Sale 2528 - African-American Fine Art, January 30, 2020

49 c OMAR LAMA Fertility Doll . Watercolor and ink on illustration board, circa 1970. 965x508 mm; 38x20 inches. Signed in ink, lower left recto. Titled in ink, verso. Provenance: the Johnson Publishing Company, Inc., Chicago. A Chicago native, Omar Lama was an early and active member of the artist collective AfriCOBRA - showing in its first two exhibitions, the 1969 AfriCOBRA: Ten in Search of a Nation and the 1970 AfriCOBRA II exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Lama designed this artwork for the cover of the seminal publication of the Black Arts Movement, the 1974 The Black Book , a collection of writings and illustrations edited by Toni Morrison. Lama developed his direct, graphic art with compositions of line and geometric abstraction. Lama studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago State University, and the South Community Art Center in Chicago. His work was recently included in Africobra and Beyond . DuSable Museum of African American History, Chicago, July 28 - September 29, 2013, and AfriCOBRA: Messages to the People , Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, November 27, 2018 - March 24, 2019. [4,000/6,000]