[This article was originally posted in the summer of 2012, but was accidentally deleted during an archive update. It is being re-posted.]
For Black Artists, Great Critical Acclaim Does Not Lead to Riches
By Milford Prewitt
An unknown art collector paid $28.6 million last May for a pop art rendition of a weathered American flag that renown painter and printmaker Jasper Johns created on canvas during his iconic “Flag” series in the early 1960s.
The transaction during a Christie’s auction would go down as the most amount of money ever paid for a work of art made by Johns, but it was not a record breaker for the most amount of money ever paid for a living artist’s work.
That distinction went to an unidentified collector in London who paid $33 million in 2008 for Lucian Freud’s life-sized portrait of a nude, napping, fat woman titled, “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” – still the all-time heavyweight champion of art sales for a living artist’s work.
Although experts recognize that Old Glory’s and the fat lady’s sale prices were rare, awesome deals even for white artists, works of art by black artists would never command those kinds of dollars, black artists, appraisers, gallery owners and other experts say.
While the art world in recent decades has been most generous with its adoration and reverence of black artists – particularly by the late 20th Century Grand Masters Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence and other break-through black visual artists – experts say the art world has been stingy with its checkbook for living artists’ work, even to include those cases where black and white artist share equal critical acclaim and where prices are more down to Earth.
“You could have bought every piece of art at the National Black Fine Art Show in the Puck Building and not spent anywhere near $33 million,” says Robert Carter, a prominent painter and illustrator who makes his home in Dix Hills, New York on Long Island. The show he was referring to has been reincarnated in some respects as the Harlem Fine Arts Show at Riverside Church in Manhattan during Black History Month in February. Cater will be among the exhibitors.
“Candidly, there is not a successful black artist in the world from a financial point of view,” Carter, the recently retired distinguished professor of art at Nassau Community College in Long Island, charges. “I didn’t say from an aesthetic point of view. I’m impressed and angered by it at the same time.”
Sherman K. Edmiston, who owns and operates the 22-year-old Essie Green Galleries on Convent Ave. in Harlem, which specializes only in art created by blacks worldwide – including Bearden and up-and-coming stars like Mark Bradford – says Carter’s criticism is extreme and not very accurate.
“We may not be doing $33 million blockbuster deals, but we have a number of younger contemporary artists who are enjoying very good livings selling their work at handsome prices,” he says. “Things are progressing.”
He mentions three black artists in particular who can command $500,000 to $1 million or more for a single work of art as examples:
• The widely exhibited and prolific Brooklyn- based painter Mickalene Thomas, whose oeuvre chiefly adorns women but features vivid and colorful outdoor and indoor still life.
• The London-based painter Chris Ofili, who earned former Mayor Rudolph Guiliani’s wrath back in the 1990s with an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum that featured one painting of an African Virgin Mary partly made with dried elephant dung; and
• The Los Angeles-based abstract painter and sculptor Mark Bradford, whose edgy compositions bring to mind the work of the ill-fated Haitian-American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. Bradford has forged a singular identity scavenging discarded building materials and other debris to compose work that reflects the multi-cultural, working-poor communities of Southern California where he grew up.
Carter – a teacher, award-winning and influential painter and illustrator in his own right and who is best known for his engaging depictions of mundane, black slices-of-life from housekeeping, laundry, worship and children playing – has works on permanent display at museums and galleries around the country. Although he agrees with Edmiston that there are black artists earning upper middle-income salaries from their work, he insists they are far and few in between.
“But to blame it on institutional racism or cultural bias – though indeed that exists – is just an oversimplification of a complex problem,” Carter allows.
Halima Taha, an art historian, art management consultant and author of the how-to-guide “COLLECTING AFRICAN AMERICAN ART: Works on Paper and Canvas,” (Verve Press, 2008) agrees that an “elitism innate in the art world had been far less praiseworthy in its critical writing and economic appraisal of work by meritorious artists of African descent.”
But within the past 20 years, Taha asserts that there has been a dramatic international, domestic and institutional demand for black art.
“Collectors are recognizing an untapped reservoir of American art,” she notes. “ They are filling the historic and aesthetic gaps in their American art collections.”
Taha says that even for white artists of distinction, earning a living is an arduous task, which puts the Johns and Freud transactions as outliers in another stratosphere.
