Ethiopian Register, writing about an interview she had with Boghossian, stated:

“

His conversations allude to the cultural universe of Third world dependency where creativity as well as culture, history and pride has been pulled along in the whirligig of European meaningless behavior. To him, people of color through no fault of their own but through the systematic destruction of their culture, have imitated everything European and have despised traditional culture and race while they fail to understand their own true needs.

Perhaps it would have been more accurate to say that Boghossian used the knowledge of European artistic styles he discovered while in Paris when he returned to Ethiopia in the mid 1960s to express his true Ethiopian self, and in doing this, taking great care not to hide his true identity with the mask of a stranger.

Skunder Boghossian was born in Ethiopia in 1937. He received a government scholarship in 1955 to study art at St. Martin’s School, Central School, and the Slade School of Fine Arts in London. In 1957 he moved to Paris where he studied and taught at L’École des Beaux Arts and L’Académie de la Grande Chaumiere.

In Paris, his artistic style was shaped by his personal experiences and the accumulation of his knowledge of modern Western art. He worked closely with African American artists and was influenced by the works of Paul Klée, André Breton, Georges Braques, and Max Ernst, as well as Afro-Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam and West African and Coptic art. His work incorporates diverse techniques and media with vibrant color, symbols, and motifs. Boghossian described all of his work as “a perpetual celebration of the diversity of blackness.” Boghossian met Marilyn Pryce in Paris who was originally from Tuskegee, Alabama and was the daughter of artist/landscape architect, Edward Pryce. The two were married in 1966 in Tuskegee, and later divorced in 1970.

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ALEXANDER SKUNDER BOGHOSSIAN (1937-2003)

Boghossian was an influential teacher in Paris, Ethiopia, and at Howard University’s School of Fine Arts (1974-2000). He was the first contemporary African artist to have his work purchased by the Musee d’Art Moderne in Paris in 1963. The Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired his painting Juju’s Wedding (1964) in 1966, and the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of African Arts acquired several of his paintings in 1992. His work has been featured in exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem; Howard University, Washington DC; Merton Simpson Gallery, NY; and Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. The exhibition, Ethiopian Passages: Dialogues in the Diaspora, opened in 2003 at the Museum of the National Center for Afro American Artists, Boston, MA, just days before Boghossian’s death.

Rosalind Jeffries, regarding the exhibition held at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1972, wrote:

“

Skunder has continually evolved in the past under the influence of African philosophy and mythology. There is one certain thing about his creations: they are pregnant with energy.

His canvases bear witness to energy and force at a fantastic range of intensity, or vibrations.

The energy is sometimes overpowering, violent, sometimes a mere frenzy, sometimes calm, sometimes a lyrical clear melody, but always in perpetual motion. These forces are not only inner forces but they relate to outer moons, suns, air, atmosphere, shifting patterns and images derived from Ethiopian sacred and folk art used throughout the centuries.

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LOT 152 SYLVESTER BRITTON (1926-2009) African Mask, c. 1975 acrylic on board 36 x 30 inches signed Provenance: Harold Woodson, Jr. ; the historical Woodson Family Collection (Harold Woodson, Jr., Susan Cayton Woodson, and Horace Cayton), Chicago. Acquired directly from the artist. $3,000-5,000 Sylvester Britton was born in 1926 on the South Side of Chicago. He attended the Abraham Lincoln Center, a cultural center in Chicago, and received formal art training in Mexico City at the School of Painting and Sculpture. When Britton returned to Chicago, he studied at the School of the Art Institute. He later traveled to Europe, living and exhibiting work both in Paris and Sweden before earning enough money to move back to Chicago by making Christmas cards. When he returned to the United States, he was instrumental in the revival of the South Side Community Art Center and became its gallery director. He was also a regular exhibitor at the 57th Street Art Fair in Chicago.

Britton exhibited works at Oak Park Library, Chicago, IL; Atlanta University; Art Institute of Chicago; and the South Side Community Art Center. He was awarded the Eisendrath Prize from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1956. Most recently, in 2018, the Smart Museum, Chicago, IL, included his work in the exhibition, The Time is Now! Art Worlds of Chicago’s South Side 19601980. Illustrations of his work appear in the catalog on pages 72 and 139. His work is also illustrated in The Black Chicago Renaissance by Darlene Clark Hine and John McCluskey, Jr., University of Illinois Press, 2012, cat #10:28 and 10:29.

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GRAFTON TYLER BROWN (1841-1918) Grafton Tyler Brown was a painter, graphic designer, and lithographer who worked in California in the late 19th century. Brown worked in Peter S. Duval’s print shop in Philadelphia in the 1850s. By 1865, he had founded his own lithography business in San Francisco, designing stock certificates for a wide variety of companies ranging from ice to mining corporations, as well as admission tickets, maps, sheet music and advertisements.

In the 1870s, Brown moved to Victoria, British Columbia to work on a geographical survey for the Canadian government. He held his first exhibition of paintings in 1883 in Victoria, which included 22 local landscapes. Brown lived in Portland from 1886-1889 and Wyoming in 1891, before returning to California, all the while painting the local scenery.

In 1892, he left the West and moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, where he worked as a draftsman and civil engineer. Brown lived out his remaining 25 years in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Right: The artist at work in his studio; Collection of British Columbia Archives and Records Service.

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GRAFTON TYLER BROWN (1841-1918)

LOT 104 Oregon Farm, 1889 oil on canvas 13-1/2 x 20-3/4 inches Signed and dated Exhibited: Artful Liaisons: Connecting Artists Grace Carpenter, Edward Espey, & Grafton Tyler Brown, Grace Hudson Museum, Ukiah, CA, 2018-2019 Grafton Tyler Brown: Exploring California, Pasadena Museum of Art, 2018 $20,000-30,000 This work is a rare departure from the landscape painting of Brown, and is more closely associated with his lithography work (see; Residence of John Donnelly, San Mateo, California , 1878. Brown completed a major project for the Illustrated History of San Mateo County, published in 1878. He was known to have sketched 40 of the 72 views of ranches and towns for this publication. (REF: International Review of African American Art, pp. 28-32, Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins, Vol. 12, number 1) BAA is grateful for the assistance in researching this painting from these scholars associated with the work of the artist: Bridget R. Cooks, Ph.D., UC Irvine; Karen Holmes, Grace Hudson Museum; Mark Humpal, Mark Humpal Fine Art.

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GRAFTON TYLER BROWN (1841-1918)

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GRAFTON TYLER BROWN (1841-1918)

LOT 23 Mt. Tacoma, September Effect, 1885 oil on canvas 26 x 42 inches signed, titled, and dated Exhibited: Artful Liaisons: Connecting Artists Grace Carpenter, Edward Espey, & Grafton Tyler Brown, Grace Hudson Museum, Ukiah, CA, 2018-2019 This work was the subject of an article in the Tacoma Daily Ledger written on 2/3/1885, claiming it was painted for Robert Harris, President of The Northern Pacific Railroad. $40,000-60,000

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GRAFTON TYLER BROWN (1841-1918)

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LOT 70 MARGARET BURROUGHS (1917-2010) Faces, 1969 acrylic on canvas 28 x 22 inches signed, titled, and dated Provenance: Harold Woodson, Jr. ; the historical Woodson Family Collection (Harold Woodson, Jr., Susan Cayton Woodson, and Horace Cayton), Chicago. Acquired directly from the artist. $10,000-15,000 In her dedication to educating others and advocating for African American art, Margaret Burroughs became a cultural leader and role model. Born in St. Rose, Louisiana in 1917, Burroughs and her family followed the Great Migration north to Chicago in 1922. She made the most of many valuable opportunities throughout her lifetime, beginning at Englewood High School, where she first became interested in art, and became the youngest member of George Neal’s Art Crafts Guild. She later studied at the Chicago Normal School.

At age 22, she founded the South Side Community Art Center, a community organization that continues to serve as a gallery and workshop studio for artists and students. In the early 1950’s, Burroughs started the Lake Meadows Art Fair where African Americans could showcase and sell their art. Burroughs lived in Mexico for a time, where she studied print making and mural painting with the Taller Editorial de Grafica Popular (People’s Graphic Workshop) under Leopoldo Mendez, a prominent printmaker of the Diego Rivera circle. When she returned to the States, she and her husband Charles founded the DuSable Museum of African American History in their living room.

It remained there for nearly a decade until it moved to its own building in Chicago’s Washington Park. (continued)

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MARGARET BURROUGHS (1917-2010)

LOT 35 Portrait of Booker T. Washington, 1950 oil on canvasboard 24 x 18 inches signed and dated $6,000-8,000 Burroughs was also an accomplished poet and author of children’s books. In 1975 she received the President’s Humanitarian Award, and in 1977 was distinguished as one of Chicago’s Most Influential Women by the Chicago Defender. February 1, 1986 was proclaimed “Dr. Margaret Burroughs Day” in Chicago by late Mayor Harold Washington.

Burroughs passed away on November 21, 2010.

In 2018, the exhibitions The Art and Influence of Dr. Margaret T. Burroughs and The Time Is Now! Art Worlds of Chicago’s South Side, 1960-1980, were presented concurrently; the former at her beloved museum, and the latter at the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. The book South Side Venus: The Legacy of Margaret Burroughs by Mary Ann Cain was also published. Together they provide a closer look at the life and legacy of this remarkable woman who continues to inspire generations.

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MARGARET BURROUGHS (1917-2010)

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LOT 149 WILLIAM CARTER (1909-1996) Three Figures, 1958 oil on masonite 24 x 20 inches signed and dated Provenance: Harold Woodson, Jr. ; the historical Woodson Family Collection (Harold Woodson, Jr., Susan Cayton Woodson, and Horace Cayton), Chicago. Acquired directly from the artists. $2,500-4,500 William Sylvester Carter was born in St. Louis, MO and moved to Chicago in 1930 to study art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Illinois. In order to earn room and board, Carter worked as a janitor at the Palette and Chisel Club (an all-white club, to which he became an honorary member in 1986).

He was among the artists represented in the American Negro Exposition assembled by Alonzo Aden, with the Harmon Foundation and the WPA in Chicago, 1940. Carter was awarded first prize for a work in watercolor. The same year, he exhibited at Howard University Gallery of Art. Carter also worked for the WPA in Illinois in 1943, and taught art at the historic South Side Community Art Center.

Carter worked in many styles and addressed virtually any subject matter from the traditional portrait to completely non-objective compositions. Although Carter humorously and vehemently vowed until the day he died (at 87) he was too young to have a painting style, this colorful, cubistinfluenced work is a fine example of a style in which he worked regularly.

Carter’s work, The Card Game, 1950, was included in the exhibition, They Seek A City, Chicago and the Art of Migration (p.87) which was held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013.

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ELIZABETH CATLETT (1915-2012) Elizabeth Catlett was born in Washington D.C. She attended Howard University where she studied design, printmaking and drawing. She continued her graduate work at the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History, and in 1940 became the first African American student to receive an M.F.A. in sculpture from the school. Grant Wood instilled in her the idea of working with subjects that she, the artist, knew best. She was inspired to create Mother and Child in 1939 for her thesis. This limestone sculpture won first prize in its category at the American Negro Exposition in Chicago, 1940.

Eager to continue her education, she studied ceramics at the Art Institute of Chicago (1941), lithography at the Art Students League of New York (1942-43), and independently with sculptor Ossip Zadkine in New York (1943). In 1946, Catlett received a Rosenwald Fellowship that allowed her to travel to Mexico City with her husband, Charles White, where she studied wood carving with Jose L. Ruiz and ceramic sculpture with Francisco Zuniga. There, she worked with the Taller de Grafica Popular, (People’s Graphic Arts Workshop), a group of printmakers dedicated to using their art to promote social change. The TGP inspired her to reach out to the broadest possible audience, which often meant balancing abstraction with figuration. After settling in Mexico and later becoming a Mexican citizen, she taught sculpture at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City until retiring in 1975.

Catlett’s work has exhibited widely (most recently The Art of Elizabeth Catlett: From the Collection of Samella Lewis was presented at the University of Delaware, Sep 3-Dec 6, 2019) and her work is found in many important collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NY.

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LOT 15 Sharecropper, 1952, printed in 1970 linoleum cut on wove paper (full margins) 17-1/2 x 16-1/2 inches (image) 29-3/4 x 22-1/2 inches (sheet) signed, titled, and dated AP $20,000-30,000

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ELIZABETH CATLETT (1915-2012)

LOT 93 Mother and Child, 1980 bronze on wood base 23 inches high (figure) 2-3/4 inches high (base only) signed and dated Exhibited and illustrated: Elizabeth Catlett, A Fifty-Year Retrospective, Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, February 8-June 7, 1998 (the exhibition traveled to Blaffer Gallery, University of Houston, TX; Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, Mexico; and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA); p. 78 (cat. #36).

Note: This is the exact sculpture included in the book and exhibition, however, the catalog incorrectly states the date as 1978. $50,000-70,000

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ELIZABETH CATLETT (1915-2012)

LOT 75 Harlem Woman, 1992 lithograph and collage 30 x 22 inches signed, titled, dated, and numbered 1/40 Provenance: The collection of Faith Grobman, New Jersey.

Literature: Elizabeth Catlett, Works on Paper, 1944-1992, Jeanne Ziedler, Hampton University Museum, p. 44 $5,000-7,000 80 •

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ELIZABETH CATLETT (1915-2012)

LOT 140 Naima, 1998 bronze on wood base 9-1/2 x 8 x 8-1/2 inches initialed Provenance: Private collection, Dallas, TX This image depicts one of the artist’s twin granddaughters, Naima Mora, who was the winner of America’s Next Top Model in 2005. $25,000-35,000 Photo: Elizabeth Catlett with granddaughter Naima Mora Catlett from You Giving Me So Much Elizabeth (Catlett) Right Now!

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ELIZABETH CATLETT (1915-2012)

LOT 119 Dancing, 1990 color lithograph 23-1/2 x 31-1/2 inches signed, titled, dated, and numbered 49/110 annotated, Stevie Wonder The Wonder Foundation Provenance: The collection of Faith Grobman, NJ. Literature: Elizabeth Catlett, Works on Paper, 1944-1992, Jeanne Ziedler, Hampton University Museum, p. 38 $6,000-8,000

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ELIZABETH CATLETT (1915-2012)

LOT 49 Survivor, 1983 linocut on Arches paper 9-1/4 x 7-1/2 (image), 11-1/8 x 10 inches (sheet) signed, titled, dated, and numbered 54/1000 Literature: Elizabeth Catlett, Works on Paper, 1944-1992, Hampton University Museum, 1993, p. 60 $4,000-6,000

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ELIZABETH CATLETT (1915-2012)

LOT 162 Face, 1973 black marble 14-3/4 x 7 x 8 inches signed, EC Provenance: David Thomas Kennedy, ex-mayor of Miami, FL (1970-1973) to the Anthony and Davida Artis Collection of African-American Fine Art, Flint, MI A similar example in mahogany may be seen in Elizabeth Catlett, A Fifty-Year Retrospective, Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York., p. 74. $15,000-25,000

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ELIZABETH CATLETT (1915-2012)

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ED CLARK (1926-2019) Ed Clark was born in New Orleans but moved to Chicago in early childhood.

He served in the US Air Force between 1944-46, and from 1947-1951, attended the Art Institute of Chicago on the G.I. Bill. He traveled to Paris in 1952, and continued his studies at the L’Academie de la Grande Chaumiere for two years.

Clark found the style of education to be much more lax in Paris than at the AIC, but he found inspiration in acquaintances and unlimited access to great works of art. He was particularly influenced by the Russian-born painter, Nicolas de Stael, whose work Clark found to be somewhere between hard-edge and the gestural abstraction popular in postwar Paris. Clark’s work became increasingly abstract and he began working in a much larger format. In 1953, he was included in an exhibition of American artists working in France at the Galerie Craven. He was the only African American represented.

He returned to New York in 1957 for a solo exhibition at the Brata Gallery in the East Village, and continued to show there through 1959, but with the emergence of Pop Art in the 60s, not much was happening for Clark in the US. He returned to Paris in 1966 for a one man show at Galerie Creuze. Since the 1960s, Clark began using a push broom to push the paint across the canvas lying on the floor. It is interesting to note that his first teacher at the AIC, Louis Ritman, introduced Clark to the work of Claude Monet, and Clark, upon first arriving in Paris, went to see Waterlilies at the Musée du Jeu de Paume, and the work had a significant effect on Clark.

Clark experimented with elliptical designs and both shaped canvases and painted, draped canvases. He was concerned with freeing the image concept from the limits of the canvas.

(REF: Explorations in the City of Light: African-American Artists in Paris, 1945-1965, Valerie Mercer, The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1996.)

Ed Clark at his home studio in Chelsea in 2014. Credit: Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

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LOT 74 Paris Series, 2003 acrylic on canvas 24 x 24 inches signed and dated verso inscribed verso, Ed Clark, Paris-03-1 Provenance: Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Maryland. $100,000-200,000

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ED CLARK (1926-2019)

LOT 18 Untitled (Abstract), 2009 acrylic on canvas 36 x 54 inches signed and dated dedicated verso, To Al Lavergne, 6-2-10 Provenance: The artist to Albert LaVergne, thence by descent.

Albert LaVergne (1943-2020) worked as a sculptor in Louisiana and Michigan. He studied at Southern University Baton Rouge and UC Berkeley, and taught at Southern University, Baton Rouge and Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI. LaVergne has executed numerous public commissions and was a friend of Ed Clark and Mel Edwards. Admirers of each other’s work, they were known to have traded, as in the case of this work. Look for a work by LaVergne in our next auction! $200,000-300,000

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ED CLARK (1926-2019)

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LOT 125 KEVIN COLE (b. 1960) What About Faith III, 2006 acrylic, wood, and metal sculpture, framed in a shadow box 12 x 6-1/2 inches (object) 20 x 16 inches (board) signed, titled, and dated Provenance: Lonna Hooks, former Secretary of State (New Jersey) and daughter of well-known multi-media artist, Earl Hooks. $2,000-3,000

“

Kevin Cole’s iconographic symbolism balances the aesthetic and political content of his work against the backdrop of African and Asian origins, as well as an uniquely American history.

Although the symbolic use of the necktie in Cole’s work has regal and international references, its symbolic use of tied necks within the African American experience is referenced in Billie Holiday’s song, Strange Fruit. Nationwide lynchings exemplified the worst aspect of the human condition and the social and economic contempt for Black American men, women, and families. Working in a range of mediums, use of repetitive form, and color create three dimensional structures that invite those who experience his work to reflect upon abstracted references to a necktie used for status, beauty, fashion and the destruction of human life.

Cole’s work celebrates history, survival, and a personal memory of a time and place.

---Halima Taha Kevin Cole studied at University of Arkansas Pine Bluff (BS), University of Illinois (MA) and Northern Illinois University (MFA). His work has been included in numerous significant exhibitions, including at the Dallas African American Art Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. In February of this year, Cole received 2020 Brenda and Larry Thompson Award from the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia. This award is given to an African American Artist who has made significant but often lesser-known contributions to the visual arts tradition and has roots or major connections to Georgia.

Cole’s work is prominently featured at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

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KEVIN COLE (b. 1960)

LOT 58 Mixed Circumstances I, 2017 mixed media on wood 36 x 60 x 7 inches 10,000-20,000

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KEVIN COLE (b. 1960)

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LOT 28 WILLIE COLE (b. 1955) The Ogun Sisters, 2012 serigraph and solar plate 30 x 22 inches published by Raven Fine Art Editions Curlee Raven Holton, master printer signed, titled, dated, and numbered 48/55 1,000-2,000 Willie Cole was born in New Jersey in 1955. He studied at the The School of Visual Arts, New York and the Art Students League. His work combines visual references of African and African American imagery with Dada-type “readymades”, such as irons, hair dryers, matches and lawn jockeys.

His work has been exhibited at the Montclair Art Museum (2006), University of Wyoming Art Museum (2006), the Tampa Museum of Art (2004), Miami Art Museum (2001), Bronx Museum of the Arts (2001) and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1998).

Cole’s, The Ogun Sisters, addresses domestic roles associated with black women: the composition is a mirror image, insinuating repetition and, along with the faces of the figure(s) being obscured by a mask, loss of identity.

The superimposed symbol in the foreground (below) represents the most basic atom of the element iron (26 protons and 30 neutrons), but more than just doubling up on the theme of iron, it evokes the notion of fundamentalism. The symbol (above) represents Ogun, a warrior spirit found in several African religions, and the god of metal (iron).

The Ogun Sisters is found in a number of important museum collections.

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ELDZIER CORTOR (1916-2015) Eldzier Cortor was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1916. His family moved to Chicago in 1917 where Cortor was to play a large role in the Chicago Black Renaissance of the 1930’s and 1940’s. In 1936, he attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and later studied at Chicago’s Institute of Design under Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. He worked for the WPA Federal Arts Project in the 1930’s and in 1941, co-founded the South Side Community Art Center on South Michigan Avenue.

After winning two successive Rosenwald Grants, he traveled to the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia and the Carolinas.

It was here that he began to paint the women of the Gullah community as the archetype of African American culture, with their long, elegant necks and colorful head scarves.

He focused on “classical composition”, making his figures resemble African sculpture. In 1946, LIFE magazine published one of these semi-nude female figures.

In 1949, Cortor received a Guggenheim Fellowship and traveled to the West Indies to paint in Jamaica and Cuba before settling in Haiti for two years. There he taught classes at the Centre d’Art in Port au Prince. Cortor worked up until his death in 2015 at the age of 99.

Recent exhibitions of his work have been held at the South Side Community Art Center in 2014; Eldzier Cortor Coming Home, an exhibition of prints, was held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston held a joint exhibition of the works of Cortor and John Wilson in 2017. His work is found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Howard University.

Photo: The artist, 1949, taken by Gordon Parks.

Black Art Auction is deeply grateful to share some reflections on his father from Michael Cortor, the artist’s son:

“

A day doesn’t go by that I don’t think about my father (as well as my mother). You know him as the artist, one of the few who could claim membership in both the Chicago and Harlem Renaissance. I was very fortunate enough to be surrounded by art growing up as well as experienced a true racial diversity living in a modest household on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. My father had a very long career and out -lived all of his contemporaries. His passion was art and yet at the age of ninety-three he took a pause and devoted himself to caring for my mother who was terminally ill. After her passing, two years later, my father returned to his passion of art and completed thirteen paintings (a couple of them quite large) and had two unfinished works. His very last signed painting was a painting that he based on one of his “L'Abbatoire” etchings.

