Sale 2390 - The Art Collection of Maya Angelou, September 15, 2015

As I began writing this intro for Swann’s catalog, I realized that what I wanted to write was less about the pieces of art to be auctioned than about my mother and her relationship to art in general and what she taught me specifically. During my childhood, my mother always had prints from a wide range of artists hanging on our walls. Her tastes were eclectic, from Catlett, Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Charles White and Toulouse-Lautrec to Samella Lewis, Picasso, Wyeth and Degas. It was her belief that the presence of art and creativity in a person’s daily life broadened his or her perspective of the world around them. Truthfully, I spent a considerable part of my childhood, albeit unsuccessfully, trying to ignore the things my mother was teaching me. Until I became a teenager the art on our walls was irrelevant to me. My mother and I moved to New York City in 1958 when I was thirteen or fourteen. We found a three bedroom flat in a brownstone in the Crown Heights District of Brooklyn. My mother was still singing in nightclubs and giving private dance lessons at the time, so the third bedroom served as her music room and dance studio. When my mother had a singing gig, which normally lasted six weeks to two and half months, we lived well; while she was inbetween jobs we lived on a tight budget. About a year after we moved to New York my mother began working for Dr. Martin Luther King, heading the New York office of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC.) Her duties were primarily fundraising and organizing. The hours were long and there were many times she worked weeks without taking a day off. Introduction © Jean Moutoussamy-Ashe (Lot 38) GUY JOHNSON