Auction Highlights: African American Art — April 3, 2025

At Auction Thursday, April 3 at 12:00 PM ET

Swann Galleries’ Spring 2025 auction of African American Art will be held on Thursday, April 3. The auction will feature a standout selection of artworks from multiple periods spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Artists from the Harlem Renaissance and Modern era consist of Allan Rohan Crite, Meta Warrick Fuller, and Richmond Barthe. Represented in the Post-War era are works by Norman Lewis, Beauford Delaney, Romare Bearden, Charles Searles, and Hughie Lee-Smith. Contemporary artists Howardena Pindell, Suzanne Jackson, Thaddeus Mosley, and Ed Clark round out the auction. 

Harlem Rennaissance

Te Adoramus Domine translated to “We adore you, Lord” is a painted plaster plaque from Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, circa 1921. Depicting the Three Kings (Balthazaar, Melchior, and Kaspar) this plaque is a scarce example of her work to come to market.

Post-War

This significant 1954 New York oil painting by Norman Lewis was originally owned by Joan Murray, who was Lewis’s partner from 1946–52. Murray was a psychology graduate student at the time but was also an observer of his practice in the New York School. Joan Murray wrote an introductory essay for Norman Lewis’s 1951 solo exhibition at the Willard Gallery. This atmospheric canvas is a beautiful abstraction of nature and a mid-career example of Lewis’s distinctive brand of Abstract Expressionism.

Friend of Beauford Delaney during his Paris period, painter and collagist John-Franklin Koenig was born and raised in Seattle, Washington, and spent most of his career in France. He worked as a painter and collagist in a modern, non-representational style. Koenig served in WWII and moved to Paris in 1948 to study under the GI Bill. In 1950, he and Jean-Robert Arnaud opened the Galerie Arnaud in the basement of Arnaud’s bookstore at 34 rue du Four. Delaney, part of the same artistic expatriate community, exhibited at their gallery in the late 1950s.

Dancer #1 is a striking and significant painting by Charles Searles—the first in his important Dancer series of the mid-1970s. After he graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1967, he was awarded a William Emlen Cresson Memorial European Traveling Scholarship in 1971. Searles traveled to Nigeria, Ghana, and Morocco. After returning from Africa, Searles began teaching art at the Ile Ife Cultural Center in Germantown—where he also played percussion in the Afro-American Dance Ensemble. This series was inspired by the repetitive movements of the Ife Ife dancers and the bright mixture of patterns in their dresses.

In 1958, Hughie Lee-Smith moved to New York City and taught at the Art Students League for 15 years. He was represented in New York by the Petite Gallery and then the Janet Nessler Gallery throughout the 1960s. His work from this period consists of beautifully painted, stark urban scenes and beautiful lakeshore scenes; both are excellent examples of Hughie Lee-Smith’s mid-career paintings. Girl Fleeing, 1959, is a fragile moment captured by Lee-Smith of a young woman running in a sea of green from a distant city on the horizon, further denoting an expanse of space, Lee-Smith’s unique vision of a modern and existential landscape with Surrealist undertones.

Contemporary

Howardena Pindell first engaged with hole-punched circles by counting and numbering each one, then placing them over a gridded form—often the lines of graph paper—and adding embellishments such as acrylic, watercolor, glitter, and even baby powder. Her inspiration for numbers and grids grew from her father—a mathematician who often wrote down figures in a gridded journal. This punched paper assemblage is a colorful and early example of Howardena Pindell’s important work in this innovative medium. Several other examples of this series, including Untitled #69, were included in the artist’s 2018 traveling retrospective, Howardena Pindell: What Remains to Be Seen, curated by Naomi Beckwith and Valerie Cassel Oliver, organized at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. 

Suzanne Jackson has lived and worked in Savannah, Georgia, since 1996. Side-a-Sapelo references Sapelo Island, one of the Georgia Sea Islands, and the site of Hog Hammock, the last remaining Gullah Geechee community in the Sea Islands. Jackson was a Professor of Painting at SCAD until her retirement in 2009.

Untitled is an example of Thaddeus Mosley’s biomorphic forms composed of the felled trees of Western Pennsylvania. Solely using a chisel and gauge, Mosley repurposes sycamore, cherry, and walnut to rearticulate the natural gradations of the material’s surface. Influenced by the work of Isamu Noguchi to Constantin Brâncuși—and the West African master sculptors of the Dogon, Baoulé, and Mossi peoples—he creates figures that conjure imbued energies and their objectivity.

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