Godfrey, who co-organized Tate’s “Soul of a Nation” exhibition. “This has meant looking beyond figures such as Pollock, Rothko, Warhol and Lichtenstein toward African-American artists working in the same period,” added Mr. Driven by seismic shifts in cultural politics, scholars and curators have challenged the fixity of the West’s artistic canon, rehabilitating neglected talent from a range of communities and cultures.
The auction market is belatedly reflecting re-evaluations that have been going on for some time in the museum world. Hendricks, whose art had been foregrounded in last year’s “ Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power” show at Tate Modern in London. A few lots later, a 1974 full-length portrait “Brenda P” raised a new auction benchmark of $2.2 million for Barkley L. This set a salesroom high for the artist of $3.4 million. Sotheby’s Studio Museum fund-raising lots also included “Bush Babies,” a 2017 work by the admired but rarely available Njideka Akunyili Crosby, whose works usually sell to museums. In the same announcement, the Broad said it had also bought a new painting by Mr. Bradford’s 12-foot-wide 2007 abstract, “Helter Skelter I,” which sold in March at Phillips for $12 million - the previous auction high for a living African-American artist. Last week, the Broad museum in Los Angeles announced that it had been the purchaser of Mr. “Speak, Birdman,” a freshly completed mixed-media abstract by Mark Bradford, was pushed by as many as a dozen bidders to $6.8 million, more than double the presale estimate. Sotheby’s Wednesday evening contemporary sale began with five works by leading African-American artists sold to raise money for a new building at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Levin suggested, there were plenty of other results last week that suggested a surge in demand for African-American art. “It also signaled an intensification of activity among African-American collectors,” Mr. “That and other results signaled that finally African-American artists are regarded as having the same historical value and price points as their peers,” said Todd Levin, a private dealer and adviser based in New York, who last year curated the exhibition “ Power,” devoted to African-American female artists, at Sprüth Magers in Los Angeles. Diddy.įor many, this sale was by far the most significant moment in the latest biannual series of auctions of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art in New York.
The painting was bought by the Grammy Award-winning rapper and music producer, Sean Combs, better known by his former stage names Puff Daddy and P. A wryly updated “fête champêtre,” showing black suburbanites relaxing in a Chicago park, had just set an auction high for any work by a living African-American artist. Barker knocked the lot down to one of three telephone bidders for $21.1 million with fees. LONDON - “I don’t need to tell you, sir, how great this is,” said Sotheby’s auctioneer Oliver Barker last Wednesday evening, leaning over his rostrum and trying to coax another eight-figure bid out of the New York dealer David Zwirner for Kerry James Marshall’s 1997 masterwork, “Past Times.”