Auction Highlights: African American Art — April 4, 2024
This season’s African American Art auction features an array of Harlem Renaissance pieces, post-war figurative art, and contemporary art.
This season’s African American Art auction features an array of Harlem Renaissance pieces, post-war figurative art, and contemporary art.
Among the highlights will be an 1836 autograph book with inscriptions by noted early African-American orators Moses Roper and Peter Williams. The large section on slavery and abolition will include several runaway broadsides and a miniature printing of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation (the only one produced in pamphlet form) intended for soldiers to distribute among the freedmen in the south. Military papers include material written by African-American soldiers, including a Civil War letter and a Spanish-American War diary.
Thanksgiving weekend was tinged with grief this year as the art world mourned the loss of painter and print-maker Eldzier Cortor. Born in Richmond, Virginia in 1916, his family moved…