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LOT 114 Compositional Image 2, c. 1970 oil on canvas 11 x 14 inches signed; signed and titled on stretcher Provenance: The Collection of Philip J. and Suzanne Schiller, Highland Park, IL $30,000-40,000

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• 97

ELDZIER CORTOR (1916-2015)

LOT 6 Neoclassical Series, c. 1975 oil on canvas 20 x 17-1/2 inches signed original frame Provenance: Corrine Jennings to Faith Grobman, New Jersey $60,000-90,000 The artist’s son commenting on Eldzier’s relationship with his roommate and travel companion, fellow painter, Harlan Jackson (an abstract expressionist). The two traveled to Haiti together, Cortor on a grant from the Rosenwald Fund:

“

My father never truly went into the abstract route that many artists went during the post WWII era. I think that my father enjoyed the challenge of being able to create realistic images and often sought inspiration from European classical painters, while at the same time looked towards African and the Caribbean for his overall statements and female figures. But I guess with two artists having different approaches and styles probably were the best of company since there wouldn’t be competition, as was the case between Picasso and Braque.

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ELDZIER CORTOR (1916-2015)

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ELDZIER CORTOR (1916-2015)

LOT 73 Dancer Composition No. 31, 1978 etching and aquatint on paper 20 x 15-1/2 inches signed, titled, and numbered 3/10 (second state imp.)

Provenance: The collection of Faith Grobman, New Jersey. $5,000-7,000

“

My father’s printing technique was often very involved. Many of the plates themselves are works of art. My father originally wanted to cut up the plates, while we were cataloging his artwork after my mother’s passing. But I discouraged that because I thought that it was important to preserve the entire process, so we began a two year process of donating artwork to institutions that had some connection to my father’s art.

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ELDZIER CORTOR (1916-2015)

LOT 142 Dancer Composition No. XL, c. 1970s etching on cream wove paper 35-1/2 x 23 inches signed, titled and numbered, AP/3 Provenance: The collection of Faith Grobman, New Jersey. $5,000-7,000

Further reading: https://www.mfa.org/search?search=cortor https://www.metmuseum.org/search-results#!/search?q=cortor https://www.artic.edu/search?q=cortor

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LOT 54

ERNEST CRICHLOW (1914-2005) Girl at Window, 1965 oil on masonite 36 x 24 inches signed and dated; original frame Literature: Ernest Crichlow: a life in art: May 4 to June 17, 2000: The Skylight Gallery, Center for Arts and Culture, Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corp., 2000. $15,000-25,000 Social realist painter, illustrator, and educator, Ernest Crichlow was born in 1914 in Brooklyn, NY. He began studying commercial art at the School of Commercial Illustrating and Advertising Art, NY, and fine art with the Art Student’s League.

In 1930, Crichlow found a mentor in Augusta Savage when he joined the Harlem Artist’s Guild, alongside other such notables as Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and Norman Lewis. Here he found his niche creating social realist works that packed a powerful message. During the Depression, he found work with the WPA, teaching art and working on mural projects. He used this platform to create works that captured “the indomitable inner strength, intrinsic beauty, dignity, and essential humanity of the African American community.” continued

The subject of the window is seen frequently in African American art, and it feels like it symbolizes a separation. Sometimes the subjects, as in this case, are looking out, into the world—but not being entirely included. Whether she’s longing to be involved--on equal footing-- with whatever is happening outside, or she’s anxious about a family member returning safely, the window represents a semi-permeable barrier for the subject. In other works I have seen, the subjects are looking in through a glass window—perhaps into a store. While the subject can see the nicely displayed objects, it is not available to them, either because of their impoverished condition, or simply racial discrimination.

Thom Pegg

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ERNEST CRICHLOW (1914-2005)

LOT 9 Young Girl, 1987 acrylic on board 22 x 18-1/2 inches signed and dated Provenance: The collection of Faith Grobman, New Jersey. $10,000-15,000 He continued to support his community by establishing Brooklyn’s Fulton Art Fair in 1958. In 1969, along with Romare Bearden and Norman Lewis he co-founded the Cinque Art Gallery, dedicated to supporting and exhibiting the works of emerging black artists. He created a 25 panel mural in 1976 for the Boys and Girls High School of Brooklyn depicting people at work in various trades and careers as an inspiration for those students to achieve excellence. Crichlow was also known for his illustrations and children’s books.

Throughout his career, he participated in notable exhibitions at the American Negro Exposition, Chicago, 1940; the New York World’s Fair; the Harlem Community Center; the Downtown Gallery; ACA Gallery; and Atlanta University. He was honored as one of ten black artists from the National Conference of Artists by President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970’s.

Crichlow’s, Reflections of Another Time, was included in Southern Journeys, African American Artists of the South, a traveling museum exhibition, originating out of the Appleton Museum of Art, Ocala, FL in 2011. In 2018, his work was included in Truth and Beauty: Charles White and His Circle held at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, NY.

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ERNEST CRICHLOW (1914-2005)

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LOT 144 ALONZO DAVIS (b. 1942) Act on It, 1985 screenprint 23-1/2 x 35-1/2 inches signed, titled, and numbered 9/88 $1,000-2,000

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

“

Davis exhibited his own work at Brockman, as well as at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Los Angles County Museum, Laguna Beach Art Association and the Watts Summer Art Festival. In Lewis / Waddy’s Black Artists on Art, v. 2, p. 105, Davis says: I am involved in making visual statements not literary ones. It is for the viewer to interpret.

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

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

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LOT 109 CHARLES DAVIS (1912-1967) Portrait of a Woman, 1948 pencil drawing 9 x 6 inches signed and dated Provenance: Harold Woodson, Jr. ; the historical Woodson Family Collection (Harold Woodson, Jr., Susan Cayton Woodson, and Horace Cayton), Chicago. Acquired directly from the artist. $1,000-2,000 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 in South Side, 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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ULYSSES DAVIS (1913-1990) Davis was born in Fitzgerald, Georgia, a small town southeast of Atlanta, to Malachi and Mart Etta Davis.

He took up whittling at a very early age, carving spinning tops for kids. For one reason or another, he was enlisted to give neighborhood boys haircuts. He showed promise, so his father bought him some real barber’s clippers. The younger Davis began earning some money (he asked two cents for a cut). He quit school to become a blacksmith’s apprentice and found jobs along the southern rail line. Eventually, in 1933, he was married and had nine children (and a foster daughter). In 1942, the blacksmith with whom he worked, moved his operation to Savannah, so Davis, wanting to stay employed, moved also. However, the highway system significantly reduced the dependency on railroads, so in 1951, he was laid off. Falling back on his learned childhood skill, he set up a barbershop in an outbuilding at his home on 45th street. There was room for a wood shop in the building, which allowed him the ability to restore and build furniture.

He divided his time between cutting hair, working on furniture, and whittling. Davis’ son Michael recalled his father comparing haircutting and whittling: “if you can’t see where you’re going with that haircut, you can’t cut it.”

He put some glass cases in the barbershop to present his creations. The barbershop was an important social institution to the community, and also a good way to advertise his second career. Just a couple of years later, word had spread and he began to get a reputation as an artist as well as a barber. A local teacher bought a piece by Davis in 1960, and began promoting his work, opening a “museum” in her home, and convincing the Georgia Arts Council to include Davis’ work in an exhibition of Georgia folk art (along with Howard Finster, Lanier Meaders and Mattie Lou O’Kelley (Missing Pieces: Georgia Folk Art 1770-1976, Atlanta History Center). Davis carved heads of all the presidents of the United States , and during that show presented First Lady Rosalyn Carter with his bust of President Jimmy Carter. Recognition of his story and his work grew greatly after he was featured on the CBS Evening News in 1984. Davis retired from his career as a barber in 1990, and devoted his full time to whittling, but passed away later the same year.

His work has been included in numerous exhibits at the Katonah Museum of Art, 1991; New Orleans Museum of Art , 1993; High Museum of Art, 1995-1996; Telfair Museum, 1996; American Folk Art Museum, NYC; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum (traveling), 2001.

REF: The Treasure of Ulysses Davis, Sculpture from a Savannah Barbershop, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 2008.

Photo: Davis presenting his bust to First Lady Rosalyn Carter and her daughter Amy, with Elizabeth Davis, p. 15.

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LOT 44 Table, n.d. carved wood 27-1/2 x 14-3/4 x 14-3/4 inches Provenance: The Collection of Jane and Bert Hunecke Literature: The Treasure of Ulysses Davis: Sculpture from a Savannah Barbershop, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 2008, cat no. 115, p. 109.

This lot is accompanied by the book The Treasure of Ulysses Davis: Sculpture from a Savannah Barbershop, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 2008 $12,000-15,000

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LOT 143 LOUIS DELSARTE (1944-2020) Penny, c. 1990s pastel and acrylic on acid free paper 12 x 9 inches signed and titled $1,000-2,000 Delsarte grew up in Brooklyn and attended the Pratt Institute (BFA) and also the University of Arizona in Tucson (MFA). He also taught art throughout his career, including at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.

Delsarte was influenced by jazz music and has attempted to represent its spontaneity and rhythm in his work. He was also commissioned to execute several important mural projects in cities throughout the country. His technique is instantly recognizable. His colorful compositions are intentionally flattened and his brushwork causes a “surface tension” that is reminiscent of a reflection of the scene being viewed in choppy water. The figures and even the inanimate objects are buzzing with energy.

His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries throughout the United States including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. In 2001, his work was chosen as part of the exhibition, When the Spirit Moves: African American Dance in History and Art. Unity is in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This article appeared in the NY Times announcing his passing earlier this year: Louis Delsarte

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JAMES DENMARK (b. 1936) LOT 57

The Pink Room, n.d. collage on paper 9 x 5-3/4 inches signed $2,500-3,500

LOT 158

At the Beach, n.d. collage on paper 5-3/4 x 9 inches signed $1,000-2,000 These works will be included in the upcoming book produced by Black Art Auction focusing on the artist’s work in collage and printmaking.

A gifted athlete, James Denmark was granted a scholarship to study at Florida A&M University, where he met and worked with Samella Lewis. Lewis invited many well-known African American artists to lecture there, so Denmark had the opportunity to meet them and gain insight into their work.

After a short hiatus from school, he enrolled at Pratt Institute of Fine Arts (M.F.A., 1976). He was highly influenced by the colorful collages of Jacob Lawrence, who was teaching at Pratt.

Denmark snuck into many of Lawrence’s classes although he was not officially enrolled in them.

Lawrence introduced Denmark to Romare Bearden and Al Hollingsworth. It was about this time Denmark moved away from charcoal and watercolor works and committed himself to the art of collage.

Denmark participated in several historically significant exhibitions, including Rebuttal to the Whitney; Afro-American Artists, New York and Boston; and Contemporary Black Artists, 1969.

His collage, Black Odyssey (1980) was executed to commemorate the opening of the new Schomburg Center building in New York. His work is included in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Denmark was represented by Nigel Jackson at the Acts of Art Gallery, where he had four solo shows in the early 1970s. Jackson spoke of Denmark (and the gallery): “I want a big structure, I want a beautiful thing. I want somebody to be able to encourage a man like James Denmark who has done this kind of work, which is unique in itself, to encourage him, not to limit him.”

(REF: Acts of Art and Rebuttal in 1971, catalog accompanying the exhibition at Hunter College, Howard Singerman, 2018; essay by Clara Chapin, p. 71)

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LOT 5 DAVID DRISKELL (1931-2020) Three Stumps, c. 1993 encaustic and collage on paper 5 x 6-3/4 inches signed Midtown Payson Galleries label verso $2,000-3,000 Artist, curator, scholar and distinguished professor emeritus David Driskell was born in Eatonton, GA in 1931. He completed the art program at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, in 1953. He went on to attend Howard University and received his MFA from the Catholic University of America, Washington D.C. Prof. Driskell explored post-graduate study in art history at the Netherlands Institute for the History of Art in The Hague.

He began his career as an educator at Talledega College in 1955. In 1977, he joined the faculty at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he remained for the rest of his career. Upon his retirement, the David C. Driskell Center was established to honor his legacy and dedication to preserving the rich heritage of African American visual art and culture. In 1976, Prof. Driskell curated the important exhibition, Two Centuries of Black American Art: 1750- 1950, which was held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He has authored multiple exhibition catalogs throughout his career.

As an artist, he works in collage and mixed media -oil paint, acrylic, egg tempera, gouache, ink, marker, and collage on paper and on canvas (stretched and unstretched). Prof. Driskell has worked with the Experimental Printmaking Institute of Lafayette college and Raven Editions. The exhibition, Evolution: Five Decades of Printmaking by David C. Driskell, held in 2009 at the High Museum of Art, GA was the first exhibition to highlight his printwork.

Prof. Driskell’s work has recently been included in David Driskell: Artist & Scholar of the African American Experience, Oct. 2019 - Jan. 2020, Morris Museum of Art, GA; David Driskell: Resonance, Paintings 1965-2002, 2019, DC Moore Gallery, NY. His work has also been featured in the following group exhibitions: Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition, Feb. 29 - May 24, 2020, Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.; Tell Me Your Story, Feb. 8 - May 17, 2020, Kunsthal Kade, Amsterdam; The Seasons, Nov. 16, 2019 - March 1, 2020, Nassau County Museum of Art, NY; and Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

The University of Maryland’s David C. Driskell Center for the Study of Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and African Diaspora is dedicating this academic year to commemorating its namesake’s life and work—combining teaching, art history scholarship and writing, and curation and the practice of art.

Photo: David Hills, Down East Magazine, March 2017

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DAVID DRISKELL (1931-2020)

LOT 155 Woman With Bird, 2011 color serigraph with relief 30-1/2 x 24-5/8 inches published by Raven Fine Art Editions; Curlee Raven Holton, master printer signed, titled, dated, and numbered 9/35 2,500-3,500

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DAVID DRISKELL (1931-2020)

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LOT 136 MEL EDWARDS (b. 1937 ) Transcendence Blue, 2007 serigraph with silver 22 x 30 inches (sheet) 18 x 24 inches (image) signed, titled, and dated 2/26/2007 Artist Proof $1,500-2,500 Mel Edwards was born and raised in Houston, but was given a football scholarship to play at the University of Southern California. Upon arriving at the school, he abandoned sports and began studying art. Edwards’ work was born of conflict: the prevailing modern art movement was toward abstraction and the non-objective while he was a student, but he believed art had been made throughout history for a reason and to tell a story. He also faced pressure as an African American artist to present a narrative of racial status. His welded steel Lynch Fragments consolidated those disparate mindsets. His compositions were balanced and pure, yet presented a narrative that was at once current and historical. Edwards found he could present similarly strong images in two-dimensional printmaking as well.

In 2008, Edwards’ 16 foot tall stainless steel sculpture, Transcendence, was installed on the campus of Lafayette College in Easton, PA. The project was proposed by Curlee Raven Holton, professor of art and founding director of the Experimental Printmaking Institute (EPI). Holton and Edwards had collaborated previously in 2004-2005, when Edwards served as artist-in-residence at EPI. This print was executed and sold to support a scholarship in Edwards’ name for students interested in graphic arts.

Photo: Melvin Edwards (b. 1937), Transcendence, 2008, brushed stainless steel, 16 ft. high, © 2008 Melvin Edwards. Lafayette College Art Collection 2008.03

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LOT 133 TOM FEELINGS (1933-2003 ) Untitled, 1964 watercolor and ink on wove paper 12 x 10 inches signed, dated, and inscribed, Senegal, West Africa Provenance: The collection of Faith Grobman, New Jersey. $900-1,200 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, a non-fiction children’s book written by Julius Lester and illustrated by Feelings, was chosen as the 1969 Newberry Honor Book. It 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 Feelings 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.

Feelings produced primarily drawings or understated watercolors of figurative subjects. While in Africa, he worked for Africa Review, established in 1971 as a journal discussing African politics, development and international affairs. When in the United States, Feelings exhibited at the Brooklyn Fulton Art Fair; Atlanta University; Morgan State College; Park Village Gallery, (solo); and the Market Place Gallery, NYC.

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LOT 16 FRANK FRAZIER (b. 1943 ) African Figures, 1996 mixed media collage 9-1/4 x 6-1/4 inches signed and dated $600-800

“

I’m concerned about the future of the Black artist; the lasting effect of our work on our own children. It’s important that we, as artists, make some statements to affect change.

Originally from Harlem, Frazier studied at the Art Students League and Hofstra University. In 1980, he moved to Dallas and began working in silkscreen. He had hoped to make his art more affordable to people and make it easier to share his narrative. He uses swatches of vibrantly colored Kente cloth and figurines from Ghana and Upper Volta, as well as the Ashanti tribe. He has exhibited at Howard University; Martin Luther King, Jr Library, Dallas; and the Brooklyn Museum. (REF: Hearne Fine Art, Arkansas)

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LOT 64 REGINALD GAMMON (1921-2005 ) Alienation, 1965 acrylic on canvas 42 x 32 inches signed and dated Provenance: The estate of the artist $20,000-30,000 Gammon was born in Philadelphia and studied at the Philadelphia Museum School of the Industrial Arts (1941, 1946-1949) , Tyler School of Fine Art and Temple University (1950-1951). He also served in the U.S. Navy from 1944-1946.

Gammon was a figure painter first and foremost. His early works, such as Alienation, The Scottsboro Boys, Harlem 66, Scottsboro Mothers, and Freedom Now (recently included in the exhibition Soul of a Nation, Art in the Age of Black Power) are powerful, somewhat angry images; the artist uses color sparingly to accentuate the message and lessen any decorative element. In fact, the 1965 exhibit of works by artists in the group Spiral (of which Gammon was a member), was titled, First Group Showing: Works in Black and White (1965). Gammon exhibited at Brooklyn College (1968); Minneapolis Institute of Art (1968); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1970); Studio Museum in Harlem; Martha Jackson Gallery; Philadelphia Civic Center; Flint Institute of Art; Rhode Island School of Art; Everson Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Art; and the Atlanta University Annuals, among other venues.

Gammon was also a member of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, established by Benny Andrews and Cliff Joseph. He participated in the protest exhibition at Acts of Art Gallery, Rebuttal to the Whitney (1971), and had a solo show there in 1974.

Additional reading: African American Art and Artists, Samella Lewis; African-American Art, Sharon F. Patton; In the foreword to the Spiral exhibition catalog of 1965, it states:

“

It will be apparent that the works do reflect varying feelings and approaches to art: several reveal that the artist’s eyes were fed by nature; another, the painter’s basically emotional response; works of Reginald Gammon and Merton Simpson are configured with violent images of conflict; in contrast, the graphics of Bill Majors are lyrical and richly textured; Hale Woodruff’s painting, despite a surface freedom, has deliberate exactitude and design.

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LOT 52 HERBERT GENTRY (1919-2003) Untitled (Abstract), 1971 mixed media on paper 24-1/2 x 18 inches signed and dated $8,000-10,000

“

Let experience be a part of you as a human being…

Even though we’re black and we’ve been hurt by many people, we still have to give of ourselves.

We sort of have to be universal. Nor do we lose blackness by being universal.

Gentry was born in Pittsburgh, but was raised in Harlem before WWII, where he had some exposure to art under the programs of the WPA. He served in the war, first in North Africa and then in Germany. He returned to Europe in the latter 1940s and attended the Ecoles des Beaux Arts and the Academie de la Grande in Paris. Gentry loved Paris and believed there were many similarities between Harlem and Paris—they were both “world cities”, with many languages and cultures—and all embraced enthusiastically.

Gentry was more drawn to the European Cobra Group of painters, who practiced a bold, gestural, figurative form of expressionism, over the abstract expressionists who were gathering great popularity in the United States in the mid-20th century. Eventually, he took up residence in Sweden, and divided his time between there and the U.S.

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HERBERT GENTRY (1919-2003)

LOT 97 Untitled (Abstract), 1983 oil on canvas 24 x 19-3/4 inches signed; gallery label verso $8,000-10,000

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LOT 29 SAM GILLIAM (b. 1933) Untitled, 1971 ink, dye and acrylic on paper 21 x 34 inches signed and dated Provenance: William Weege, of Tandem Press and Jones Road (printmaking) in Wisconsin.

Weege and Gilliam collaborated for nearly half a century ; to private collection, Cincinnati, Ohio. $20,000-30,000 Sam Gilliam was born in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1933. Shortly after his birth, the family (Gilliam was one of eight children) moved to Louisville, KY where he was raised. Gilliam attended college at the University of Louisville, receiving a BFA in 1955. That same year his first solo exhibition was held at the university. He went on to serve in the Army and upon his return, began working towards his MFA. After graduation, he taught for a year in the Louisville public schools until he moved to Washington D.C., where he continues to live today. Gilliam continued to teach in the Washington public schools as well as the Maryland Institute College of Art, University of Maryland and Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh throughout his career.

By the time Gilliam arrived in Washington D.C. in 1962, the Washington Color School had been established and included Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Thomas Downing. Gilliam met and became friends with Downing. Soon, his works became large, hard-edged abstractions.

Ever-evolving, he continued to experiment with innovative methods - taping and pouring colors, folding and staining canvases. He created Beveled-edge paintings in which he stretched the canvas on a beveled frame, so that the painting appeared to emerge from the wall on which it was hung. In 1965, he abandoned the frame and stretcher altogether and began draping and suspending his paint stained canvases much like hanging laundry on the clothesline. Each work could be improvised and rearranged at will. The first of these was displayed at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1969. Gilliam received numerous public and private commissions for his draped canvases. One of the largest of these was Seahorses in 1975. This six part work involved several hundred feet of paint stained canvas installed along the exterior walls of two adjacent wings of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 1972 he represented the US in the Venice Biennale. (continued) Sam Gilliam photographed on June 22, 2016 in Washington, D.C. (Marvin Joseph, Washington Post)

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SAM GILLIAM (b. 1933)

LOT 100 File, 1995 acrylic on hand-made paper 15 1/2 x 15 1/2 Inches signed and dated Provenance: Baumgartner Gallery, Wash. DC to private collection, Los Angeles 12,000-15,000 By 1975, Gilliam began to create dynamic geometric collages influenced by Miles Davis and John Coltrane. In 1977, he produced similar collages in monochromatic black hues. Re-invention has been a consistent component in Gilliam’s work throughout his career - he has constantly innovated, disrupted, and improvised and he is still doing all of it at age 86. He is now being represented by Pace Gallery in New York and David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles.

Gilliam’s work is found in the collections of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington D.C.; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Tate Modern, London; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among many others.

Recent exhibitions include: Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983; Black: Color, Material, Concept, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, 2015; Surface Matters, Edward H. Linde Gallery, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2015; Affecting Presence and the Pursuit of Delicious Experiences, the Menil Collection, Houston, 2015.

A semi-permanent installation of Gilliam’s paintings is currently on view at Dia:Beacon, NY.

