143

James Little

(b. 1952)

Sharpeville, 1960.

Gouache on four sheets of handmade paper, 1985.
Titled, dated, and inscribed with medium, orientation arrows, and instructions for the positionings in graphite, verso.
Image: 26 x 36 in. (66 x 91.4 cm.), Frame: 31 x 41 in. (78.7 x 104.1 cm.)

  • Provenance:
    Acquired directly from the artist (1985).
    Private collection, New York.
  • Notes:
    Sharpeville was the site of the Sharpeville Massacre, which took place on March 21, 1960, near the town of Vereeniging, South Africa, located 30 miles south of Johannesburg. As part of a nationwide protest against the 1959 requirement for all Blacks to carry pass books, Blacks descended upon police stations throughout the county on the 21st and gave back their passes and demanded to be arrested. Some 20,000 showed up at the Sharpeville police station. The police began firing automatic weapons at the unarmed protesters, killing 69 and wounding an additional 180. The massacre was a turning point in the anti-apartheid movement, drawing international condemnation of the South African government. It was here on December 10, 1996, some 11 years after James Little's picture was made, that Nelson Mandela, as the first president of biracial South Africa, signed the country's new constitution.

    James Little has had a distinguished fifty year practice as an abstract painter in New York. Little received a BFA from the Memphis Academy of Art in 1974 and an MFA from Syracuse University in 1976. His paintings are in many institutional collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Art, The Studio Museum of Harlem, The Menil Collection, the Library of Congress, the Saint Louis Art Museum, Everson Museum of Art, the New Jersey State Museum and the Newark Museum, Newark. He received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in Painting in 2009 and the Pollock-Krasner Award in 2000. In 2016, Little was commissioned by the Metropolitan Transit Authority to create a public artwork for the Long Island Rail Road's new Brooklyn-bound platform at Jamaica Station - an installation of 33 colored glass windows, unveiled in February 2020. Little was featured as a participating artist in the 2022 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
  • Condition:
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April 2, 2026 12:00 PM EDT
New York, NY, US

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