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SAM GILLIAM (b. 1933)

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LOT 88 NEFERTITI GOODMAN (b. 1933) Homage,1990 linocut with hand painted watercolor, gouache, and collage 29 x 46-1/2 inches signed, titled, dated U/P Provenance: Lonna Hooks, former Secretary of State (New Jersey) and daughter of well-known multi-media artist, Earl Hooks. $2,000-3,000 Born Cynthia Freeman, and also known as Nefertiti Goodman, Nefertiti has become best-known for her large, exquisitely produced relief prints. She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence (MFA, 1977) and the Massachusetts College of Art (BFA, 1974).

After graduating, she taught at the Elma Lewis School of Fine Art in Roxbury (founded in 1950), but after receiving a fellowship in printmaking from the New Jersey Council on the Arts , she left Boston for Nutley, New Jersey. She begins her print-making process in black and white, and then embellishes the image with gouache and watercolor in jewel-like tones.

She incorporates contrasting patterns in most of her works, sometimes within the subject and other times as a border to contain the image.

Her first major exhibition came in 1975 at the National Center of AfroAmerican Artists, National Arts Club, NY, although she was included in a group exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston the previous year. She also exhibited in Jubilee: Afro-American Artists on Afro-America, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1975 (four works; Dream II was illustrated, along with a work by William H. Johnson, on p. 16 of the catalog).

Her work was also included in Choosing: An Exhibit of Changing Perspectives in Modern Art and Art Criticism by Black Americans, 19251985, sponsored by the Phillip Morris Companies (Jacqueline FonvielleBontemps, curator, 1986; work, p. 106 of accompanying catalog).

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DEBORAH GRANT (b. 1968) Grant was born in Toronto, but her family moved to Brooklyn in 1972. She received a BFA from Columbia College in Chicago in 1996 and an MFA from the Tyler School of Art (Philadelphia) in 1999 (studied with Stanley Whitney). She then completed a summer residency at the Skowhagen School of Painting and served as artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2002-2003).

In 1996, Grant began working in a process she called “random select”, which combines non-linear historical facts and pairings of artists and content that defy categorization. Human nature attempts to define and organize sensory input, but the reality is that we are bombarded with many sensations simultaneously— some we choose, some we do not, and they definitely do not arrive in any sort of reasonable order.

“

I wanted to examine the idea of constant information bombardment or the chaos in the back of our minds juxtaposed with what is happening physically in front of us.

International Review of African American Art, John Welch, 2014 Grant addresses art history itself in a process of re-invention, and she emphasizes “telling who your sources are.” Rather than feigning cleverness and ignorance, she very obviously includes the inspiration in the work; thus she retells the story—but because it’s her telling, it’s truly a different story.

Grant exhibited in the seminal show, Freestyle, at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2001 (alongside Rashid Johnson, Mark Bradford, and Jennie C. Jones). The show focused on young artists who would be destined to be the pacesetters for the next generation. In the catalog (p.33), Franklin Sirman writes about Grant’s work:

“

Grant’s compositions are frontal assaults using dense imagery and diaristic text..to ask questions and provoke meaningful answers. From an early interest in comic books and Disney’s own Fantasia to the architectural graffiti of her youth in Coney Island and the art historical referents of Dubuffet, Twombly, and Basquiat, Grant is sampling public scatter to create a space of imaginary dimensional depth. Employing a newsprint palette of black and white (serious) and red, she generously asks us to consider the mundane nature with which we go about our business. Drugs, violence, and imprisonment take their roles alongside heroic figures like Marie Callas and Jean Genet while the everyman spews forth in a chaotic diatribe of words.

Photo: Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles

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LOT 132 Giant, 2002 enamel and adhesive letters on chalkboard 23 x 17 inches signed, dated, titled verso label verso from Arena Gallery, NYC $3,000-5,000

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LOT 148 JONATHAN GREEN (B. 1955) First Sunday, 1995 color lithograph on Arches paper 18-3/4 x 18 inches (image) published by Mojo Portfolio New York signed and numbered 7/250 Provenance: The collection of Faith Grobman, New Jersey. $3,000-5,000

“

Jonathan Green was born in Gardens Corner, South Carolina, and raised in the home of his maternal grandmother, Eloise Stewart Johnson, where he learned the Gullah dialect and the culture of the Southeast. After a stint in the U.S. Air Force, Green studied at the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA, 1982). His work has been heavily influenced by his Gullah heritage.

The scenes he depicts in his work focus on themes of work, love, belonging, and spiritually in the African American experience.

The Kinsey Collection; Shared Treasures of Bernard and Shirley Kinsey, Where Art and History Intersect, p. 144-145.

Green’s work is included in the permanent collections of The Morris Museum; The Afro-American Museum of Philadelphia; The Naples Museum of Art; Norton Museum, West Palm Beach, FL; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC, and the IFCC Cultural Center, Portland, OR. Gullah Images, The Art of Jonathan Green, was written by Pat Conroy in 1996.

For a video interview with Jonathan Green, please visit the following link, Seeking Johnathan Green .

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JONATHAN GREEN (B. 1955)

LOT 66 Escorting Ruth, 1993 color lithograph on Arches paper 26 x 36 inches published by Mojo Portfolio New York signed and numbered 8/250 Provenance: The collection of Faith Grobman, New Jersey. $3,000-5,000

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JONATHAN GREEN (B. 1955)

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LOT 83 INGE HARDISON (1904-2016) Lot of two works Portrait Bust of Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, 1966 from the Old Taylor Series, Ingenious Americans painted plaster 8 inches x 3-3/4 x 5-1/2 inches signed and dated subject is identified by a label on bottom Portrait Bust of Norbert Rillieux,1967 from the Old Taylor Series, Ingenious Americans painted plaster 8-7/8 x 5 x 5 inches signed subject is identified by label on bottom Provenance: Artist to private collection, NY to Armand-Paul Family Collection, NY $1,500-2,000 Hardison studied at Tennessee State A & I, the Art Students League (NY), and Vassar College.

She worked in the theater and as a fine artist, primarily devoted to photography and sculpture.

One of Hardison’s best-known images is a sculpture of Sojourner Truth (1990), a gift given by NY Governor Cuomo to President Nelson Mandela.

“

Sculpture woke up again in the ‘60s. While teaching in a Freedom School in Harlem, I became reacquainted with the towering bravery and the deep commitment to freedom and justice of our black foreparents, and was moved to begin an ongoing series of sculptured portraits I called Negro Giants in History. In the ‘70s, I received my first public commission from Old Taylor Whiskies to do the Ingenious Americans, nine sculpted portraits of little-known black scientists and inventors, for a nationwide promotion.

(REF: Gumbo Ya Ya, An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Women Artists, intro by Leslie King-Hammond, 1995)

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INGE HARDISON (1904-2016)

LOT 164 Lot of two works Portrait Bust of Benjamin Banneker, 1968 from the Old Taylor Series, Ingenious Americans painted plaster 8-7/8 inches x 3-3/4 x 5-1/2 inches signed and dated subject is identified by a label on bottom Portrait Bust of Matthew Henson,1966 from the Old Taylor Series, Ingenious Americans painted plaster 8-7/8 x 5 x 5 inches signed and dated subject is identified by label on bottom Provenance: Artist to private collection, NY to Armand-Paul Family Collection, NY $1,500-2,000

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INGE HARDISON (1904-2016)

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LOT 138 JOHN WESLEY HARDRICK (1891-1968) Road through Brown County, Indiana, 1942 oil on board 24 x 36 inches signed and dated Exhibited: Indiana State Museum, 2007 label verso $5,000-7,000 John Hardrick was born in Indianapolis to Shepard and Georgia Etta (West) Hardrick in 1891. He showed a talent for art as a young boy, and his work was brought to the attention of the owner of a local art store and framer, Herman Lieber, who helped the boy enroll in children’s classes at the John Herron School of Art (interestingly, many of the frames one will find on his paintings today were made by Lieber and bear the label).

As a teenager, he began studying with important Hoosier Group impressionist painters, William Forsyth and Otto Stark. He worked at a foundry at night to put himself through John Herron (he executed a well known painting of this subject matter, illustrated in the catalog for the exhibition, A Shared Heritage, Art by Four African Americans (Hardrick, Scott, Woodruff, and Majors), IMA, Warkel and Taylor, p. 59).

In 1914, he was married to Georgia Ann Howard and held his first exhibition, which was successful. He shared a studio on Indiana Avenue with Hale Woodruff for some of that year, but increased financial pressures caused him to stop painting, and take a job in his family’s trucking business.

When he resumed painting, he exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1927. One of his paintings, Little Brown Girl was purchased by a group of supportive black citizens and donated to the Herron Art Institute for their permanent collection. It currently hangs at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. He exhibited at the 2nd Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Negro Art in San Diego in 1928, and the catalog read: “In spite of acute poverty, this young man has the faculty of discerning beauty in everything, being able to face all his adversities with a smile that conceals the feeling within, at the same time he possesses a personality which strangely draws people to him.”

He also exhibited at the Hoosier Salon in 1929, 1931,and 1934, which were then held in Chicago at Marshall Field and Company. He won first prize for a portrait at the Indiana State Fair in 1934.

He participated in the American Negro Exposition in Chicago, 1940. (continued)

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JOHN WESLEY HARDRICK (1891-1968)

LOT 60 Indianapolis Street Scene, c. 1940 oil on board 15 x 11-1/2 inches signed A work nearly identical to this is in the collection of the Indiana Historical Society, which was included in the exhibition, A Shared Heritage, Art by Four African Americans (Indianapolis Museum of Art), 1996. $8,000-12,000 The Civil Works Administration commissioned him to do a mural at the Crispus Attucks High School (the school where Irvena, the subject of this work, attended) in 1934, but it was rejected by the principal because it depicted black foundry workers, not doctors and lawyers.

Hardrick’s health declined by 1941, and he worked as a cab driver. He would keep supplies in the trunk of his cab, and while waiting for fares, quickly paint local street scenes; later, he would also offer the paintings for sale from the trunk of his cab. (REF: Tom Davis, research for the Crown Hill Cemetery, Indianapolis)

“

Occasionally, Hardrick took his easel to downtown Indianapolis and painted as people watched. He often sold the still wet, newly finished work and then immediately put up another blank board and started again. “Street Scene in Indianapolis” (fig. 35) is an example of one of these…The images are loosely painted and exhibit a spontaneity exemplifying the impressionist idiom. Cars and buildings in the background are almost completely obscured by the misty atmosphere….

A Shared Heritage,, Art by Four African Americans, IMA, Warkel and Taylor p. 50 Hardrick’s landscapes are derived from the many trips he took to Brown County, about fifty miles from Indianapolis. He traveled to the area at the peak of the autumn season, when the leaves were at the height of their color; during the summer when the sun was bright and hot; and in the winter when the ground was covered with snow. He did not sketch or paint during these visits . Instead, the artist took in the different scenes and committed them to memory. (REF: A Shared Heritage, Art by Four African Americans, IMA, Warkel and Taylor, p. 41).

He applied his paint very thickly, using a palette knife to create a tactile surface. He relied on a brush only to blend or add a shape, and use his thumb to mold the paint as if he were shaping a sculpture. (Ibid, p. 41) Hardrick worked quickly, beginning at the top of the canvas and working down. He was more concerned with the atmosphere and expression of the landscape than the descriptive qualities, thus following in the tradition of earlier African American landscape painters, Bannister and Duncanson. His landscapes were romanticized versions of his memories of his visits to the country. He blended his own paint when possible, and has a very distinctive palette.

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JOHN WESLEY HARDRICK (1891-1968)

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LOT 145 BERNARD HARMON (1935-1989) Snap Peas, 1955 oil on board 24 x 36 inches signed $10,000-20,000 Harmon was born in Philadelphia, and although little is known about his early years, we know he was an aspiring artist as a teenager (remarks from his sister, Virginia, included in his obituary) and he studied at the Philadelphia Museum School (BFA) and the Tyler School of Art, Temple University (MFA). He was a gifted portrait painter, and taught in the Philadelphia School District for 32 years.

He exhibited locally, and helped organize an exhibit at the Philadelphia Civic Center - Afro American Artists, 1800-1969 , an historically significant show for black artists in the 1960s. Harmon exhibited three paintings there. Harmon also taught prepatory classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and a summer program at Drexel University. He was dedicated to teaching children how to enrich their lives with art, and was instrumental in developing numerous programs all over the city toward that cause.

His loose, expressionist style relates to the work of Alice Neel, who began her career in Philadelphia.

Photo: Artist, teacher Bernard Harmon (obituary), Kathy Brennan, Philadelphia Daily News, Aug 23, 1989, p. 30.

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BERNARD HARMON (1935-1989)

LOT 154 School Boy, 1968 oil on board 40 x 34-1/4 inches signed and dated $10,000-20,000

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BERNARD HARMON (1935-1989)

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LOT 129 ROBIN HOLDER (b. 1952) They Damaged Us More Than Katrina, 2006 color serigraph 26-1/4 x 18-7/8 inches (image) 30 x 22 inches (full sheet) published by Raven Fine Art Editions, Curlee Raven Holton, master printer signed, titled, numbered 54/70 $1,500-2,500

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Robin Holder was the child of an African American father and Russian Jewish mother born in Chicago and raised in New York City since the age of 7.

Being an African American Jewish female is automatic grounds for marginalization in this country. However, I decided that the role of victim was unacceptable. While studying at the High School of Music and Art I realized I could be creative instead of reactive. I decided art making could be a constructive vehicle of experimentation, exploration, communication and courage!

Robin Holder

“

Holder’s unique approach to printmaking is her use of stenciling and layering, creating imagery, which similarly to life, is rich with meaning and complexity.

African American Art Since 1950, Perspectives from the Driskell Center, 2012, p. 69 In addition to the High School of Music and Art (NYC), she studied at the Art Students League (1969-71) and the Printmaking Workshop in Amsterdam. From 1977-1986, she worked as a coordinator at Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop (NYC).

This print is part of a larger series titled, Warrior Women Wizards: Mystical Magical Series, which began in 1985 and continued for more than two decades. In 2006, she began a residency at Curlee Raven Holden's Experimental Printmaking Institute, where she executed this work. The disastrous effects of the hurricane and the inadequate governmental response inspired this subject, but typically, the artist addresses multiple issues within the scope of a single work. In times of tragedy, the inequalities which exist everyday are amplified.

Photo: Gumbo Ya Ya, Anthology of Contemporary African-American Women Artists, 1995, Midmarch Arts Press, NY; p. 107

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LOT 159 AL HOLLINGSWORTH (1928-2000) Woman in a Flower Garden, c. 1965 34 x 33 inches oil on masonite signed, label verso Harbor Gallery, Cold Spring Harbor LI $8,000-10,000 Hollingsworth was born in Harlem to Barbadian immigrants.

While still a teen, he worked after school as an artist assistant at Holyoke Publishing Company for Catman Comics. Hollingsworth continued with his own syndicated comics in the early 1950’s while attending the College of the City of New York. He decided later to concentrate on fine art and began painting in an abstract expressionist style.

Hollingsworth tended to work in themes - working out his ideas in a variety of media. One of his themes was The Women. “I take my hat off doubly to the Black woman,” he was quoted in an interview published in Black Art, An International Quarterly (Fall 1977). “I wanted people to recognize the pride of women, the spiritual quality of women, the sacrifices of women.”

Hollingsworth’s first one man show, Exodus, was held at the Ward Eggleston Gallery, NY in 1961. He produced paintings, drawings, and collages both abstract and representational in style. Among Hollingsworth’s series were Cry City (1963-65), The Prophet Series (1970), and the Subconscious Series. He was a member of Spiral, along with other notable African American artists like Romare Bearden, Charles Alston, Earl Miller, Norman Lewis and Hale Woodruff.

Throughout his long and varied career, Hollingsworth also created and hosted the television show, You’re Part of Art on NBC in 1970, was an instructor at the Art Student’s League, and a professor at Eugenio Maria de Hostos Community College of the City University of New York.

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LOT 11 VARNETTE HONEYWOOD (1950-2010) Generations of Creative Genius, 1990 color silkscreen 23 x 29-1/4 inches (image) 28 x 33-1/2 inches (sheet) signed, dated and numbered 137/150 $1,000-2,000

“

Varnette Honeywood is an artist who celebrates black lifestyles in America with images rich in African references...Honeywood’s primary concern is to illustrate the strong, reassuring, and free expressions of proud Black people. For Honeywood, this goes far beyond depicting the icons of African American history to her own community. She is documenting a secular historical record of everyday African American life.

“Who else”, says Honeywood, “is going to interpret or document these feelings..and who else is going to deal with our triumphs and our sufferings if it is not us?”

-Curtis James, Gumbo Ya Ya: Anthology of Contemporary African-American Women Artists, 1995, p. 110.

Varnette Honeywood was born in Los Angeles and studied at Spelman College and USC. She visited Africa in 1977, when her work was exhibited at FESTAC. She met Bill and Camille Cosby in the 1980s, and a reproduction of one of her works was chosen to hang in the living room set on The Cosby Show. Honeywood was a prolific printmaker as well as painter.

REF: Forever Free: Art by African-American Women 1862-1980, Center for the Visual Arts Gallery, Illinois State University, 1981; St James Guide to Black Artists, editor Thomas Riggs, 1997, pp. 251-252.

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LOT 59 MANUEL HUGHES (b. 1939) Colored Women, acrylic on canvas mounted on board 7-1/2 x 19-3/4 inches (image) 9 x 21-1/4 inches (framed size) signed LL Provenance: Collection of Julia E. Harris, Chicago; Acquired directly from the artist. $2,000-3,000 Hughes, known to his friends as “Manny”, was born in St Louis, Missouri, and at the young age of 8, enrolled himself in the People’s Art Center. He eventually studied at the University of Missouri (BFA, MFA), and was initially an abstract artist, but turned to realism. He is best known for realist still life paintings of objects he found and bought at flea markets in New York and Paris.

A.M. Weaver writes in St James Guide to Black Artists : “Light through the use of color is a vehicle to heighten the dramatic effect of the appearance of objects that comprise his cluttered compositions. The theatrical quality of his paintings re-enhanced at intervals through the use of stark..backgrounds”. (p. 258) Hughes has exhibited in numerous important venues over the decades of his career, including Contemporary Black Artists in America, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1971; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Kenkeleba Gallery, NYC; Nevada Institute of Contemporary Art, Las Vegas; Pratt Institute; Massachusetts College of Art, Boston; O.K. Harris, NYC; and Liz Harris Gallery, Boston.

REF: Black Artists on Art, vol. 1., Lewis/Waddy.

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MANUEL HUGHES (b. 1939)

LOT 157 Untitled (Suitcase), c. 2005-10 acrylic on board 11-3/4 x 16-3/4 inches (image) 13 x 18 inches (framed size) signed LR Provenance: Collection of Julia E. Harris, Chicago; Acquired directly from the artist. $2,000-3,000 Along with visual artists Oliver Jackson and Emilio Cruz, Hughes was associated with BAG (Black Artists’ Group) in St Louis in the late 1960s-early 1970s. This collective held inter-disciplinary exhibitions/performances which included elements of theater, poetry, dance, music and visual arts.

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MANUEL HUGHES (b. 1939)

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LOT 170 MARGO HUMPHREY (b. 1942) Black Madonna, 2013 color lithograph 27-1/2 x 22-1/5 inches signed, titled, and dated $3,500-5,500 Humphrey addresses issues of feminism, race, and personal subject matter subtly. Humphey works in sculpture and installation, but by far her medium of choice is print-making.

She studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland (BFA) and Stanford University (MFA). She uses narrative symbolism in her work, grounded in African American cultural traditions.

She has worked with significant printmaking ateliers, including the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper, Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop and the Tamarind Institute in New Mexico. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Hampton University, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

In this work, Humphrey addresses the 2013 murder of Trayvon Martin, who was carrying a bag of Skittles on him at the time. The Skittles came to represent a rallying cry for the injustice of George Zimmerman’s acquittal and the tragic killing of black youth. The Madonna, representing the mothers of young black males all over, weeps for her slain boy—and that he had just bought the candy at a nearby 7-Eleven brings about the somber realization that Trayvon was in fact, still just a boy.

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ELLIOT HUNTER (1938-1970)

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Hunter studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and was a founding member of the Seventy-Ninth Street Collective and the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), Chicago. OBAC (pronounced “oba-si”) was a group of educators, poets, writers, scholars and visual artists. He contributed to the Wall of Respect in Chicago (the “Jazz” section, along with Jeff Donaldson and Billy Abernathy) and also the Wall of Dignity in Detroit. He died at only 31 years of age after a brief illness. In Rebecca Zorach’s book, Art for People’s Sake: Artists and Community in Black Chicago, 1965-1975, p. 61, the author speaks about the artists of the Wall of Respect not necessarily adhering to a social realist narrative similar to what they had seen previously in public murals: Along with portraits, Elliott Hunter had previously painted gorgeous large canvases, their bursts of abstract color suggestive of Abstract Expressionism.

Hunter’s work was included in the exhibition The Time is Now! Art Worlds of Chicago’s South Side (1960-1980) at the Smart Museum of Art (University of Chicago, 2018), and two works were illustrated in the accompanying catalog: (cat. 18, p. 38 and cat. 59, p. 128). REF: Walls of Heritage / Walls of Pride, African American Murals , Prigoff and Dunitz). He had previously exhibited at the South Side Community Art Center.

In his book, Africobra, Experimental Art Toward a School of Thought, painter Wadsworth Jarrell tells this anecdote about Hunter:

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In April 1970, three artists were invited to an AfriCobra meeting: Elliott Hunter, Keith Morrison, and Bertrand Phillips, all painters…Jae and I went downstairs to get refreshments, and Elliott followed. He said, ‘I need something to drink that’s stronger than coffee. I am going out to get some cream sherry. I may not be back because the last thing I need is to join a group.’

Photo: View of artist Elliot Hunter during the first meeting of OBAC, the Organization of Black American Culture, Chicago, IL, summer 1967. (Photo by Robert Abbott Sengstacke/Getty Images)

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LOT 128 Untitled (Abstract), c. 1970 oil on board 36 x 48 inches signed Provenance: Harold Woodson, Jr. ; the historical Woodson Family Collection (Harold Woodson, Jr., Susan Cayton Woodson, and Horace Cayton), Chicago. Acquired directly from the artists. $3,000-5,000

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LOT 82 OLIVER JACKSON (b. 1935) Untitled, 1985 oil stick on gessoed paper 42 x 48 inches (image) 54 x 48 inches (framed size) signed and dated Provenance: Collection of Julia E. Harris, Chicago; Acquired directly from the artist. $20,000-25,000 Jackson was born in St Louis and studied at Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington, IL, BFA; and University of Iowa, MFA, 1963. His solo exhibitions include the National Gallery of Art, 2019; Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis, 2012; Harvard University; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; UC Berkeley; Seattle Art Museum; St Louis Art Museum; and UC Santa Barbara.

Along with visual artists Manuel Hughes and Emilio Cruz, Jackson was associated with BAG (Black Artists’ Group) in St Louis in the late 1960s-early 1970s. This collective held interdisciplinary exhibitions/performances which included elements of theater, poetry, dance, music and visual arts.

Lizetta LeFalle-Collins makes the crucial point to Jackson’s work in St James Guide to Black Artists, p.268:

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Form, an essential element of life and of all art, is at the heart of Oliver Jackson’s work, but the most riveting thing about his artwork is the nervous energy created by his brushwork.

Figuration is critical to his work…His work is clearly influenced by his presence in the San Francisco Bay Area, where figuration refused to take a back seat to the pure painting of abstract expressionism.

Photo: Weston Wells, 2018.

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OLIVER JACKSON (b. 1935)

LOT 116 Untitled, 1985 intaglio, etching and drypoint 35 x 47-1/2 inches (image) 46-1/2 x 58 inches (framed size) signed, dated, and numbered 5/23 Provenance: Collection of Julia E. Harris, Chicago; Acquired directly from the artist. $9,000-11,000

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OLIVER JACKSON (b. 1935)

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LOT 40 DANIEL LARUE JOHNSON (19382017) Untitled, 1971 acrylic and oil on canvas 54 x 54 inches artist’s stamped initials and date on verso $8,000-12,000 Born in Los Angeles in 1938, Johnson studied at the Chouinard Art School and the California Institute of Arts, Los Angeles. He moved to New York, where he befriended Willem de Kooning, and with the latter’s help, was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship with which he used to study in Paris with sculptor, Alberto Giacometti. He is closely associated with Los Angeles’s African American artist movement of the mid-20th century, which developed as a response to the country’s social, political, and economic changes. His varied body of work includes assemblages, expressionist and hard-edge abstract paintings, and colorful, minimalist sculptures. His work is included in the collections of Pasadena Art Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. Johnson was included in the show, The Search of Freedom, African American Abstract Painting 1945-1975, Kenkeleba Gallery; also: Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1960-1980, Hammer Museum, 2011; The Afro-American Artist, and Witness, Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties, Brooklyn Museum, 2014; His work is illustrated in A Search for Identity, Elsa Honig Fine, 1982; 5 + 1, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1969; and The Deluxe Show, Houston, 1971.

Most recently his work appeared in Soul of a Nation Art in the Age of Black Power, which was most recently held at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston until August 30, 2020.

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

Photo from sassyj.net

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LOT 166 OLIVER JOHNSON (b. 1948) African Woman with Yellow Shawl, 1976 oil on canvas 33-1/2 x 21 inches signed label on verso with title and date from Galerie Felice, NYC $700-900 Johnson was born in Jacksonville, FL and was self-taught as an artist. Johnson had a very turbulent youth and was in reform schools and prisons, including Sing-Sing and Attica. He took advantage of the art programs at the prisons. Artists like Cliff Joseph and Benny Andrews created programs of art therapy for the New York State prison system, and Johnson was one of the benefactors. Johnson painted a portrait of Louis Armstrong in Attica that received critical praise, and that encouragement turned his life around. “I felt things were happening and wanted to start to dictate my whereabouts...

After the Louis Armstrong piece I knew I had to come home, to change, and I did.”

(Syncopated Rhythms 20th Century African American Art from the George & Joyce Wein Collection, Boston University, 2005, p. 57). Gallery director Felice Balay and her husband Roland (former president of Knoedler Gallery) saw a television show featuring Johnson’s work and arranged a show for him at Wildenstein Gallery (1979). Johnson’s works are in the collections of Malcolm Forbes and Camille O. And William H. Cosby, and were featured on the set of The Cosby Show.

More recently, his work was included in Black Romantic, Studio Museum in Harlem, 2002, p. 83; and Black New York Artists of the 20th Century Selections from the Schomburg Center Collections, NYPL, 1998; p. 47.

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SARGENT JOHNSON (1888-1967) Sargent Johnson was best known as a modernist sculptor, influenced by the cultures of Mexico, Latin America, and West Africa. Born in 1887, to a father of Swedish descent and a mother of Cherokee and African American heritage, Johnson and his siblings could have passed for white, but he remained firmly aligned with his African American heritage. In fact, the aim of his art was, according to him, to show African Americans how beautiful they were to themselves. Johnson was orphaned at an early age and sent to live with an uncle, whose wife, May Howard Jackson, happened to be a well-known sculptor of African American portrait busts.

He received his first formal art training at the Worcester Art School in Boston, later relocating to the West Coast in 1915, where he studied at the A.W. Best School of Art and the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. He studied with Ralph Stackpole, as well as Benjamin Bufano, whose work influenced his artistic output greatly in the 1920’s. At this time, Johnson’s work consisted of small scale ceramic heads, primarily of children. He became a regular exhibitor in the Harmon Foundation exhibitions between 1926 to 1935.

Johnson’s creative output increased dramatically in the 1930’s. He experimented with a variety of material including terra cotta, wood, beaten copper, marble, terrazzo, and porcelain. He also produced prints and gouache drawings. He was employed by the California WPA, eventually becoming a supervisor, where his work took on a monumental scale. He created public sculptures such as a carved redwood organ screen for the California School of the Blind, and exterior low relief friezes and mosaic decorations for the San Francisco Maritime Museum.

Johnson also created sculptures for the Golden Gate International Exposition held in 1939 on Treasure Island.

In 1944 and 1949 he traveled to Mexico using funds from the Abraham Rosenberg Scholarship, where he studied the culture, ceramics, and sculpture 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 12 Hippopotamus, 1939 glazed ceramic 6 x 25 x 8 inches signed Provenance: Charlotte Irvine, Stinson Beach, CA thence by descent.

Literature: Sargent Johnson: African American Modernist, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1998; Plate 13, no. 22. $50,000-70,000

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SARGENT JOHNSON (1888-1967)

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SARGENT JOHNSON (1888-1967)

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SARGENT JOHNSON (1888-1967)

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SARGENT JOHNSON (1888-1967)

LOT 107 Metal and enamel decorative wall sculpture with abstract motif, c. 1950 9 x 37 x 3/4 inches signed Provenance: Charlotte Irvine, thence by descent.

Johnson was commissioned by Charlotte Irvine to execute this work to be placed above her fireplace in her home in Stinson Beach, CA. $20,000-30,000 Catalog note: The black abstract shapes in the background are actually cutouts in the metal, and the black backing board is visible. This work was originally built-in to the masonry of Ms. Irvine’s fireplace. It is currently framed and fitted to hang on a wall as a typical plaque, but it may also be built back into a fireplace. The material is inherently heat resistant.

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LOT 47 WILLIAM H. JOHNSON (1901-1970) Cagnes-Sur-Mer, c. 1928-30 oil on canvas 19-1/2 x 24-1/2 inches signed $40,000-60,000 William Henry Johnson was born in Florence, South Carolina in 1901. His mother, Alice Johnson, was of African American and Native American ancestry and his father (who was not married to his mother) was white. Alice soon married a local African American man and they had four additional children. William was interested in drawing at an early age, copying cartoon characters. When he was 18, he dropped out of school and accompanied his uncle to New York in search of better job opportunities. Two years later, when he was 20 years old, he had saved enough money to enroll at the National Academy of Design to study art. Johnson showed tremendous promise at the NAD and came to the attention of two well-respected painters, Charles Hawthorne and George Luks. They mentored him and raised enough money forJohnson to travel to Paris. Hawthorne suggested Johnson might have more success as a black artist in Europe initially, and upon proving himself there, possibly return to the States.

One of Johnson’s greatest influences in France was the work of Chaim Soutine. Soutine’s paintings were a step further than the Ashcan style works of Luks; they were Expressionist, and full of energy and emotion. Landscapes, seascapes and buildings were frenzied, distorted and thickly painted. Johnson moved to the South of France to Cagnes-sur-Mer, where Soutine had worked. This work shares two very obvious characteristics with the work of Soutine: the red/pink palette and the “accordion-like” composition of trees and buildings.

In 1929, Johnson met a Danish tapestry weaver and ceramicist named Holcha Krake. Holcha and her sister and brother-in-law were preparing to tour Europe’s museums and art centers, and invited William to come along. Eventually, the group returned to (continued)

L to R: Street in Cagnes sur Mer, photo: Martin Rytych.

Chaim Soutine, Landscape at Cagnes, c. 1923-1924; oil on canvas. Photo credit: Pinacotheque de Paris, France ADAGP, Paris.

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WILLIAM H. JOHNSON (1901-1970)

Holcha’s home of Odense, Denmark. Johnson married Holcha in 1930, and they lived in Kerteminde, a Danish fishing village.

Johnson admired the woodcut prints made by the Expressionists, especially the German, Max Beckmann, and the Norwegian, Edvard Munch, and this work reveals the influence of artists such as these on not only Johnson’s style, but also his choice of medium. Johnson met Munch in 1932, introduced by Pola Gauguin, the son of painter Paul Gauguin.

In 1929, Johnson had returned to New York to exhibit in the Harmon Foundation show of 1930, in which he was awarded the gold prize. He returned to the United States with Holcha in 1938, planning to make the U.S. his permanent residence. He felt a need to succeed in his home country. This was a difficult time in the United States, and Johnson had no luck selling his work. He eventually got a job through the W.P.A. teaching at the Harlem Community Art Center.

Johnson became enamored with the work of Horace Pippin and Jacob Lawrence and decided to change his style to what he called “primitive” (he had actually deemed himself a “primitive” earlier in his career, influenced by Paul Gauguin’s adoption of the term as a mindset—not a style of painting). Johnson’s new style embraced simplicity, and his subjects were calm and self-assured of their identity. He enjoyed his most productive period from 1939 through the mid 1940s. In 1943, Holcha died of breast cancer, and Johnson returned to Florence. He painted portraits and local scenes in his new style, but succumbed to grief about losing Holcha. In his devastated state, he developed a plan to return to Denmark to marry Holcha’s sister, Musse, whom he had met in 1929. His proposal was rejected by Musse, but he remained with the Krake family for six months. He then moved to Oslo with the intention to exhibit his work there, but was in a state of declined mental health and was found wandering the streets. He was taken in by the Traveler’s Aid Society and shipped back to New York, where he was admitted to a state hospital in 1947.

He remained there until his death in 1970, unable to recognize anyone and unable to paint.

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WILLIAM H. JOHNSON (1901-1970)

William H. Johnson at easel, c. 1930; William H. Johnson: An American Modern, Teresa G. Gionis, 2011; p.104

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LOT 98 LAWRENCE A. JONES (1910-1996) St. Matthew 25, 40-43 Verses, 1945-47 tempera on masonite 19 x 26-1/2 inches signed and dated signed with artist’s address, verso partial exhibition label verso Seattle Art Museum, October 1945 Provenance: Evelia Jones, daughter of the artist. $8,000-10,000 Jones was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, the oldest of 12 siblings. He left Virginia and registered at the Art Institute of Chicago where he studied from 1934-1936. In Chicago, Jones befriended accomplished artists Charles White, Eldzier Cortor and Frank Neal. He also worked in the art studios at Hull House. Jones did not finish his degree there, but moved to New Orleans and simultaneously studied and taught art at Dillard University (1936-1940). While there, he was awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship to travel to Mexico and study at the Taller de Grafica Popular. (continued)

“

The King will reply, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

Then he will say to those on his left, “Depart from me, you who are cursed, Into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”

“For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink.”

“I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.”

Matthew 25:40-43 (KJV)

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LAWRENCE A. JONES (1910-1996)

LOT 121 Brother Robert in Mexico, 1946 watercolor and gouache on paper 13 x 18 inches (image) signed and dated Provenance: Evelia Jones, daughter of the artist. $4,000-6,000 In 1941, Jones went to teach at Fort Valley State College in Georgia. One of his students was Benny Andrews. A year after arriving in Georgia, he was drafted into the army. He painted a mural while serving at Fort McClellan titled, Negro Work and Life in Georgia. After the war, Jones created a new art department at Jackson State University in Mississippi, and remained there teaching until the 1970s. Jones earned a Master’s degree in art education from the University of Mississippi (1971). He visited Ghana, Nigeria, Togo, and the Republic of Benin (1974).

Jones exhibited at the Seattle Art Museum; Atlanta Annuals, 1957, Many Years of Growth, honorable mention; American Negro Exposition, Chicago, 1940, New Orleans YMCA; Centennial Show of Black Progress, Chicago, 1964, Past, Present, Future, second place; and Augusta Savage Studios, NY, 1939.

His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, St Louis Art Museum, Jackson State University, MS.

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LAWRENCE A. JONES (1910-1996)

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LOIS MAILOU JONES (1905-1998) Lois Mailou Jones’ career spanned seven decades, and her paintings represented a variety of artistic techniques and themes as her style evolved. Her work remained consistent in her thoughtful use of color and strong sense of design, both of which were instilled in her through her extensive education at institutions such as the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, the Boston Normal Art School, and the Designer’s Art School of Boston.

At the beginning of her career, Jones submitted textile designs through a white classmate that were used by major textile firms. She went to work at Palmer Memorial Institute in North Carolina, helping to establish an art department. Professor James Herring was so impressed with her work, that he asked her to join the faculty at Howard University. Jones held a position here for the next 47 years. A number of her students went on to have extremely successful careers in art, including Elizabeth Catlett and David Driskell.

In 1937, Jones went to Paris for a years sabbatical. She attended the Academie Julian and began painting plein air. She would continue to return to Paris throughout her life; like other African American artists of the time, she felt a freedom there that was profound.

Jones found another spiritual home in Haiti. In 1954, she was invited to visit and paint the country’s landscape and the people. The works she produced in this period are her most widely known works. Jones was equally at home painting French landscapes and figure studies. Her work is found in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Metropolitan Museum, NY; and the National Palace, Haiti.

The Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC, organized the exhibition Lois Mailou Jones: A Life in Vibrant Color in 2011. In 2013, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston held a show of 30 paintings and drawings showing her versatility and mastery of techinique. Her work was also included in the exhibition, I, Too, Sing America: The Harlem Renaissance at 100, held at the Columbus Museum of Art, OH, in 2018.

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LOT 38 Automne, c. 1950 oil on canvas 10 x 13 inches signed $7,000-10,000

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LOIS MAILOU JONES (1905-1998)

LOT 103 Portrait of a Woman, 1962 oil wash on canvas 19-1/2 x 16 inches signed and dated Provenance: The collection of Faith Grobman, New Jersey. $6,000-10,000

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LOIS MAILOU JONES (1905-1998)

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CLIFF JOSEPH (b.1922) Based upon James Baldwin’s book of the same title written two years earlier. Baldwin’s book is comprised of two essays exploring religion and racial injustice, written in the form of letters. The first, entitled, My Dungeon Shook, is a fictional letter to the author’s 14 year-old nephew written on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. The letter is a plea to the nephew, and by extension, all black youth, to transcend their immediate anger and adopt a broader, more compassionate perspective. He argues that a deeper understanding of the true source of the “Negro problem”, as he calls it, would derive power and mobility. This places the responsibility on the African American to help the sadly insecure white “countrymen” come to terms with a history they do not understand.

Until that happens, they are incapable of understanding or relating to the African American, or correcting the existing (illogical) structures of inequality.

In the second essay, (originally titled, Region in My Mind) Down at the Cross, Baldwin addresses his initial joy of finding Christianity and the eventual disillusionment with the church and its teachings, finding them oppressive and deeply flawed.

“

Baldwin writes, White people were, and are, astounded by the Holocaust in Germany. They did not know that they could act that way. But, I very much doubt whether black people were astounded – at least, in the same way. For my part, the fate of the Jews, and the world’s indifference to it, frightened me very much. I could not but feel, in those sorrowful years, that this human indifference, concerning which I knew so much already, would be my portion on the day that the United States decided to murder its Negroes systematically, instead of little by little and catch-as-catch-can. I was, of course, authoritatively assured that what had happened to the Jews in Germany could not happen to the Negroes in America, but I thought, bleakly, that the German Jews had probably believed similar counselors. …

Joseph addresses these issues by way of illustration of the words of the slave song; the white man, the black man, the Christian, the Jew and the Muslim all occupy the same world, and the current path, if continued to be guided by hate and oppression, will only lead to an allencompassing hell-fire.

For more information on Cliff Joseph and his work, please visit the following link: Cliff Joseph: Artist and Activist .

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LOT 50 The Fire Next Time, 1965 oil on canvasboard 21-1/2 x 30 inches signed; signed, titled, and dated verso Literature: Cliff Joseph: Artist & Activist, Thom Pegg, 2018, pp. 40-41. $10,000-20,000

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LOT 123 WOSENE KOSROF (b. 1950) Treasure Chest IV, 2002 acrylic on linen 10-1/2 x 16-1/2 inches signed, titled, dated $5,000-7,000 Wosene, as he is known professionally, studied at the Addis Ababa School of Fine Arts and completed his BFA in 1972; then as a Ford Foundation Scholar, he earned his MFA at Howard University in 1980. Wosene incorporates Amharic script into his compositions, as well as jazzinfluenced movements of color. The symbols do not form literal words but are appropriated by the artist to act as a universal (international) visual language. This work was from the series of works, Color of Words (1995-2003). Similar to the notes of a jazz composition, the Amharic symbols create an improvised arrangement that connects with basic human elements such as emotion and self-reflection. This core commonality makes his work accessible to all.

His work is included in the collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art; Newark Museum; Neuberger Museum of Art,NY; Indianapolis Museum; United Nations, NY; Library of Congress; and the Birmingham Museum of Art.

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LOT 115 CLAUDE LAWRENCE (B. 1944) Untitled (Abstract), 2006 gouache on paper 22-1/2 x 30 inches signed and dated 3/06 verso $1,000-2,000 Lawrence studied music in high school and in college at Roosevelt University in the mid-1960s.

He made a living as a saxophonist after college until 1980. He was mostly self-taught, although he studied printmaking at the Printmaker’s Workshop in New York City from 1992-1993. He was living in Harlem in the late 1980s, attending gallery openings and networking. He met artists Fred Brown, Lorenzo Pace, Jack Whitten and Joe Overstreet. Bob Blackburn recruited him to the Printmaker’s Workshop after meeting Lawrence at an opening. From 1990-2010, he lived in locations across the country and in Mexico City.

He has lived in Chicago since 2010.

In 2013, three of his paintings were accepted into the permanent collection of the Parrish Art Museum in Southhampton, NY, and in 2014, three of his paintings were accepted into the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. His work is also in the collections of the Studio Museum in Harlem; African American Museum, Los Angeles; American Folk Art Museum, New York; Brooklyn Museum; the National African American Museum of History and Culture, Washington, DC; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Lawrence paints on canvas and on cold press watercolor paper.

In 2015, Gerald Peters Gallery in New York presented: Claude Lawrence: Beyond Improvisation.

Lawrence’s work has also been featured in exhibitons at Cinque Gallery, NY; East African Cultural Center, Philadelphia, PA; Montclair University, NJ; Parrish Art Museum, Southhampton, NY; Water Mill Museum, NY; Elaine Benson Gallery; East End Arts Council, Riverhead, NY; Great Neck Library, NY; Goat Alley Gallery, Sag Harbor, NY; Warren Street Gallery, Hudson, NY; Hugh Hill Gallery, Kent, CT; Works of Art Gallery, New York, NY; Museum of African-American Art, Los Angeles, CA. Photo courtesy of Madeline Rabb.

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JACOB LAWRENCE (1917-2000) Jacob Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1917 and raised in Philadelphia and Harlem. As a teenager, Lawrence had been uprooted from a childhood spent in Philadelphia when his mother brought her children to live with her in Harlem. She enrolled him in the after-school arts program directed by James Lesesne Wells. Lawrence’s mentor happened to be Charles Alston. He was able to create voraciously - he created elaborate paper mâché masks and three-dimensional models of Harlem. He read about master painters and focused his attention on patterns and colors.

Lawrence began attending high school, but quit after two years, worked odd jobs, and completed a stint with the CCC digging ditches during the Depression. He re-discovered Alston who was now teaching in a WPA art center. Alston directed him to the Harlem Community Art Center, which was run by Augusta Savage. She was able to get him admitted as an easel painter by the time he turned 21. He eventually found studio space with fellow artists Ronald Joseph, Romare Bearden, and Claude McKay. Lawrence was a regular at Professor Charles Seifert’s discussions of African and African American history at the 135th St. branch of the NYPL. At Seifert’s request, he attended an exhibition of West African sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. As an artist, Lawrence synthesized the events, meetings, discussions, experiences, and moments of his life onto the canvas and into his first narrative series (and the works to come). In 1936-38, he produced a series of works, The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture. For him, it was not sufficient to produce one defining work on the life of such an important historical figure, so he created 41 paintings. Lawrence also created series on Frederick Douglass in 1939; Harriet Tubman, 1940; John Brown; and the Migration Series.

In 1939 the James Weldon Johnson Literary Guild sponsored an exhibition of his work at the Harlem YMCA - his first publicized one man show. The Toussaint L’Ouverture series was also shown at the Manhattan headquarters of the Catholic Interracial Council. Later, an entire room was set aside at the Baltimore Museum of Art for his series. This was unprecedented.

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Lawrence won three successive Rosenwald Fellowships. With the second, he traveled through the South, experiencing both rural and urban life, the result of which was his Migration Series.

It was at this time that Edith Halpert of the Downtown Gallery began representing him. During WWII, he served in the Coast Guard, and was assigned to the first racially integrated ship in US history. In 1946, he accepted an invitation from Josef Albers to teach at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. He taught at many schools throughout his career, including the Art Students League, New School for Social Research, Pratt Institute and the University of Washington in Seattle, where he eventually retired.

Between 1986 and 1997, Lawrence created prints from The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture Series, which is now in the collection of the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University in New Orleans. Lawrence translated 15 of these paintings into silk screen prints. At this later date, he was able change certain aspects of the work when adapting his original paintings to sets of silkscreen prints. The works were shown in the exhibition, To Preserve Their Freedom: Jacob Lawrence’s Toussaint L’Ouverture Serigraph Series, held at the Amistad Research Center, New Orleans in 2017.

Recently, his work has been shown in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Jacob Lawrence and Black Mountain College, Black Mountain College Museum & Art Center, Asheville, NC, 2018-19 and I, Too, Sing America, Columbus Museum of Art, OH, 2018-19.

The exhibition, Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle, was recently presented at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA until April 26th of 2020. This show is currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY through November 1, 2020.

His work is found in the collections of MOMA, NY; National Academy of Design, NY; National Gallery, Washington D.C.; The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and many more.

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JACOB LAWRENCE (1917-2000)

LOT 69 Douglass, 1999 color silkscreen on Rising Two Ply rag paper through hand cut film stencils 26-1/8 x 18 inches (image) 32-1/8 x 23 inches (full sheet) signed, titled, dated, and numbered 82/125 Nesbett, 99-2 Published by the National Association of Black Journalists, Adelphi, Maryland; printed by Workshop, Inc., Washington DC (Lou Stovall, Master printer).

Provenance: Dr. Dianne Whitfield-Locke and Dr. Carnell Locke, Maryland.

Literature: Jacob Lawrence: The Complete Prints (1963-2000), Peter T. Nesbett, 2001, p. 69.

“This print is based on the twenty-first image from The Life of Frederick Douglass series (1939).

During the process of creating this print, Lawrence changed the color palette and made significant adjustments to the treatment of individual elements, including the table and chair.” $6,000-8,000

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JACOB LAWRENCE (1917-2000)

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JACOB LAWRENCE (1917-2000)

LOT 42 15 PRINTS BASED ON PAINTINGS FROM THE LIFE OF TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE SERIES, 1986-1997 Published by the Amistad Research Center, New Orleans Printed by Workshop, Inc., Washington DC (Lou Stovall, master printer) All illustrated in: Jacob Lawrence, The Complete Prints (1963-2000), Peter T. Nesbett, 2001; pp.

71-85.

Provenance: The collection of Preston Edwards, New Orleans. $110,000-130,000

General Toussaint L’Ouverture, 1986 silkscreen on Bainbridge Two Ply Rag paper through hand-cut film and brushed lacquer stencils, screens destroyed 28-3/8 x 18-1/2 inches (image) 32-1/8 x 22 inches (sheet) signed and dated titled L’Ouverture annotated C/P 1/1 L86-2 This print is based on the twentieth image from the original series of 41 paintings. (Nesbett, 72) Toussaint L’Ouverture was born into slavery in 1743 in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). He led a slave rebellion in 1791 and eventually gained control of the island. He improved the economy and maintained a well-disciplined army. In 1801, he helped promulgate a democratic constitution for the colony. He was named Governor-General for Life, much against Napoleon Bonaparte’s wishes.

In 1802, he was invited to parley with the French, but was arrested with perfidy and deported to Paris, where he was thrown in Fort de Joux prison. Exposed to horrendous conditions, he died in 1803, sadly only a year before the French capitulated and Haiti became a sovereign state (1804).

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JACOB LAWRENCE (1917-2000)

LOT 42 The Birth of Toussaint L’Ouverture, 1986 silkscreen on Bainbridge Two Ply Rag paper through hand-cut film stencils, screens destroyed 28-1/2 x 18-1/2 inches (image) 32-1/8 x 22 inches (sheet) signed and dated titled The Birth of Toussaint numbered 60/100 L86-1 This print is based on the sixth image from the original series of 41 paintings. (Nesbett, 71)

The Capture, 1987 silkscreen on Bainbridge Two Ply Rag paper through hand-cut film stencils, screens destroyed 28-1/4 x 18-3/8 inches (image) 32-1/8 x 22 inches (sheet) signed, titled, dated, and numbered 117/120 L87-2 This print is based on the seventeenth image from the original series of 41 paintings.

(Nesbett, 73)

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JACOB LAWRENCE (1917-2000)

LOT 42 To Preserve Their Freedom, 1988 silkscreen on Bainbridge Two Ply Rag paper through hand-cut film stencils, screens destroyed 18-1/2 x 28-3/4 inches (image) 22 x 32-1/8 inches (sheet) signed, titled, dated, and numbered 74/99 L88-2 This print is based on the thirty-eighth image from the original series of 41 paintings. The image differs significantly from the original painting. Lawrence added the wound to the central figure, reconfigured the sky and foliage, and incorporated bright red and yellow into the composition.

(Nesbett, 74)

Toussaint at Ennery, 1989 silkscreen on Bainbridge Two Ply Rag paper through hand-cut film stencils, screens destroyed 18-5/8 x 29 inches (image) 22 x 32-1/8 inches (sheet) signed, titled, dated, and numbered 96/99 L89-3 This print is based on the thirty-fourth image from the original series of 41 paintings. Though several changes have been made to the forms of the horses and riders, the most significant alterations are in the palette. The colors of the ground, sky, hats, and sabres have been altered.

Lawrence added red, blue, and yellow to the composition, turning the foliage in the foreground to flames. (Nesbett, 75)

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JACOB LAWRENCE (1917-2000)

LOT 42 The Coachman, 1990 silkscreen on Bainbridge Two Ply Rag paper through hand-cut film stencils, screens destroyed 28-1/4 x 18-3/8 inches (image) 32-1/8 x 22 inches (sheet) signed, titled, dated, and numbered 44/99 L90-4 This print is based on the eighth image from the original series of 41 paintings. The only change Lawrence made to the this image while executing the screenprint was to add more blue to the background color. (Nesbett, 76)

Dondon, 1992 silkscreen on Bainbridge Two Ply Rag paper through hand-cut film stencils, screens destroyed 18-5/8 x 29 inches (image) 22 x 32 inches (sheet) signed, titled, dated, and numbered 31/124 L92-2 This print is based on the sixteenth image from the original series of 41 paintings. Lawrence made several changes to this image while executing the screenprint: he increased the prominence of the foliage in the foreground, altered the form and features of the horse, and added red to the composition. (Nesbett, 77)

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JACOB LAWRENCE (1917-2000)

LOT 42 Contemplation, 1993 silkscreen on Bainbridge Two Ply Rag paper through hand-cut film stencils, screens destroyed 28-3/8 x 18-1/2 inches (image) 32 x 22 inches (sheet) signed, titled, dated, and numbered 19/120 L93-2 This print is based on the twenty-seventh image from the original series of 41 paintings. Lawrence made a number of changes to the image during the execution of the screenprint. In the original painting, Toussaint wears a white shirt, the background is solid green, and the candle burns a yellow flame and drips no wax. There is no red in the original. (Nesbett, 78)

St. Marc, 1994 silkscreen on Bainbridge Two Ply Rag paper through hand-cut film stencils, screens destroyed 28-1/2 x 18-1/2 inches (image) 32-1/8 x 22-1/8 inches (sheet) signed, titled, dated, and numbered 22/120 L94-3 This print is based on the twenty-second image from the original series of 41 paintings. The many changes to the image during the creation of the print include extensive alterations to the foliage, the horse, and the overall color palette. (Nesbett, 79)

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JACOB LAWRENCE (1917-2000)

LOT 42 Strategy, 1994 silkscreen on Bainbridge Two Ply Rag paper through hand-cut film stencils, screens destroyed 18-1/2 x 28-5/8 inches (image) 22-1/8 x 32-1/8 inches (sheet) signed, titled, dated, and numbered 71/120 L94-4 This print is based on the fourteenth image from the original series of 41 paintings. (Nesbett, 80)

The March, 1995 silkscreen on Bainbridge Two Ply Rag paper through hand-cut film stencils, screens destroyed 18 x 28 inches (image) 22-1/8 x 32-1/8 inches (sheet) signed, titled, dated, and numbered 36/120 L95-2 This print is based on the twenty-third image from the original series of 41 paintings. The most significant changes that were made during the creation of the print can be seen in the sky and the addition of red in the foliage. (Nesbett, 81)

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JACOB LAWRENCE (1917-2000)

LOT 42 Flotilla, 1996 silkscreen on Bainbridge Two Ply Rag paper through hand-cut film stencils, screens destroyed 18-3/8 x 28-7/8 inches (image) 22-1/4 x 32-1/4 inches (sheet) signed, titled, dated, and numbered 70/120 L96-6 This print is based on the thirty-first image from the original series of 41 paintings. (Nesbett, 82)

Deception, 1997 silkscreen on Bainbridge Two Ply Rag paper through hand-cut film stencils, screens destroyed 18-1/2 x 28-3/4 inches (image) 22-1/4 x 32-1/4 inches (sheet) signed, titled, dated, and numbered 88/125 L97-3 This print is based on the thirty-sixth image from the original series of 41 paintings. (Nesbett, 83)

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JACOB LAWRENCE (1917-2000)

LOT 42 The Burning, 1997 silkscreen on Bainbridge Two Ply Rag paper through hand-cut film stencils, screens destroyed 18-1/2 x 29 inches (image) 22-1/8 x 32-1/8 inches (sheet) signed, titled, dated, and numbered 114/125 L97-4 This print is based on the thirty-second image from the original series of 41 paintings. The treatment of the sky and the color palette differ significantly from the painting. (Nesbett, 84)

The Opener, 1997 silkscreen on Bainbridge Two Ply Rag paper through hand-cut film stencils, screens destroyed 18-3/4 x 28-3/4 inches (image) 22-1/4 x 32-1/8 inches (sheet) signed, titled, dated, and numbered 116/125 L97-5 This print is based on the twenty-first image from the original series of 41 paintings. (Nesbett, 85)

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LOT 167 To the Defense, 1989 lithograph on Arches paper from handdrawn aluminum plates edition of 200 with 20 AP, 6 PP plates destroyed 31-7/8 x 24 inches (image) 31-7/8 x 24 (paper) signed, titled, dated, and numbered 101/200 Published by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund on it’s 50th Anniversary.

Printed by Stone Press Editions.

Literature: Jacob Lawrence: The Complete Prints (1963-2000), Peter Nesbett, 2001, p. 47; L89-1 $6,000-8,000

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JACOB LAWRENCE (1917-2000)

LOT 8 Stained Glass Windows, 2000 silkscreen on Rising Two Ply Rag paper through hand-cut film stencils 27-1/4 x 20-1/8 inches (image) 32 x 25 inches (sheet) signed, dated, and titled B, SGW numbered 22/135 Published by Spradling-Ames Corporation, Key West, Florida; printed by Workshop, Inc., Washington DC (Lou Stovall, master printer).

This image is based on a painting titled Builders - Stained Glass Windows (1998).

Illustrated: Jacob Lawrence: The Complete Prints (1963-2000), Peter T. Nesbett, 2001; p. 71; L00-1. $5,000-7,000 This image is in the collection of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC.

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LOT 169 CLIFFORD LEE (1926-1985) Duke Ellington at the Piano, c. 1960 oil on board 28 x 22 inches signed $3,000-5,000 Clifford Lee was a social-realist artist working in Chicago during the 1950s and 60s. He studied at the Grand Rapids Gallery (MI) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He worked primarily with a palette knife and his subject matter consisted of jazz musicians. Lee’s paintings were shown at the Englewood Concourse Commission (supported by the South Side Community Art Center and the Du Sable Museum of African American History), and the Hyde Park, Gold Coast and Lake Meadows Art Fairs. His work also appeared in Ebony magazine.

Lee is included in Theresa Dickason Cederholm’s, Afro-American Artists, the 1974 Ebony Handbook and Falk’s Who’s Who in American Art.

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LOT 130 HUGHIE LEE-SMITH (1915-1999) Nocturne, 1995 color lithograph 26 x 36 inches published by Mojo Portfolio signed, dated, and numbered 5/175 Provenance: The collection of Faith Grobman, New Jersey. $3,000-5,000 Lee-Smith was born in Eustis, Florida in 1915, and raised in Atlanta and Cleveland, Ohio. He knew from an early age that art was his mission. His mother encouraged his growing talent by enrolling him in an art class for gifted students at the Cleveland Museum of Art. At twenty years old, he 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 at the Cleveland Institute of Art (1938); and at Wayne State University (1952-1953), he studied art, theater, and dance. Throughout his career, he taught at several distinguished institutions including the Karamu House, Cleveland (late 1930’s), Princeton Country Day School, NJ (1963-65), Howard University, Washington D.C. (1969-1971), and the Art Student’s League, NYC (1972-1987).

Lee-Smith was employed by the Ohio Works Progress Administration in 1938-1939. 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 printmaking in 19391940. His early works were shown mostly in Chicago and Detroit; at the South Side Community Art Center, the Snowdon Gallery, and the Detroit Artist’s Market. He was a regular exhibitor at the National Academy of Design between the years of 1959 and 1976.

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. The retrospective was held at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton (1988). Just two years before his death, he was featured at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art in Maine, and in 1994, he was commissioned to paint the official City Hall portrait of former New York City Mayor David Dinkins. He died in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1999 after a long illness.

His work is included in many major collections including the South Side Community Art Center, Chicago; Howard University; the Detroit Institute of Arts, and Wayne State University. In 2013, the Muskegon Museum of Art in Michigan, organized a solo exhibition of his work from the 1930’s and 40’s titled, Hughie Lee-Smith: Meditations.

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HUGHIE LEE-SMITH (1915-1999)

LOT 13 Jazz, c. 1985 watercolor on paper 10 x 12 inches signed Provenance: The Anthony and Davida Artis Collection of African-American Fine Art, Flint, MI $6,000-8,000

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LOT 85 NORMAN WILFRED LEWIS (1909-1979) Moon and Smoke, 1951 oil and ink on paper 11 x 11 inches signed and dated $10,000-15,000 Although Norman Lewis began his career predominantly as a social realist, he grew increasingly dissatisfied with the genre’s ability to manifest societal change. He began to explore abstraction in the mid-1940’s, developing a personal style consisting of a cast of calligraphic figures reminiscent of pictographs. From 1946 to 1964, Lewis was represented by the Willard Gallery, where he had six solo shows and participated in two group exhibitions. Like most African American artists of the time, he straddled two worlds, one of the African American artist, the other that of the abstractionist. He co-founded the Harlem Artist’s Guild, 1935 and the Spiral Group, 1963, as well as the Cinque Gallery. He was the only African American included in the Studio 35 sessions, organized by Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline to define abstract expressionism. The Museum of Modern Art subsequently included his work in the exhibition, Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America.

Lewis’ first retrospective exhibition was held in 1976 at the Graduate Center of City College, New York. His work is found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Museum of Modern Art; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; Studio Museum in Harlem; and Whitney Museum of American Art. His work was featured in the recent exhibition, Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis, held in 2015 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

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LOT 105 EDWARD LOPER, JR (b. 1934) Quebec, c. 1970 oil on canvas 36 x 40 inches signed artist’s address, 511 37th St, Wilmington, DE, on verso $6,500-8,500 Edward Loper, Jr. is a self- taught artist who describes his technique as “a way to see.” He has been exhibiting his work since the 1960’s. A long time resident of Wilmington, DE, Loper worked as a designer for Tupp Signs. Additionally, he has taught art, photography and woodworking at Wilmington High School and instructed art, pottery and sculpture at the West End Neighborhood House and Kingwood Center. In the 1970’s he headed the Visual Arts Department at Christina Cultural Arts Center in Wilmington, DE. Loper is equally at home painting genre scenes, portraits, and landscapes, all of which retain his personal style of vivid Post-Impressionist brushwork. In 2019, the Delaware Art Museum held an exhibiton of his father’s and his own work called The Loper Tradition.

An Interview with Edward Loper, Jr. at the Delaware Art Museum

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LOT 68 EDWARD LOPER, SR (1916-2011) Provincetown, c. 1940 oil on canvas 21x 27 inches signed titled, written on stretcher $7,500-9,500 Loper was born on the east side of Wilmington, Delaware, and became interested in art when he was 20 years old. He began working for the Index of American Design of the Works Project Administration (he worked there for 5 years). In 1947, he began offering instructional classes from his studio, and during his career, he taught hundreds of students, including at the Delaware Art Museum, Lincoln University, MO, and the Jewish Community Center. While mostly selftaught, he did study at the Barnes Foundation off and on for 10 years. He stressed to his own students to paint what they see and not how someone else might see it. In the 1950s, his style fractured the plane of the composition, and his work became more colorful. His work is included in the collections of the Delaware Art Museum; Philadelphia Art Museum; Corcoran Gallery, Washington DC; Howard University; Clark Atlanta University; and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, among others. The Delaware Art Museum presented a retrospective of his work in 1996.

Additionally, the Delaware Art Museum held a joint exhibiton of his and his son’s work in The Loper Tradition, 2019.

For more information on Edward Loper, Sr., please visit the following link: Edward Loper, Sr. African American Painter, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE

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LOT 80 ED LOVE (1936-1999) Homecookin’, 1969 welded steel 43 x 24 x 20 inches titled and inscribed 398 Exhibited: Art in Washington and Its Afro-American Presence: 1940-1970, Washington Project for the Arts, Washington DC, Keith Morrison, 1985; listed on page 98; no. 53. $20,000-30,000 Love was born in Los Angeles and studied at California State University (LA), receiving a MFA. He also studied abroad at the University of Uppsla, Sweden as a post-graduate fellow. He eventually became a professor at Howard University, teaching sculpture (1969-1987) and from 1987-1990 he served as Dean of Visual Arts at the New World School of Arts, Miami. In 1990, he became a professor and director of undergraduate studies at Florida State University.

Love’s work in metal is influenced by jazz, traditional African sculpture, and ancient Egyptian mythology. His work was recently included in an exhibition at the California African American Museum titled L.A. Blacksmith which ran from September 10, 2019 through February 16, 2020.

The exhibition featured "historic Los Angeles metal sculpture that signifies the durability of West African metalsmithing aesthetics to contemporary explorations of iron and steel alloys, bronze, copper, tin, aluminum and gold." https://caamuseum.org/exhibitions/2019/la-blacksmith Ed Love exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, solo, 1976; Studio Museum in Harlem; California State University, LA; University of Massachusetts; Washington Project for the Arts; University of Maryland, and elsewhere. His work was also included in Choosing: An Exhibit of Changing Perspectives in Modern Art and Art Criticism by Black Americans, 1925-1985, sponsored by the Phillip Morris Companies (Jacqueline Fonvielle-Bontemps, curator, 1986.)

Similar examples of his work are illustrated in University of the District of Columbia Special Art Collection, 1984, p. 52-53.

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AL LOVING (1935-2005) Al Loving was born in Detroit. His father was the first black teacher in Detroit’s public high schools and Loving, Sr. went on to become a professor and dean at the University of Michigan.

Loving, Jr. studied first at Wayne State University and Flint Junior College (now Mott Community College), then the University of Illinois (BFA, 1963) and the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MFA). Shortly after graduation, Loving moved to New York, and lived at the Hotel Chelsea (1968).

He is the first African American artist to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1969).

Unlike many African-American artists whose art focused on the racial politics of the era, Loving was a staunch abstractionist. His early works were built upon strict yet simple geometric shapes—often hexagonal or cubic modules. Inspired by Hans Hoffmann (who taught Loving’s mentor Al Mullen), Loving concentrated on the tension between flatness and spatial illusionism.

In the 1970s the artist became disenchanted with his earlier, hard-edge geometric paintings.

Loving dispensed with notions of centralized composition, figure/ground separation, and pictorial frame in his later torn canvas and collaged paper works. He combined hundreds of pieces of cut and torn canvas or paper into an abundance of overlapping patterns and shapes, their rich and intuitive array of colors stretch irregularly, spiraling outward, surrounding the space, and engulfing the viewer. (REF: www.alloving.org) In an interview in the catalogue for The Appropriate Object, an exhibition of seven black artists at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo in 1989, Mr. Loving spoke about his difficulty with the cube and his need to break out of a geometrical prison.

In the early 1970s, Loving abandoned hard-edge abstraction, and began creating fabric collages in the abstract expressionist style. He was influenced by an exhibition at the Whitney, Abstract Designs in American Quilts, and began working with sewn material fragments, much like Sam Gilliam. A decade later, he transitioned into using other materials, such as corrugated board and rag paper, torn by hand and reconstructed into circles and spirals. Each piece of cardboard is painted and placed overlapping to create the dynamic and continued composition. About this time (1988), Loving joined the faculty of the City University of New York. Loving’s work is included in the Detroit Institute of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC), Philadelphia Museum of Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.

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LOT 120 Untitled (Abstract), 1984 acrylic and elements of collage on handmade paper 34 x 31-1/4 inches signed and dated Provenance: Collection of Julia E. Harris, Chicago, acquired directly from the artist $15,000-18,000 www.BLACKARTAUCTION.com

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AL LOVING (1935-2005)

LOT 39 Sag Harbor 6, 1988 acrylic and mixed media collage sculpture 47 x 44 inches signed and dated verso inscribed verso, A double wish for life and continued growth.

Provenance: Collection of Julia E. Harris, Chicago, acquired directly from the artist $20,000-30,000 Photo: Al Loving in his studio from the article “Artists and the Fine Art of Survival”, Black Enterprise, December 1975; p. 22.

Michael Brenson, in his review of Loving’s exhibit at the June Kelly Gallery, 1990, which appeared in the New York Times, writes:

“

The dominant shape is a spiral, which Mr. Loving sees as a symbol of affirmation and regeneration. The spiral keys and pulls together the compositions, and triggers associations with automobile wheels, circus rings, violin scrolls and tribal jewelry. The spiral helps give the work a note of musical, narrative and theatrical performance.

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AL LOVING (1935-2005)

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AL LOVING (1935-2005)

LOT 67 Monumental Wall Assembly (preliminary drawing), c. 1968 colored pencil and graphite on paper 15 x 20 inches signed and titled Provenance: Gertrude Kasle Gallery, Detroit to a private collection Detroit.

Gertrude Kasle Gallery opened in 1965 in Detroit, handling the work of such artists as Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan, Robert Goodnough, Robert Natkin, and of course, Al Loving. The gallery operated for 11 years, and Loving exhibited there June 15-July 7, 1969 and September 12-October 7, 1970. The 1969 show was the artist’s first solo exhibit—the same year he had a solo exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art. $10,000-20,000

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LOT 45 WILLIAM MAJORS (1930-1982) The Prophet, 1962 oil on illustration board 24 x 32 inches 26 x 37-1/2 inches (full board size) signed and dated label from ACA Galleries, NY $8,000-12,000

“

The prophet theme is inspired by his faith and specifically by his experience living in Firenze, Italy for nearly two years where the art of Renaissance masters such as Massacio and Giotto profoundly motivated his creativity. A John Hay Whitney Fellowship enabled him to live in Italy during that time.

Susan Stedman, the artist’s widow.

Harriet Warkel writes: "The city itself had an extraordinary impact on Majors, who found its history and cosmopolitan environment conducive for painting. The respect he received from the Europeans simply because he was an artist gave Majors added encouragement to pursue his work. He had never experienced this kind of support and appreciation." (A Shared Heritage: Art

by Four African Americans, p. 100) His exposure to the religious art of Italy was clearly inspirational to him, but he had actually begun to build his abstractions from a natural or religious base in the late 1950s, while still in Indianapolis.

Majors studied at the Cleveland School of Art and completed his BFA at the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis. His work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Art, Boston, Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the Roy Neuberger Museum, among others.

Photo: The artist, Dartmouth College, NH; Artist-in-Residence, 1977. Courtesy of Susan Stedman Majors (Illustrated: A Shared Heritage, Art by Four African Americans, Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1996; p, 179.)

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LOT 32 KERRY JAMES MARSHALL (b.1955 ) May 15, 2001, 2003 four color screen print on Arches 88 paper 27-1/2 × 22-1/2 inches pencil signed, titled, dated, and numbered 41/60 This is part of a limited edition set. $4,000-6,000 Marshall collaborated with master printer Randy Hemminghaus in 2003 to produce May 15, 2001, which refers to a date of a fine art auction held at Sotheby’s. This image addresses the idea of art as a commodity and the assessed value of various works by both black and white artists. The format is a spoof on a grocery store advertisement, typically featuring canned goods and weekly specials.

Kerry James Marshall was born in Birmingham, Alabama and moved with his family to Los Angeles. He studied at the Otis College of Art and Design in L.A. with, among others, Charles White. He realized under White’s tutelage that his art should have meaningful content, whether it be about politics, social issues, history, culture, etc.

Like most African American artists, one of Marshall’s main goals is to make it clear that the default American perspective is inaccurate and exclusive and by definition, false. Re-evaluation and redefinition is essential, and that process begins with exposing the inherent contradictions of the prevailing ideas.

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LOT 91 CHARLES MCGEE (b.1924) Girl Blowing Bubbles, c. 1955 oil on masonite 25 x 15 inches signed $15,000-25,000

McGee was born in South Carolina, but moved to Detroit when he was ten years old. He studied at the Society of Arts and Crafts (now the Center for Creative Studies) in Detroit. He also studied in Spain for a year. He was later an associate professor at Eastern Michigan University (1969-87) and had his own art school and gallery in the 1970s. McGee painted several murals, including The Blue Nile (1987) at the Detroit People Mover Broadway station. He helped found the Urban Wall Mural Program in Detroit in 1978, a community beautification project funded by the Michigan Council of Arts. There were a total of fifteen murals executed for this project in the 1970s and 80s. McGee also painted murals at the Martin Luther King Community Center and for Northern High School. McGee exhibited extensively and was included in the controversial Contemporary Black Artists in America held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971.

Photo: Jarrett Begick

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SAM MIDDLETON (1927-2015) Mixed media artist, Sam Middleton was one of a group of expatriate African Americans who enjoyed success in Europe in the 1960’s. Middleton was born in New York City and grew up in Harlem near the Savoy Ballroom. This notable venue provided much inspiration for his future collages. His love of music - classical and jazz - was integral to his very life - he was known to carry an unwieldy turntable and collection of records with him wherever he traveled.

He joined the Merchant Marines in 1944. Upon his return to New York City in the 1950s, he relocated to Greenwich Village, meeting and befriending a small group of African American artists including Walter Williams, Clifford Jackson, Harvey Cropper, and Herb Gentry - all of whom would expatriate to Europe in the next decade In the early 1950s, Middleton was part of New York’s Cedar Tavern scene, which included his friends Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline. Kline encouraged Middleton to apply to the John Hay Whitney Foundation and advised him to seek artistic success outside New York.

Middleton received a scholarship for one year of study at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel, otherwise he was largely self-taught. It was there in 1957, that he began experimenting with collage. His work was shown at Contemporary Arts Gallery in 1958 and again in 1960. The Whitney Museum of American Art showed four of his works in Young America 1960: Thirty American Painters Under 36. (continued)

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LOT 163 Untitled, 1973 mixed media on paper 9-1/2 x 15 inches signed and dated $2,000-3,000

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SAM MIDDLETON (1927-2015)

LOT 55 Untitled, 1974 mixed media and collage on paper 14-1/2 x 20 inches signed and dated $3,000-5,000 Between 1959 and 1961, Middleton lived in Europe, exhibiting in Spain, Sweden, and Denmark.

Much of his artistic material was gleaned from ephemera he collected as he moved from city to city. In 1962 he decided to make a home in the Netherlands. His later work brought the Dutch landscape into his collages.

Middleton remained in the Netherlands for the rest of his life. He showed extensively there and other locales throughout Europe, but was not forgotten in the States. In 1970, his work was shown in the exhibition, Afro-American Artists Abroad at the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin and in 1983, the Studio Museum in Harlem held the exhibition An Ocean Apart: American Artists Abroad which also included Herb Gentry, Cliff Jackson, and Walter Williams.

His work is found in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, NL; Fisk University, Nashville, TN; Brooklyn Museum, NY, as well as many others.

Photo: Middleton, Cliff Jackson, and Harvey Cropper in Stockholm, Sweden, 1960; Sam Middleton Estate. Unidentified photographer; Š Sam Middleton Estate

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SAM MIDDLETON (1927-2015)

LOT 14 Untitled, 1962 acrylic and collage on paper 23 x 16-3/4 inches signed and dated $5,000-7,000

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LOT 118 EARL B. MILLER (1930-2003) Untitled, 1963 oil on canvas 36 x 28-1/2 inches signed, titled, and dated inscribed verso, painted in Marbella, Spain $10,000-15,000 Earl Miller was born in Chicago and studied at Roosevelt College, the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago; Pratt Institute; Art Students League; and the Brooklyn Museum School in New York. He also studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste, Germany. Miller’s early influences in Chicago, especially at the Institute of Design (a.k.a., the Chicago Bauhaus, because it was founded by Bauhaus master, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy), would have been in abstraction.

In New York, Miller joined the group Spiral, the year this work was executed (1963). He exhibited in an important group show which included Beauford Delaney, Herbert Gentry, Sam Middleton, Larry Potter, Norma Morgan and Walter Williams in Copenhagen in 1964: 10 American Negro Artists Living and Working in Europe. He also exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, along with an extensive list of exhibitions in Europe. He eventually began teaching at the University of Washington in Seattle (1969).

Photo: The artist and Romare Bearden at a meeting of the Spiral group; courtesy of Dr. Pringl Miller, the artist’s daughter.

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LOT 34 LEV T. MILLS (b. 1940) Celebration, 1982 serigraph on bronze mirror plexiglass 28 x 22 inches identified as 1/2 by the artist signed and dated verso $3,500-4,500 Known primarily as a printmaker, Mills grew up in Florida, and studied at Florida A&M University. He earned his MA and MFA at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. At Wisconsin, he studied with Dean Meeker, an accomplished printmaker himself. Mills’ subjects approach a social narrative, but he likes to leave room for interpretation. He places precedence on artistic issues and this is evident in the high level of craftsmanship in his work.

The images are bold, but subtle—not heavyhanded. Mills studied abroad at the Slade School of Art in London on a fellowship. He participated in exhibits throughout Africa with the United States Information Agency program.

Mills returned to the U.S. to Atlanta, to teach printmaking at Clark College, and later Spelman College. In the late 1960s-70s, Mills’ work consisted primarily of intaglios and silkscreen prints.

“

I am greatly influenced by the discovery of new materials that might be used to produce a work of art. It is necessary to define these components that make art meaningful as new media are produced. The ongoing effort of a “structuralist” is to struggle with forms—to build up, modify, tear down, and build up again before the resolution of a given work finally does take place.

-Lev T. Mills Photo: Impressions/Expressions: Black American Graphics, Studio Museum in Harlem, 1980, p.

33.

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LOT 95 EVANGELINE MONTGOMERY (b. 1933) Dialogue With Nature, 2011 acrylic on canvas 30 x 30 inches signed and dated titled verso Provenance: The estate of the artist. $5,000-7,000 Evangeline Juliet, “EJ” Montgomery was born in New York. Her father was a Baptist minister and her mother a homemaker. As a teenager, she discovered her affinity for creating art when she received a paint set as a gift.

Montgomery graduated from Seward High School in New York City. In 1955, she moved to Los Angeles with her husband and studied at the Los Angeles City College (1955-58) and Cal Sate, Los Angeles (1958-62). Montgomery lived in Nigeria from 1962-1965. Upon her return, she earned a BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1969. She also studied at UC Berkeley (1968-70).

EJ worked as an artist in several mediums, including printmaking, painting, sculpture, ceramics, and jewelry design. She was also a very important administrator and advocate of African American art. She worked as a curator at the Oakland Museum from 1968-1974, and organized the retrospective show on the work of Sargent Johnson. Montgomery was impressed with Johnson’s work in enamel and successfully executed works of her own in that medium.

Montgomery moved to Washington, D.C. in 1980 to work as a community affairs director for WHMM-TV. Shortly thereafter, in 1983, she began working with the United States Department of State as a program development officer for the Arts America Program, organizing overseas exhibitions for American artists—including African American artists.

Photo: The artist, 1973; Oakland Post Photograph Collection, MS 169, African American Museum and Library at Oakland, Oakland Public Library. Oakland, California.

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EVANGELINE MONTGOMERY (b. 1933)

LOT 24 Untitled, c. 1960-65 hand built and glazed ceramic vessel 8 x 3-1/2 x 5 inches initialed $300-500

LOT 171 Night Gardens, 1996 Offset lithograph 29-3/4 x 21-1/2 inches Titled and numbered recto: “Night” , S.P. 3” Signed, titled, dated and numbered, “S.P.3” verso Unframed BAA is donating the proceeds of this lot to Stages of Freedom, Providence, R.I. to help fund their youth swim program. www.stagesoffreedom.org $1,000-1,500 266 •

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LOT 160 Untitled, c. 1960-65 hand built and glazed reed vase 21 x 9-1/2 x 6 inches initialed $300-500

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KEITH MORRISON (b.1942 ) Referred to by his biographer as a “painterly storyteller”, Keith Morrison is not only a highly accomplished artist, but curator, art critic and educator. Born in Jamaica, Morrison’s formal art training was at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he received both a B.A. and an M.F.A. His work has been widely exhibited across the U.S and worldwide, including at the Art Institute of Chicago; Smithsonian Institution; Anacostia Museum, Washington D. C.; Corcoran Gallery, Washington D.C.; and the California Afro-American Museum, Los Angeles. He represented Jamaica as an artist in the 2001 Venice Biennale, and served as U.S. critic to the 2008 Shanghai Biennale. He exhibited at the Southside Community Art Center (Chicago) in 1975.

His works are held in the collections of numerous public institutions including the Cincinnati Art Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum of Modern Art of Monterrey, Mexico, and the National Gallery of Art, Jamaica.

Morrison has held faculty and administrative appointments at a number of distinguished universities and art schools, including DePaul University, University of Illinois, Fisk University(1967-68), and Dean of the Tyler School of Art at Temple University (Philadelphia).

Goldfishing in the Night, 1983, is very similar to the work included in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago: Con brio, also from 1983. “Con brio” is a musical term, meaning “with vigor”. The overall painting technique of both works, also incorporating geometric shapes, creating a tension between surface and depth within the composition, is similar; but the palette sets an opposing tone. Con brio is up-tempo and energetic, placing the viewer in the moment, while Goldfishing in the Night is peaceful and quiet, self-reflecting.

Con brio,1983 oil on canvas 44 x 44 inches Reference number: 1984.186 Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago

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LOT 126 Goldfishing in the Night, 1983 oil on canvas 46 x 58 signed and dated Provenance: The collection of Julia E. Harris, Chicago; Acquired directly from the artist. $15,000-20,000

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LOT 72 OTTO NEALS (b.1931 ) Young Nanny of the Maroons, 1991 bronze with deep brown patina 16-3/4 x 9 x 9-1/2 inches (sculpture) 6-1/2 x 9 x 2 inches (base) signed, dated, and numbered 3/3 Provenance: The collection of Faith Grobman, New Jersey. $9,000-12,000 Neals' mother left her husband and three children in South Carolina in the early 1930s in search of employment in New York City. There was a much greater chance of a woman succeeding at the time because of the numerous domestic jobs available in the city. She did, in fact, become employed, and her family immediately moved to Brooklyn in 1934. Neals attended the Brooklyn High School for Special Trades there and was already very interested in the arts (coincidentally, Ernest Crichlow attended the school at the same time, albeit they were a few years apart).

After high school, Neals got a job in a factory, but two years later, in 1952, he was drafted into the army (he did not go to Korea, but was stationed at Fort Bragg, NC). In the mid-1950s, he married Vera Anita, whose relatives were from Guyana. Otto joined a group of Harlem-based artists known as the Twentieth-Century Creators. This group eventually split and the dominant faction started Weusi (a Swahili term for “blackness”), and then five of those members founded the Nyubba Ya Sanna (House of Art), located at 132nd Street in Harlem.

Neals had also studied at Bob Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop and the Brooklyn Museum’s school.

Neals began participating in the Fulton Art Fair in Bedford-Stuyvesant (1950s-60s), along with artists Ernie Crichlow and Tom Feelings. He made two trips to Guyana, the second in 1970, and when he returned, he became much more invested in sculpture. He found a studio in Brooklyn, and began working with Vivian Schuyler Key, whom after a break in her artistic career to raise a family, returned to work as a painter and sculptor. The two influenced each other’s work.

REF: Black New York Artists of the 20th Century Selections from the Schomburg Center Collections, NYPL, 1998 Black Artists of the New Generation, Elton Fax, 1977. (Photo credit: Leroy Ruffin)

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Nanny of the Maroons (c. 1686-1755) led a community of formerly enslaved Africans, called the Windward Maroons, in the British colony of Jamaica. Nanny led a successful guerrilla war against the British, leading to a peace treaty in 1740.

Nanny was purportedly from what is now Ghana, and her success in war tactics was attributed to her powers in Obeah, an African-derived religion widely practiced in the Caribbean countries.

Obeah disciples possessed both good and bad magical powers. The government of Jamaica declared Nanny a National Hero in 1975. Her portrait is featured on the $500 Jamaican dollar bill.

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OTTO NEALS (b.1931 )

LOT 127 P.S. I Love You, 1999 bronze with green patina 14 x 6 x 8-1/2 inches (sculpture) 8 x 8 x 2-1/2 inches (base) signed and dated AP 2 Provenance: The collection of Faith Grobman, New Jersey. $9,000-12,000

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OTTO NEALS (b.1931 )

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LOT 76 MARION PERKINS (1908-1961) Mother and Child, 1953 hand carved ceramic stele 10-1/2 x 5 x 2 inches (figure) signed and dated Provenance: Lawrence A. Jones, an artist friend of Perkins in Chicago; thence by descent. $25,000-35,000 Marion Perkins was born in 1908 near Marche, Arkansas. When his parents died in 1916, he was sent to live with an aunt in Chicago. He attended Wendell Phillips High School in the Bronzeville area. Perkins quit school just before his senior year, married and started a family. His wife, Eva, was his muse and model for many of the feminine sculptures he created. Perkins owned a newspaper stand for many years and had aspirations to become a playwright for a short time.

Sculpting was something he chose as a hobby in early days, and he was largely self taught.

His work caught the eye of Margaret Burroughs, who was in his circle of friends, as well as Peter Pollack, gallery owner and administrator for the Illinois Art Project. The latter eventually became a patron and was instrumental in introducing him to Si Gordon. Gordon was an Illinois Art Project sculptor and teacher who gave Perkins his first formal training in sculpting at the black YMCA at 38th and Wabash. Perkins showed his work there for the first time in 1938 as a part of a student show.

In the 1940’s, Perkins grew rapidly as an artist, and by the end of the decade, his work demonstrated a clear personal aesthetic. His technique was conservative by many critic’s standards as abstraction was coming into vogue. Perkins process involved direct carving in stone or wood, a process that was favored by European Modernists like Constantin Brancusi, André Derain, and Modigliani. His politics also informed his work. Perkins was a committed Marxian activist and intellectual and “believed art could convey ideas effectively only through recognizable imagery.” Abstraction, in his views, was biased toward the elite, whereas figurative sculpture applied to all.

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Perkins gleaned much of the marble and sandstone he used for his sculptures from homes being wrecked in the Chicago area and worked in his backyard. In 1940, two of his sculptures were chosen to appear in the American Negro Exposition. His work appeared regularly in shows at the Art Institute of Chicago throughout the 1940’s and 50’s. In 1947 he received a Rosenwald Grant, and in 1948, he won 2nd prize at the 52nd Annual Chicago and Vicinity Exhibition held at the Art Institute of Chicago for his work, Ethiopia Awakening. He taught classes at the South Side Community Art Center and took a ceramics course at Hull House.

By the 1950’s, Perkins’ work took on a more political tone. One of his most important works, Man of Sorrow, not only received a prize from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1951 Chicago and Vicinity Exhibition but was also purchased for their collection. This work was notable for its portrayal of a black Christ - strong in its presence, yet clearly expressing his agony. In 1952, he won the Joseph Golde prize at the Art Institute of Chicago for Dying Soldier. His last work exhibited at the Art Institute in his lifetime was Unknown Political Prisoner in 1957. Perkins was quite direct with the political themes in his art and wrote about his convictions in the Marxist monthly, Masses & Mainstream. He had been planning a series of figures, a monument to Hiroshima called the Skywatchers series. Although he did execute a number of marble reliefs and works in plaster, the project remained in the “study” stage. Both Perkins and his wife died in 1961.

REF: Schulman, Daniel. “Marion Perkins: A Chicago Sculptor Rediscovered.” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, vol. 24, no. 2, 1999, p. 220-243+267-271

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Marion and Eva Perkins outsideof their home, Chicago, 1951

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LOT 10 PRENTICE HERMAN POLK (1898-1984) Lot of two works Young Boy on the Steps, c. 1930 silver gelatin print 10 x 8 inches signed Portrait of Phil Rowell, 1932 (printed c. 1980) silver gelatin print 10 x 8 inches Provenance: Private collection, Indian Head, MD. $3,000-4,000 Prentice Polk was born in Bessemer, Alabama. He studied photography at the Tuskegee Institute (1916-1920) with C.M. Battey and apprenticed with Fred Jensen in Chicago, Illinois (1922-1926).

Jensen charged Polk $2.50 an hour and Polk was making $5.00 a day. Polk went door to door soliciting commissions for pictures of the neighborhood kids. That was a rough job during the Chicago winters, so he returned to Tuskegee in 1927 and opened his first studio. A year later he was hired to the faculty at Tuskegee Institute, and from 1933-1938 was the Head of the Photography Department.

His work was exhibited at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Art Institute of Pittsburgh, Atlanta University, Birmingham Museum of Art, California Museum of African American Art, Emory University, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Tuskegee Institute, and the New York Museum of National History. Polk worked at Tuskegee from the late 1920s through the 1960s, capturing the significant cast of visitors to the school over the years on film. He also created more than 500 negatives of Dr. George Washington Carver at Tuskegee.

REF: P.H. Polk, Pearl Cleage Lomax (essay), 1980.

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PRENTICE HERMAN POLK (1898-1984)

LOT 117 Lot of two works George Washington Carver, 1938 (printed c. 1980) silver gelatin print 10 x 8 inches signed Man and Ox, 1932 (printed c. 1980) silver gelatin print 14 x 11 inches Provenance: Private collection, Indian Head, MD. $3,000-4,000

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PRENTICE HERMAN POLK (1898-1984)

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LOT 122 RAMON PRICE (1930-2000) Untitled, 1973 mixed media drawing on paper 14 x 11 inches signed and dated. $1,000-2,000 Ramon Price, the youngest half-brother of former Chicago mayor Harold Washington, was an accomplished artist, educator, and ambassador of African American art, whose efforts as chief curator of the DuSable Museum propelled the work of African Americans to an international level. Born in 1930 on Chicago’s South Side, Price attended DuSable High School. After graduating, he attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received a Master of Arts from Indiana University. His dedication to art education and history was inspired by Margaret Burroughs, his art teacher and lifelong friend.

Price returned to DuSable High School from 1960-73 to teach art. He served as art department chairman as well for three of those years. A painter and a sculptor, his works can be found in numerous collections. A bronze called Monument to Black Pride is part of the DuSable Museum’s permanent collection. He also taught art history at Indiana University and introduced a course in African and African-American art history at George Williams College in Downers Grove.

Price began volunteering at the DuSable Museum in the early 1970s. He was widely respected and through his efforts and contacts the museum’s stature grew. At the time of his death, Price had been preparing the museum for the Oct. 21 opening of Margaret Burroughs: A Lifetime in Art, an exhibit of works by the museum’s founder.

His sculpture, The Spirit of DuSable, 1977 is in the collection of the DuSable Museum of African American History, Chicago, IL.

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LOT 20 MAVIS PUSEY (1928-2019) Broken Construction at Dusk, c. 1970 lithograph 24 x 18-3/4 (image) 30 x 22-1/4 inches (sheet) signed, titled, and numbered 14/20 $4,500-6,500 Mavis Pusey was best known for her hard-edge, nonrepresentational images. This was very much her singular focus throughout her entire career.

Pusey was born in Jamaica in 1928. Her parents died when she was young. An aunt taught her to sew, and her first job was cutting fabric in a garment factory in Kingston, Jamaica. When she was 18, Pusey went to NY to study at the Traphagen School of Fashion. Due to financial constraints she began attending classes at the Art Students League instead, where she studied painting and printmaking over the next four years. One of her teachers was Will Barnet.

When her student visa expired, Pusey went to London, and then Paris, where her first solo exhibition was held at Galerie Louis Soulanges in 1968. When she returned to NY, her work Dejyqea (oil/canvas, 72 x 60 in.) was included in the important exhibition, Contemporary Black Artists in America, held in 1971 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. She worked with Robert Blackburn at his workshop for three years and was struck by the energy and constant movement of the city. Many of her prints from this period reflect a focused interest on the city’s construction. Pusey also taught at various institutions throughout her career including Rutgers University and the New School for Social Research. She moved to Virginia later in her career.

In 2017, her work was included in the exhibition, Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today. It was the first U.S. presentation dedicated exclusively to the formal and historical dialogue of abstraction by women artists of color. Her work will also be the subject of a major exhibition at the Birmingham Museum of Art, AL. Pusey’s work is found in the collections of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington D.C.; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; and the Birmingham Museum of Art, AL.

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“

I am inspired by the energy and the beat of the construction and demolition of these buildings. The tempo and movement mold into a synthesis and, for me, become another aesthetic of abstraction. I use color and texture to convey the tension that is the heartbeat of the city… I see the new construction as a rebirth, a catalyst for a new environment, and since the past must be a link to the future, in each of my works…. there is a circle to depict the never-ending continuation of natural order and all matter.

-Mavis Pusey

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LOT 146 GREGORY RIDLEY, jr (1925-2004) The Prophet, 1974-75 brass repoussé mounted on wood with stained glass wood embellishments 24 x 12 inches (copper), 35 x 24 inches (overall dimensions) signed and dated $2,000-3,000 Gregory Ridley was born in Smyrna, Georgia. In 1936, his family moved to Nashville. After a stint in the Navy, he enrolled at Fisk University, where he studied under Aaron Douglas, and the two became lifelong friends. Ridley also earned an undergraduate degree from Tennessee State University and a MFA from the University of Louisville.

Ridley accepted a teaching position at Alabama State University the same year he received his master’s degree (1951). Before retiring, he had taught at several southern universities as well as at City University New York.

Several works from Ridley’s Ngere Mask Series are displayed in the library at Fisk University.

Adhering to the philosophy of Alain Locke, by exploring African heritage and designs in contemporary African American art, Ridley executed both paintings and metal repoussé sculptures in this aesthetic.

“

Gregory Ridley (1925-2005), later a Fisk art professor himself, created metal relief sculptures and other works that show Douglas’s imprint, including ‘Nefertiti’ (1989, plate 24). This hand-hammered brass relief suggests the kind of rhythmic narrative that Douglas so often used , as well as figures in profile and inspiration from ancient Egypt. Often traveling to New York with Douglas in the summers, Ridley said that Douglas explained different periods of art sequentially in his lecture classes and admired Greek and Renaissance art, including the concept of “the golden section.”

Aaron Douglas African American Modernist, Susan Earle, 2007, p.45-46.

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GREGORY RIDLEY, jr (1925-2004)

LOT 92

Portrait of Frederick Douglass, 1972 copper repoussé 25 x 15-1/2 inches (image) signed $5,000-10,000

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GREGORY RIDLEY, jr (1925-2004)

LOT 41

Portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr, 1972 copper repoussé 25 x 15-1/2 inches (image) signed $5,000-10,000

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LOT 141 FAITH RINGGOLD (b. 1930) Born in the USA, 2012 color serigraph 30 x 22 inches published by Raven Fine Art Editions Curlee Raven Holton, master printer signed, titled, dated, and numbered 7/25 $2,000-3,000 Ringgold was born in Harlem and lived an entire life before beginning her life as an artist: she grew up and married a jazz musician, raised two children, divorced, and then finished her education at the City College of New York (BS, 1955 and MFA, 1959). She was the youngest daughter of Andrew and Willi Posey Jones, and they lived on West 140th Street. Faith was an excellent student and was also a very talented artist, albeit that was never explored formally. In fact, she had little encouragement from her school teachers. She had hoped to attend the High School of Music and Art in NYC, but she was never told about the process for applying. She ended up at George Washington High School, which did have high academic standards, but practiced institutional racism. Black students were never given the same opportunities as whites, even though sometimes the administration claimed it was strategic because the black kids would fail setting their sights too high. When she graduated she knew she wanted to study art, and hoped to go to Pratt, but because her older sister was already attending NYU, finances were strained.

She settled on CCNY. In 1961, she traveled to Europe for a summer with her daughters and her mother. She re-married (Burdette Ringgold) who was very encouraging regarding her art. In the 1960s, her work was politically charged. In the 1970s, she shifted in subject and medium choices. Her subject matter became contemporary black culture in America and the common person. She began using crafttype materials as a statement of feminism because many women were at home making crafts with their families. She began making masks and dolls. Her mother was the well known fashion designer, Willi Posey. The art of quilting and dressmaking was passed down through Ringgold’s family. She also began experimenting with performance art. (continued)

Photo: Jill Mead/ The Guardian

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FAITH RINGGOLD (b. 1930)

LOT 48 Freedom Flag #1: On Tuesday Morning, 2001 Acrylic and colored pencil on paper 8-1/2 x 10 inches (image) signed and dated 9/11/01 Provenance: The artist $8,000-10,000 In 1980, Ringgold collaborated with her mother to make her first quilt, Echoes of Harlem. She chose quilt-making because that practice was allowed to slaves, with their owners unaware that the practice developed and preserved African culture. Ringgold has used the flag symbolism throughout her career, sometimes making a very harsh statement. Perhaps taking all the images into consideration along with this image, we can assume the flag for Ringgold has always symbolized an idealized freedom—but whether people live up to it or not is another matter.

Perhaps the taking of the knee during the sporting events is not about disrespecting the flag but about being disappointed in people not living up to what it symbolizes. Freedom for ALL.

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FAITH RINGGOLD (b. 1930)

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LOT 51 JOHN ROZELLE (b. 1944) Cyanic, c. 1990 acrylic and fabric collage on canvas stretched over shaped boards 55 x 31 inches signed,titled, and dated verso Locus Gallery, St. Louis label verso $6000-8000 A native of St. Louis, Missouri, John Rozelle is a prolific painter and collagist. Rozelle attended Washington University, St. Louis, where he received a BFA and Fontbonne College, where he received a MFA. He served as an associate professor in the Drawing and Painting Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1990-2009.

Prior to joining the Art Institute faculty he taught drawing, design, painting, and sculpture at Fontbonne College. In 1989, Rozelle was artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

His work has been featured in exhibitions including I Remember...Thirty Years After the March on Washington: Images of the Civil Rights Movement 1963-1993, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., 1993; The Chemistry of Color: African American Artists in Philadelphia, 19701990, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, PA, 2005; Layers of Meaning: Collage and Abstraction in the Late 20th Century, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, PA, 2003; The Studio Museum in Harlem: 25 Years of African-American Art, NY, 1994; African American Abstraction: St. Louis Connections, MO, 2008.

In 1998, Rozelle was commissioned to install the Middle Passage Project at the Dred Scott Courthouse in St. Louis, MO. Museum collections include the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, PA; Margaret Harwell Museum, Spertus Museum of Jewish Studies, Chicago, IL; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; California Afro-American Museum, Los Angeles; and The Museum of African American Art, Los Angeles.

“

... As an artist, Rozelle seems to have zeroed in on this uncompromising balance, one which allows him to cite influences of all kinds without having to suppress personal and cultural history. His intricate collages, products of a fertile imagination and a skilled hand appeal to us not because they are from the mind of a black artist; they appeal to us solely on the grounds that they come from a gifted artist.

-Jeff Daniel, critic for the St Louis Post-Dispatch Photo: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 12, 1996, p. 22

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AUGUSTA SAVAGE (1892-1962) Augusta Savage was born in Green Cove Springs, Florida. She had a knack for sculpting even as a small child, making mud ducks and selling them at the local fair. She married at the age of 15, but her husband died the following year, after having a child together.

In 1915, her family moved to West Palm Beach, where she met a potter and acquired 25 pounds of clay. Her sculpture received much local attention, and through a series of events and support of teachers, Savage traveled to New York City in her quest to become a professional sculptor. She was admitted to the Cooper Union School, which was tuition-free, and finished her 4 year program in 3 years. She traveled abroad to France on scholarship and joined a group of black artists and intellectuals, including Hale Woodruff, Henry Tanner, and Countee Cullen.

By the early 1930s, Savage was living in Harlem and had created a school, Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts. In 1933, she founded The Vanguard, a group of Harlem intellectuals who met in her studio to discuss politics, art, and the condition of the African American.

A short film showing Savage at work: Augusta Savage African American Sculptor.

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AUGUSTA SAVAGE (1892-1962)

LOT 1 Child With Rabbit, 1928 bronze 40 x 16 x 11-1/4 inches Provenance: Private collection, Chicago, IL. This work is identical to the work that is in the collections of the South Side Community Art Center and the DuSable Museum of African American History. It is one of five cast. The statue in the collection of the DuSable was recently exhibited in Augusta Savage Renaissance Woman held at the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, Jacksonville, FL in 2018 and illustrated on pages 62-63.

The series of 5 bronzes were cast by Anthony Fortunado, a first generation Italian bronze maker at the studio of sculptor, Geraldine McCullough, on the South Side of Chicago (date unknown).

This was done under the supervision of Dr. Margaret Burroughs, from the original plaster model. Savage had visited the South Side Community Art Center several times for lectures and workshops, although it is unclear when Burroughs took possession of the plaster model to execute this project. $30,000-50,000

James L. Allen (1909-1977) Portrait of Philippa Duke Schuyler with the original plaster sculpture of Child With Rabbit, 1938 Fig 42, Augusta Savage: Renaissance Woman, 2018, Cummer Museum, p. 145.

Schuyler was a child prodigy and a noted composer and pianist by the age of four.

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AUGUSTA SAVAGE (1892-1962)

Savage at work on Lift Every Voice and Sing, 1935-45, unidentified photographer; Fig 6, Augusta Savage: Renaissance Woman, 2018, Cummer Museum.

The New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations, New York World’s Fair 1939-40 Records, 1654255

Augusta Savage presenting the president of the New York World’s Fair Corporation, Grover Whalen, with a miniature replica of her sculpture. The replica is a souvenir from the fair and Savage made a number of them to sell to support her art. Fig. 43 from Augusta Savage: Renaissance Woman, 2018, Cummer Museum, p. 146.

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AUGUSTA SAVAGE (1892-1962)

LOT 156 Lift Every Voice and Sing (The Harp), 1939 metal with silver/bronze patina 10-3/4 x 9-1/2 x 4 inches signed and inscribed $10,000-20,000

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LOT 19 JOHN T. SCOTT (1940-2007) Take the A Frame, 1984 kinetic sculpture painted brass, steel, wood on a flagstone base 27 x 34-1/4 x 7-3/4 inches (including base) signed and dated on base Collection of Julia E. Harris, Chicago; Acquired directly from the artist. $8,000-10,000

“

Scott was born in New Orleans, LA, and studied at Xavier University, New Orleans, (BFA, 1962) and then Michigan State University (MFA, 1965). He became a professor of art at his alma mater, Xavier, after completing graduate school.

John T. Scott’s abstract sculptures of painted steel and aluminum use tension—formal, technical, and conceptual—as the structuring principle behind works that, while derived from the uniqueness of the artist’s New Orleans-based African American cultural experience, convey universal resonance through the suggestion of ritual.

St James Guide to Black Artists, Nicole Gilpin, p. 474 The year both of these works were executed, 1984, Scott was invited by kinetic sculptor, George Rickey, to spend six weeks working at the Hand Hollow Foundation in East Chatham, New York.

Scott’s interest in moving sculpture was encouraged by Rickey, and he used the time to develop what he called a “kinetic vocabulary”. The previous year, Scott worked as the chief designer for the African American pavilion for the 1984 Louisiana World Exposition. (continued) Photo: Frank Methe

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JOHN T. SCOTT (1940-2007)

LOT 153 Shango’s Necklace, 1984 kinetic sculpture painted brass, steel, and wood on a flagstone base 19 x 10 x 5-3/4 inches (including base) signed and dated on base Collection of Julia E. Harris, Chicago; Acquired directly from the artist. $6,000-8,000 Yvonne Edwards-Tucker wrote in the International Review of African American Art (vol 6, no. 2; p. 42) about Scott’s work following his exposure to Rickey:

“

His newest works consist of intricately and exquisitely crafted wood and metal sculptures.

This series…carries a sacredly/serious multiple reference to a type of curved African stringed instrument originally fashioned by the hunter from his bow and arrow to assuage his remorse after the kill; and to the McComb Mississippi Delta folk music associated with the pounding rhythms of blues guitarist, Bo Diddley. These delicately balanced, open, linear sculptures, sensitive to the slightest changes in wind movements, are more obliquely abstract than his previous static sculpture—and yet, they remain strongly welded to the same roots, thematically.

The diddie bow, as it was called, was an African myth, which involved the hunter restringing the bow used to kill an animal and then playing a lyrical memorial to its spirit. It spoke to Scott formally as a visual tool and culturally as a reclamation of African history that also suggested the significance of music to the African American experience. (Gilpin, p. 474) Scott’s work is included in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art; Fisk University; Florida A&M University; Michigan State University; National Museum of American Art,; Loyola University; New Orleans Museum of Art; and the Tulane University Law School, among others.

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JOHN T. SCOTT (1940-2007)

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LOT 113 WILLIAM EDOUARD SCOTT (1884-1964) Forest Glade with Deer and Egret, c. 1930 oil on canvas 24 x 24 inches signed original frame Provenance: Williamay and Arthur Jackson, Chicago; acquired directly from the artist; Williamay Jackson Miller; by descent from her late husband; Phyllis L. Jones, Chicago; by descent from her aunt Williamay Jackson Miller. $4000-6000 Scott was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, one of two children of Caroline Russell and Edward Miles Scott. His introduction to formal art training came at the Manual High School in Indianapolis, where he studied with Otto Stark, one of the Hoosier Group artists. Encouraged by Stark, Scott went on to study at the Art Institute of Chicago, graduating in 1907 (although he continued classes for two additional years). As an upperclassman, Scott was awarded mural commissions at local schools and won the Magnus Brand Memorial Prize for three consecutive years, and these financial success provided him with the finances to travel abroad.

He traveled to Paris, 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. He was invited to exhibit at the Paris Salon in 1912 and 1913.

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. In 1927, Scott was awarded the Distinguished Achievement award from the Harmon Foundation, and four years later, 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; Du Sable Museum of African American History; New York Public Library; National Gallery of Art; Guggenheim Museum; Columbus Museum, GA; and Fisk University.

REF: A Shared Heritage, Art by Four African Americans, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Harriet Warkel and William Taylor, 1996.

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LOT 111 JOE SELBY (1893-1960) Portrait of the La’Mar, NY, 1950 oil on board 11-3/4 x 18-1/8 inches signed and dated $2,000-3,000 Joe Selby was born in Mobile, Alabama. He painted in Miami, Florida from the 1920s to the 1950s. As a boy he worked as a deck hand on tugboats; in 1905 at age twelve he was involved in a tragic accident when his leg was mangled in a line-handling accident. The accident ended his career as a deckhand, so Selby turned to painting ship portraits.

He painted all types of boats, but primarily yachts, approaching owners at the Miami city pier to ask if they wanted a portrait of their boat. If the owner agreed, Selby boarded the vessel to take notes and make measurements, then returned to a fire station near the dock where he would commence on the portrait. Early in his painting career (1920s-30s), Selby worked in Baltimore and painted boats on the Chesapeake Bay. Over the years his clients included General Motors magnates Alfred P. Sloan and Charles Kettering, Axel Wennegren, Arthur James Curtis, William B. Leeds, and members of the Morgan and Rockefeller families.

Selby lived much of his life in public housing in Miami's Overtown district before constructing his own home. His last dated painting was in 1959. His work is in the collection of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, St Michaels, MD. REF: Roger King Fine Art A short film about the work of Joe Selby.

Photo: Miami Herald, Feb 21, 1959, p. 29.

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LOT 108 THOMAS SILLS (1914-2000) Untitled (Abstract), c. 1950 oil and benzene on paperboard 22 x 30 inches signed $6,000-8,000 African American abstract expressionist artist Thomas Sills was born in Castalia, North Carolina in 1914 and began painting in 1952 at the age of 38. In 1957 he won the prestigious William and Noma Copley Foundation Award and held solo exhibitions at the Betty Parsons Gallery, NY; Paul Kantor Gallery, CA; and Bodley Gallery, NY. His work was also included in many group exhibitions including the Fourth Annual Artists Annual at Stable Gallery, NY. The Stable Gallery was the center of Abstract Expressionism in New York City in the 1950’s and home to artists Robert Indiana, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Hans Hofmann, Willem deKooning, Andy Warhol, and Lee Krasner.

Click here for a short video of Thomas Sills explaining his process in the film, Black Artists in America, v.3 which was produced in 1973 by Dr. Oakley N. Holmes.

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LOT 90 NELSON STEVENS (b. 1938) Primal Force, 2019 color serigraph 22 x 24 inches published by Raven Fine Art Editions; Curlee Raven Holton, master printer signed, titled, dated, and numbered 38/86 $2,000-3,000 When artist Nelson Stevens looks at a person he sees a broad palette of colors. That vision illuminates his portraits with a multi-hued, mosaic-like style. “I look at people and see the image in them,” said the professor emeritus of art and Afro-American studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst . “My art is anthems in praise of people.”

Steven’s career has spanned over 5 decades and a multitude of media and style, yet has remained consistently grounded in the black experience and his exuberant celebration of color.

One of the highlights of his career was getting involved with the Black Art Movement in Chicago in the 1960’s. He had recently completed his M.F.A. at Kent State University. He recalled during this period he had to convince his teachers and fellow classmates that Black art existed as its own entity. Prior to the movement, there was no literature to back up Black art as an absolute genre. Murals like the Wall of Respect, painted in 1967 by Stevens and other members of the Organization of Black American Culture helped change that. Stevens was also one of the founding members of AFRICOBRA, along with Wadsworth Jarrell and others, and exhibited widely with them.

Stevens’ work may be found in many private and public collections, including the Smithsonian, Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City , and the Art Institute of Chicago. His work is now being shown in the exhibition, Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, which originated at Tate Modern in London, UK and will be shown at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston through August 2020. He currently lives and works in Maryland.

Photo: The artist, seated middle front row with the members of Africobra, 1970.

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LOT 99 ALLEN STRINGFELLOW (1923-2004) Untitled (Still Life), 1997 mixed media collage with gold leaf 16 x 20 inches signed and dated Provenance: Nicole Gallery, Chicago, 2000 to private collection, Chicago, IL $1,000-2,000 Allen Stringfellow was born in Champaign, Illinois, the son of a nightclub singer and jazz guitarist.

As a teenager, he designed costumes for his father’s colleagues and painted religious murals for local churches.

He was an artist who came of age in the Depression, learning his craft at the University of Illinois and at the Art Institute in Milwaukee. He taught printmaking classes at the South Side Community Art Center. Stringfellow and William Carter, a WPA artist who became his best friend, veered away from social realism. “I wanted to be an artist without a clenched fist in the air,” he says. “I thought being a black artist would be labeling myself, and besides, I was never mad.”

Stringfellow painted pleasant watercolors, exhibiting them at art fairs on the South Side. To make ends meet, he silk-screened store displays for an ad agency. For five years in the 1960s, he ran his own gallery, Walls of Art, where he promoted the artwork of major African American artists, as well as himself.

Stringfellow went to work at Armand Lee in the late 1960s, 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, and is included in the permanent collections of Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Illinois (Champaign, IL), the Chicago Historical Society, DuSable Museum, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

REF: Website of Africanah.Org: Arena for Contemporary African, African-American and Caribbean Art. Text from Essie Green Gallery, New York.

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LOT 78 FREDDIE STYLES (b. 1944) Red Into Black Into Red, 2019 acrylic on cotton canvas 60 x 72 inches signed, titled, and dated verso $20,000-30,000 Styles is an Atlanta-based abstract painter, who credits his rural upbringing as influential on his work. He believes a rural lifestyle creates a deep connection—a sensitivity-- between the land and the people owing their existence to it. He graduated from Morris Brown College in Atlanta, and served as artist-in-residence at several institutions, including Clark Atlanta University and Spelman College.

He has exhibited at the High Museum, Atlanta; Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah; City Gallery East, Atlanta; African American Abstraction, American Embassies in Sierra Leone, Trinidad & Tobago and South Africa; Tradition Redefined, The Larry and Brenda Thompson Collection, Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA, 2011; and the Tubman Museum, Macon, GA. In 1997, he was commissioned to create an ad for Absolut Vodka, and in 2001, he was awarded a King Baudouin Foundation Cultural Exchange Program grant to work and study in Belgium.

Styles’ work is included in the following collections: High Museum; Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, Atlanta; MOCA/GA, Atlanta; Spelman College Museum of Art; Clark Atlanta University Collection; Saint Louis Art Museum; Paul R. Jones Collection, University of Delaware; University of Alabama; and Absolut Vodka, Sweden.

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LOT 81 ANN TANKSLEY (B. 1934) Untitled, 1972 oil on canvas 11 x 14 inches signed and dated 72 Provenance: The collection of Faith Grobman, New Jersey. $2,000-4,000 Born Ann Graves in the Homewood community of Pittsburgh, Ann became interested in art at an early age. She graduated from South Hills High School in 1952 and went on to study at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and earn a BFA. She married fellow Homewood native, John Tanksley and they moved to Brooklyn, NY. Tanksley began raising her family before returning to study at the Art Students League, the New School for Social Research (Greenwich Village), and also at Bob Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop.

Tanksley was an early member of Where We At: Black Women Artists, Inc., a women’s art collective based in New York. She exhibited at the 1972 show, Cookin' and Smokin', at the Weusi-Nyumba Ya Sanaa Gallery in Harlem. “She uses a glazing technique incorporated with charcoal lines, which enhances a sense of spontaneity and humor.” (Gumbo Ya Ya: Anthology of Contemporary African-American Women Artists, King-Hammond, 1995) Her work is included in the collections of the Johnson Publishing Company (dispersed), Studio Museum in Harlem, National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Hewitt Collection, among others.

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LOT 84 DOX THRASH (1893-1965) Construction Workers, Philadelphia, c. 1945 oil on board 20 x 24 inches Provenance: Sioma Glaser, composer and nephew of Issac Bashevis Singer. This work was originally with two other oils of similar scenes, one of which had a type-written label identifying the artist, Dox Thrash.

(That work sold Sept 15, 2019 at Treadway Auctions, lot 303). $1,000-2,000 Thrash was born in a former slave cabin in Griffin, Georgia in 1892. He studied art through correspondence school until 1909 when he moved to Chicago. There, he began taking part time classes at the Art Institute and also studied privately with William E. Scott. He resumed full time studies after serving in World War I. Thrash lived an itinerant lifestyle in Boston, Connecticut, and New York, working odd jobs and painting. Eventually, in 1926, he settled in Philadelphia where he studied at the Philadelphia Sketch Club with Earl Hortor. Thrash began experimenting with the aquatint process in the early 1930’s and is credited with later inventing the process of carborundum printing, known as cartograph, with fellow students Hugh Mesibov and Michael Gallagher. He made his debut as an artist in 1931 at the Catherine Street YWCA in Philadelphia, which featured an exhibition of his oil and watercolor paintings. In 1933, his first exhibition of prints was held at the same location.

In 1937, Dox Thrash joined the Federal Arts Project as a printmaker and worked for Philadelphia’s Fine Print Workshop Division producing portraits and urban and rural scenes related to AfricanAmerican life. During World War II, he created a series of prints with a patriotic focus. He remained a prominent artist in Philadelphia until his death in 1965. Thrash devoted a great deal of his artistic career to printmaking, and his innovative work in that medium is significant, but he did produce both watercolors and oil paintings throughout his life, and as seen in this image, the results were highly successful.

In 2002, the Pennsylvania Art Museum presented a retrospective of his work entitled, Dox Thrash: An African-American Master Printmaker Rediscovered. It featured over 100 of his drawings, watercolors, and prints.

Photo: www.black-artists-in-the-museum.com (in partnership with the Baltimore Museum of Art)

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JAMES VAN DERZEE (1886-1983) James Van Derzee was a Harlem photographer whose studio approach contrasted the photojournalistic style of Gordon Parks and the social realism of Aaron Siskind. His success was largely based on his portraits of middle-class black families in Harlem, which sought to convey a sense of dignity and self assurance in the sitter. It has been said that the successful recipe for a Van Derzee image was equal part authentic pride of the sitter and equal part carefully constructed artifice— courtesy of the photographer.

In 1924, Van Derzee was commissioned as the official photographer of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). It was Van Derzee’s responsibility to not simply document the activities of Garvey and the movement, but portray them in a strictly positive light.

Van Derzee executed thousands of photographs of meetings and parades, some of which were made into a calendar.

His work is found in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Williams College Museum of Art, MA; and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, among others.

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LOT 33 Eighteen photographs (portfolio) 18 mounted silver and sepia-toned silver prints, 1905-1938.

Published in 1974.

Each approximately 7-1/4 x 9-1/2 inches, loose as issued.

Printed by Richard Benson, New York. Published by Graphics International Ltd., Washington, DC in 1974; Harry Lunn, Jr. Provenance: The Anthony and Davida Artis Collection of African-American Fine Art, Flint, MI $25,000-35,000

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JAMES VAN DERZEE (1886-1983)

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JAMES VAN DERZEE (1886-1983)

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JAMES VAN DERZEE (1886-1983)

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JAMES VAN DERZEE (1886-1983)

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LOT 31 KARA WALKER (b. 1969) Lift, 1997 etching and white ink on black wove paper 6-9/16 x 5-7/8 inches (plate size) 12-1/8 x 12-1/4 inches (sheet) Printed by Landfall Press, Inc. Santa Fe, NM (formerly Chicago) Unique proof $6,000-8,000 Walker was born in California, but raised in Atlanta from the age of 13. She studied at the Atlanta College of Art (BFA, 1991) and the Rhode Island School of Art (MFA, 1994). Her work primarily addresses race, gender, and sexuality in graphic terms. She is well-known for her silhouette cutouts, paintings, prints, installations, in black and white contrast.

In 2007, the Walker Art Center presented the first full-scale museum survey of her work, Kara Walker: My Complement, My Oppressor, My Enemy, My Love. Her work is included in numerous museum permanent collections.

Works from this series may also be found in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art (Camptown, 1997) and the Baltimore Museum of Art (Drumstick). BAA would like to thank Scott Briscoe at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., NYC (the artist’s representative gallery) for his kind assistance in describing this work.

Photo: Ari Marcopoulos/www.theguardian.com

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LOT 22 STEVE WALKER (b. 1945) The Reader, 1994 acrylic on masonite 14 x 10 inches signed titled, dated October 94, and artist’s address verso Provenance: Susan Woodson Gallery, Chicago,1995 $2,000-3,000 Steve Walker worked in Chicago and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. He was a popular artist at the South Side Community Art Center. His work was influenced by Norman Rockwell.

Walker worked as a commercial graphic artist for Walgreen’s (which is headquartered in the north suburbs of Chicago) until his retirement. His work was included in the collection of the Johnson Publishing Company, Chicago.

Photo: Clay Works Ring Some Bells at Du Sable Fair, Margaret Carroll, Chicago Tribune, July 19, 1982, p. 44. Phil Greer and Bill Hogan (photos).

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LOT 61 WILLIAM “BILL” WALKER (1927-2011) Free Now, 1971 acrylic on canvas 44 x 38 inches signed and dated $10,000-15,000

“

In August of 1967, on the southeast corner of 43rd and Langley Streets, Chicago, Illinois, a group of African American artists came together to paint the landmark mural that sparked a people’s art movement. William “Bill” Walker was instrumental in the creation of the Wall of Respect. The purpose of the project was to “honor our Black heroes and to beautify our community.” It soon became, in the words of fellow artist Jeff Donaldson, An instantaneous shrine to Black creativity, a rallying point for revolutionary rhetoric and calls to action, and a national symbol of the heroic Black struggle for liberation in America.

Cities across American followed suit with murals of their own. Bill Walker continued to paint murals in the city of Chicago, as he had painted them before 1967, solidifying his role as father of the community mural movement - capturing the “human side of street life in the city.”

Bill Walker was born in 1927 in Birmingham, Alabama. An only child, he was initially raised by his grandmother in a desperately poor ghetto of “bleak little shacks” with outhouses known as Alley B. In 1938, he was sent north to Chicago to join his mother who worked as a seamstress and hairdresser. They lived in a variety of places in the Washington Park area and he eventually attended Englewood High School. Walker was drafted in WWII and re-enlisted to receive college tuition under the GI Bill. He was a mail clerk, then an MP with the 99th Pursuit Squadron, the all black command under which the Tuskegee Airmen fought. In 1947, he painted his first murals while in the military. While stationed in Columbus, Ohio he became friends with Samella Lewis. He often stayed with her family and assisted her on a few commissions.

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In 1949 he enrolled in the Columbus Gallery School of Arts. He began studying commercial art and later switched to a concentration in fine art. Walker won the school’s 47th Annual Group Exhibition “Best of Show” award in 1952. He was the first African-American to do so. Walker credits Joseph Canzani with encouraging his interest in mural painting. At school he studied the early Renaissance fresco painters. It wasn’t until after his graduation that he learned about the Mexican muralists - Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, and Jose Clemente Orozco. He was particularly impressed with the way they incorporated structural elements in to their compositions.

Walker also cited Jacob Lawrence, Charles White, and William McBride as important influences.

After graduation, Walker headed to Nashville and Memphis where he painted murals for a Baptist church, a local Elks club, and the Flamingo Club, a nightclub near Beale Street. While researching and preparing to complete another mural of a plantation scene, he had an important epiphany. He realized he needed to create art that spoke for those who had been marginalized. Walker returned to Chicago and worked as a decorative painter for a variety of north-side interior designer firms.

By the mid 1960s, Walker was formulating an idea for a mural in the area near 43rd and Langley which never came to fruition. However in May of 1967, the Organization of Black American Culture was formed and the opportunity again arose. OBAC was cofounded by artist Jeff Donaldson, sociologist Gerald McWorter, and Hoyt Fuller, editor of Negro Digest, and was dedicated to visual art, music, writing, dance, and theater. Walker floated the idea of a mural at the location. The group couldn’t just simply paint a mural and leave it at that. Walker knew the neighborhood well and secured permission from business owners, community leaders, and street gangs. The residents were a big part of the process as well. Jeff Donaldson and Eliot Hunter, Wadsworth Jarrell, Barbara Hogu-Jones, Caroline Lawrence, Norman Parish, Edward Christmas, Myrna Weaver and many others contributed sections to the wall. Walker was responsible for the section on religious leaders. Walker had originally painted the portraits of Black Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad, Nat Turner, and Wyatt Walker, a New York minister and civil rights activist, but when threatened with a lawsuit by Muhammad, who did not want to be pictured on the same wall as Malcolm X, he erased the section and replaced it with a composition of Nat Turner.

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The members of the OBAC eventually drifted apart- some, Donaldson, Jarrell, Jones, and Lawrence formed AfriCobra- and Walker, who remained in the neighborhood, came to be the “guardian of the wall.” As a result of the impact the Wall of Respect had in Chicago, similar walls were created in cities across the country. Walker worked on the Wall of Dignity in Detroit and the Wall of Truth, which was located across the street from the Wall of Respect. He co-founded the Chicago Mural Group (now known as the Chicago Public Art Group) with John Pitman Weber and Eugene Eda and completed more than 30 murals over the next four decades in working-class Chicago neighborhoods. In 1975, he formed his own mural group known as International Walls, Inc. Walker turned increasingly to studio art in the late 70’s. Chicago State University held the exhibition, Images of Conscience: The Art of Bill Walker in 1984. The exhibit consisted of 44 paintings and drawings in three series: For Blacks Only; Red, White, and Blue, I Love You; and Reaganomics. The show was not without controversy as the images presented were not pretty, but dark representations of urban black neighborhoods. The exhibition traveled to the Vaughn Cultural Center, St. Louis and the Paul Robeson Cultural Center, Pennsylvania State University.

Most recently, Walker’s work was presented in the exhibition Bill Walker: Urban Griot, held at the Hyde Park Art Center, November 2017 - April 2018.

“

The artist-to-people communication is the kind of relationship that would place the artist and his work in a position of respect, pride, and dignity—all of which he should have. These views are not based on the feelings of an idealist hoping for something that cannot be or believing in something he has never experienced. They are founded on the grounds of experience.

Experience of talking with people in a community during the time that the art project is in progress; of discussing the conditions of their problems and the world and trying to realize how art can become more relevant to the people of the world.

-Bill Walker, Black Artists on Art, v. 2, Lewis/Waddy, 1971

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LAURA WHEELER WARING (1887-1948)

Fig. 20, from the book, African American Artists 1880-1987: Selections From the Evans-Tibbs Collection, Smithsonian Institution, 1989; p. 48.

Addison Scurlock (1883-1964) Portrait of Madame Evanti (Lillian Tibbs), 1934 cat. 29 Still Life is seen in the upper left corner of the image.

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LOT 21

Still Life, 1928 oil on canvas 41-1/2 x 31-1/2 inches signed and dated original frame Literature: African American Artists 1880-1987: Selections From the Evans-Tibbs Collection, Smithsonian Institution, 1989; p. 47 $70,000-90,000

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LAURA WHEELER WARING (1887-1948)

Laura Wheeler Waring was born in Hartford, Connecticut to the Reverend Robert F. Wheeler and Mary (Freeman) Wheeler. Waring (née Wheeler) began painting watercolors in her early teens and won several awards before graduating from the Hartford Public High School in 1906 and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, in 1914.

In 1924, she traveled to Paris with novelist Jesse Redmon Fauset and furthered her studies at L’Academie de la Grande Chaumiere under Botel de Monvel, Robert Henri, and Delacluse. At this time, she began to gain recognition among an emerging group of African American artists. Henry Ossawa Tanner introduced her to artists Palmer Hayden, Malvin Gray Johnson, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Augusta Savage, and Hale Woodruff as well as Langston Hughes and Roland Hayes. In 1927, she married Walter E. Waring, a professor at Lincoln University, an all-black college located in Jefferson City, MO. Waring was accomplished in portraits, landscapes and still life painting. In 1927, she won the Harmon Foundation gold prize for her portrait Anne Washington Derry. She executed portraits of several prominent African Americans, including Marian Anderson and W.E.B. Du Bois - all of which are in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C. Waring’s work in figure painting was singled out once again by the Harmon Foundation in 1944, when eight of her portraits were shown in the exhibit, Portraits of Outstanding American Citizens of Negro Origin.

In addition to fine art, Waring also produced illustrations for the children’s books published by Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, Inc., The Brownies Book, and for the cover of The Crisis. She also taught at Cheyney State Teachers College, PA, where she became director of the art department until 1945.

Her work may be found in the collections of Howard University, Washington D.C.; Evan-Tibbs Gallery, Washington D.C.; Barnett-Aden Collection, Florida; and Cheyney State University, PA.

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LAURA WHEELER WARING (1887-1948)

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LOT 46 CHERYL WARRICK (b. 1956) Untitled, 1990 acrylic on canvas 32-1/4 x 32 inches signed and dated verso Provenance: Collection of Julia E. Harris, Chicago; Acquired directly from the artist. $3,000- 5000 Warrick is a Boston-based abstract painter. She was born in St Albans, NY and studied at the Massachusetts College of Art (BFA). She has exhibited extensively in Boston area galleries and at the Museum of Fine Art Boston. Her work is included in many public and corporate collections including: the Boston Public Library; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Rhode Island School of Design; Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA, Harpo Productions; Museum of Art, Providence; and Lucent Technologies, NY.

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CHERYL WARRICK (b. 1956)

LOT 147 Descrete, 1987 acrylic on canvas 14 x 11 inches signed, titled, and dated verso Provenance: Collection of Julia E. Harris, Chicago; Acquired directly from the artist. $3,000- 5000

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LOT 131 CHARLES WHITE (1918-1979) Abide, 1979 colored etching 9 x 11-3/4 inches (image) 21-3/4 x 22 inches (sheet) signed with estate stamp, Hand Graphics, Santa Fe, initialed in the plate, and numbered 77/80 Heritage Gallery, Los Angeles label verso $2,000-3,000 Born in 1918 in Chicago, Charles White was initially an introverted child, preferring to retreat into a world of reading and drawing. As he grew older, he became more outspoken, influenced by Alain Locke’s The New Negro. As a student at Englewood High School, alongside other future notables such as Margaret Burroughs, Eldzier Cortor, and Charles Sebree, he often clashed with his teachers over their whitewashing of historical subjects. He joined George Neal’s Art Crafts Guild and gathered at the studio of Morris Topchevsky, where he was able to further explore his views of art, politics, and the role of the African American in society.

White graduated high school in 1937 and went on to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was subsequently hired by the Illinois Art Project in the easel division, but transferred to the mural division, where he worked with Edward Millman and Mitchell Siporin. His first major mural, Five Great American Negroes, was completed in 1940. His work was also exhibited at the American Negro Exposition, winning several awards.

White married Elizabeth Catlett in 1941 after meeting her at the South Side Community Art Center, and the pair moved to New Orleans where they both taught at Dillard University. Two consecutive Rosenwald scholarships allowed him to study lithography at the Art Student’s League of New York with Harry Sternberg, as well as travel the Southern United States. He used this opportunity to observe and paint black farmers and laborers for his mural, The Contribution of the Negro to the Democracy of America. (continued)

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CHARLES WHITE (1918-1979)

LOT 30 Standing Man, 1934 watercolor on cream wove paper 10 x 8 inches signed Heritage Gallery, Los Angeles label verso $5,000-7,000

LOT 71 Portrait of a Man in a Green Jacket, 1934 watercolor on cream wove paper 7-1/4 x 9-1/2 inches Heritage Gallery, Los Angeles label verso $5,000-7,000

Catlett and White relocated to Mexico where they both became involved with the Taller Grafica de Popular. After their divorce, White returned to New York City. His work retained a figurative style which stood in stark contrast to the burgeoning abstract movement occurring at the time. He used drawings, linocuts, and woodcuts to celebrate the historical figures who resisted slavery, as well as ordinary African Americans struggling amid great social injustice in a post-slavery America.

Despite their small size, these works conveyed the power of a mural.

In New York in the 1940s and early 1950s, White showed his work at the progressive ACA Gallery and was a prominent member of African American and leftist artist communities. White moved to Southern California in 1956, and his career flourished as he embraced drawing and printmaking more fully, pushing at the boundaries of his media while continuing to engage with civil rights and equality. Despite his rejection of the prevailing style of Abstract Expressionism and ongoing use of an expressive figuration, he found critical acclaim in the United States and abroad.

White was the second African American to be inducted into the National Academy of Art and Design in 1975. Charles White: A Retrospective was held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018.

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

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CHARLES WHITE (1918-1979)

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CHARLES WHITE (1918-1979)

LOT 112 Life Drawing #8, c. 1965 charcoal on paper 45-1/2 x 36 inches stamped signature Provenance: The collection of Dalton and Cleo Trumbo, Los Angeles, CA to private collection, NY $60,000-80,000 In 1965, White began teaching at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, and served as Chairman of the Drawing Department until 1979. He was the first African American faculty member.

Kerry James Marshall, in an interview for the exhibition, Charles White: Life Model (parallel exhibit to the retrospective, which showed at the Charles White Elementary School—former campus of the Otis Art Institute, 2019) said: “Life drawing was a specialty at Otis and Charles White was the effective dean of figure drawing. His classes were the most popular, and always full to capacity.

Like me, all of the black students who matriculated through Otis were primarily because of White.”

(Other relevant students were David Hammons and Timothy Washington) Marshall described the “special Otis paper” used by White in his Life drawing class. “It was large and you got it at McManus and Morgan” (McManus and Morgan was a specialty paper store in downtown LA on 7th street).

Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Degas all executed “basic” line drawings which were meant as complete ideas as well as preliminary sketches in advance of a more ambitious composition (drawing or painting). White himself made the point in an interview when asked about a statement Eric Ray had made about White’s preference for drawings:

“

...drawing is a particularly exciting medium for me. I just like the feel of it. My whole body is into it when I draw, and I think black and white is as effective a medium [as any]. I don’t know about this preciousness—that oil painting has been looked upon as a very precious medium, therefore it’s the final kind of test. I think, particularly an artist like Käthe Kollwitz proved a point. If Daumier had never painted a picture in his life, he still would have been remembered as a great, great artist. Or Goya. His etchings alone would put him up in a class of greatness.

Reproduced in Charles White, Let Light Enter, catalog for the exhibition at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, January10-March 7, 2009, p. 7.

Perhaps White was speaking more specifically about the perceived painting versus drawing hierarchy, but the fact remains that great artists have always found an important purpose for drawings in their body of work, whether it was a personal shorthand to convey the essence of the idea, a tool for teaching, or simply a preferred medium. As White said in the same interview: “Whatever I’m working with at the moment I prefer.”

Click here for a short video about Charles White and his students from LACMA.

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CHARLES WHITE (1918-1979)

“

Drawing is the probity of art J.A.D. Ingres, as quoted by James A. Porter in Images of Dignity: The Drawings of Charles White.

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CHARLES WHITE (1918-1979)

LOT 101 Vision, 1973 limited edition sterling silver plate produced by Heritage Gallery, mounted and framed taken from an etching of the same name executed in 1968 7-3/4 diameter signed, dated, and numbered 57/100 A similar example illustrated in A Century of African American Art, The Paul R. Jones Collection, Amalia K. Amaki, University of Delaware, 2006, p. 177. $3,500-5,500

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CHARLES WHITE (1918-1979)

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LOT 65 STANLEY WHITNEY (b. 1946) Untitled (Abstract), 1985 monoprint on Rives Paper (unique) 30-1/4 x 44-1/2 inches signed and dated Provenance: Collection of Julia E. Harris, Chicago; Acquired directly from the artist. $8,000-10,000 Whitney grew up in Bryn Mawr, PA. Both his parents were college-educated: his father went to Howard and his mother, Temple. His father was in real estate, but also ran a series of small businesses trying to make ends meet. Stanley had been interested in art since as long as he can remember, although he initially thought he would be a commercial artist, because that was more realistic, but when the time came to actually make a painting, he would consistently use every color on the palette with reckless abandon. He wanted to get out of Philadelphia, so after high school he discovered a college in Columbus, Ohio that offered a fairly open-ended art program affiliated with the Columbus Museum of Art (1964). In 1966, recruiters from the Kansas City Art Institute visited his school, so he transferred. He was inspired when he saw the work of Morris Louis, believing that his art had been all about the past previously, but Louis’ work was about the future, and that clicked with the young Whitney.

He bounced around between Kansas City, the Studio School in New York, and eventually Yale University, where he completed his MFA. His base had always been New York, and if he left for any reason, he always returned. He even took a job teaching at Tyler University in Philadelphia— with the caveat that he must actually live in New York. That was in 1973, when he got a loft on Cooper Square in New York, and has worked there ever since.

Whitney has had solo exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX, and his work is included in the collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum (KC), Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Yale University Art Gallery.

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STANLEY WHITNEY (b. 1946)

LOT 137 Untitled (Abstract), 1985 monoprint on Rives paper (unique) 30 x 44-3/4 inches signed $8,000-10,000

“

I went to a print shop with Bob Blackburn, where my future wife and girlfriend at the time, Marina Adams, was working. She was also going to Columbia University for her MFA in painting. It was through her that I got invited to do these monoprints. And when I did those, my hand really showed up. There was more gesture and mark making, and the color layered differently. The monoprints felt more alive and had more immediacy than those acrylic paintings I was doing.

Bomb Oral History Project: Stanley Whitney by Alteronce Gumby. (April 21, 2015)

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STANLEY WHITNEY (b. 1946)

LOT 3 Untitled (Abstract), 1985 black India ink on mylar 36-1/8 x 42-1/2 inches signed and dated Provenance: Collection of Julia E. Harris, Chicago; Acquired directly from the artist. $20,000-40,000

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I used to look at that small Van Gogh drawing in sepia ink in the Guggenheim; I always loved how rich and colorful it was, even though it was black and white, sepia. You know, it was a different mark-making technique. My paintings then were so indirect that I wanted something that would be real direct.

I chose pen and ink, not charcoal, because I wanted to put a mark down and deal with it. I couldn’t erase it.

So that really was my big goal. I wanted to open the work up—not relying on the color, but on structure. I thought that Color Field artists were weak with their structure.

I worked on Mylar with black ink, then they photographed them and made silkscreens out of them.

I worked on this type of Mylar that was not totally transparent. I used pen and ink on that, with a brush. So that was a shift—going from pen and ink to a brush and ink.

Bomb Oral History Project: Stanley Whitney by Alteronce Gumby. (April 21, 2015)

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STANLEY WHITNEY (b. 1946)

LOT 110 Untitled (Abstract), 1985 black India ink on mylar 36 x 40-3/4 inches signed and dated Provenance: Collection of Julia E. Harris, Chicago; Acquired directly from the artist. $10,000-20,000

Whitney in his studio.

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LOT 87 WILLIAM T. WILLIAMS (b. 1942) Bee’s Quest, 2008 serigraph 24 x 18 inches (image) 30 x 22 inches (sheet) signed, titled, dated, and numbered 17/25 $2,000-3,000 Williams was born in Cross Creek, North Carolina. He received his BFA from the Pratt Institute in 1966, and his MFA from Yale in 1968. With only one year out of graduate school, the Museum of Modern Art acquired one of his works. Williams and Mel Edwards began the artist-in-residence program at the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 1975, he was invited by Bob Blackburn to work with the Printmaking Workshop in New York. For the next 22 years, the two collaborated to produce many images. In 2005, Williams was invited to create a print at the Brandywine Workshop in Philadelphia, and in 2006, he served as an artist-in-residence at Lafayette College and the Experimental Printmaking Institute, working with master printmaker, Curlee Raven Holton (this image was executed there).

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LOT 135 JOHN WILSON (1922-2015) Five Men, 2004 offset lithograph 15 x 24-3/4 inches (image) 17-1/2 x 27 inches (sheet) signed, titled, dated, and numbered 26/56 $3,000-5,000 Wilson was a Boston painter, sculptor and printmaker. He was influenced by the Mexican muralists, in terms of both style and subject matter, and addressed issues of racism and oppression of African American people in his art. He grew up in Roxbury and took art classes at Roxbury Memorial High School before continuing his education at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston). He also studied in Paris with Fernand Leger. Upon his return to the U.S., he married Julie Kowitch, a teacher, and traveled to Mexico. He later taught at Pratt University in New York, and Boston University.

Wilson’s bronze sculpture of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., is on permanent display at the Capitol Rotunda in Washington , D.C.

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LOT 26 HALE WOODRUFF (1900-1980) Going Home, 1935/1981 linocut 10 x 8 inches (image) 15 x 11 inches (sheet) signed and dated 35 by the estate numbered 4/10 This posthumous print was taken from the original block by the artist’s widow, Theresa A. Woodruff. Edition of 10. Printed at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop.

Provenance: Gwen Robinson Keita Gallery, Chicago, 1997 1,000-2,000 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.

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.

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 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 in his lifetime, 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.

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