Carter counters that that is exactly his point.
“There are no black superstars in our business,” he complains. “There are no Ophras, no Denzels, no Ken Chenaults and no LeBron Jameses,” referring to the black superstars of media, acting, corporate executive management and basketball, respectively.
Edmiston, the owner of the Essie Galleries, says black people could do more to support black artists. But too many suffer from the delusion that one needs great wealth to buy works of art, he states.
“It’s no way we can overlook the fact that wealth makes a difference and that wealthy people have more discretionary income to buy art,” he says. “No doubt about it.
“But black people have this mistaken impression that it takes great wealth to become a collector and that is not the case,” he contends. “Arthur Schomburg started off as a young man [on a combined teacher’s and law messenger’s salary], but it was his insight that was his real fortune that has resulted in what the Schomburg Collection is today.”
Taha observes “it’s important to realize that there are two distinct markets for African American artists that co-exist under one umbrella.
“One is the commercial market where many artists are thriving and the other is where black artists have broken free of the complexities of the mainstream marketplace of appraisers, dealers, galleries, curators, private and institutional collectors,” she points out. “Essentially these artists have created their own marketplace and are not relying on the collective activity of the formal art world to validate them.”
But Taha complains that she is bothered by the art press’s and mainstream media’s relentless promotion of an outdated schism that separates black art from white art when, in the final analyses, “it’s all American art except that some of it happens to be produced by people of African descent.
“On the world stage, I think most black artists would call themselves American artists first.”
Taha says a number of affluent blacks and African-American celebrities have stepped up to the plate in recent years with money to nurture the future of black art and black artists, most prominently media and fashion mogul Russell Simmons.
Along with his brothers, Danny and Joseph (DJ Run from the seminal hip hop group, Run–D.M.C.), the trio founded the Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation in 1995 to give disadvantaged urban youth art exposure and encourage young people to pursue art careers. Rush also curates and finances showcases for up-and-coming young artists at galleries in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
One of Taha’s favorite New York spaces is Kenkeleba House and the Wilmer Jennings Gallery – across the street from each other on E. 2nd St. in the East Village are a ‘must see and visit’ for anyone seriously interested in the best range of work, in all mediums, from the 19th century to the present. Both galleries are run by Corrine Jennings, whose commitment to nurturing African American visual culture is, in Taha’s words, “unparalleled.”
“Not only do historic, emerging and mid career artists from throughout the African diaspora find their way there, but established artists whose dealers want to stifle their creativity to what they feel will sell, can have an exhibition space for more experimental work,” Taha reports.
Edmiston nominated Thelma Golden, the director and chief curator of the famed Studio Museum of Harlem, as one of his favorite art world operatives who is working hard to keep black art centerstage.
Golden shook up the staid art world back in the 1990s when, as a curator at the Whitney, she put together “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, ” a controversial collection of 29 paintings, photographs, illustrations and sculptures of black men, all created by an ethnically diverse group of artists.
Grace Ingleton is the kind of anonymous patron of black arts Edmiston salutes.
A 70-something retired nurse who began collecting works of black artists nearly 50 years ago, Ingleton is best known in black art circles as the co-founder of the Dedicators Award, an annual ceremony that honors black artists over 50 and raises scholarship money for young people to pursue an art education.
Among past honorees were Robert Carter, the late Lawrence Dorsey – whose family-run art gallery at 553 Rogers Ave. in Brooklyn’s Prospect Lefferts Gardens section is still in business and perhaps the oldest black-owned art gallery in the city at 40-plus-years-old – and Otto Neals, who helps manage the Dorsey Gallery.
Ingleton explained that beyond raising scholarship money, the awards ceremony was an attempt to give older black artists recognition before it was too late and to provide them some financial assistance.
“They were teachers, postal workers, or worked for the government in some way, but they couldn’t live on their art alone,” she sighs. “And it always amazed me that here were black men and woman whose creativity, technical skill and contributions to the culture were equal to or passed that of popular white artists, but they barely made any money or earned much attention.”
But for all the financial challenges black artists face, the age-old debate among them over staying true to the black aesthetic versus going for the money rages as intently today as it did during the 1960s.
“You look at the abstract impressionistic artist Sam Gilliam [based in Washington, D.C], without question one of the most commercially successful artists at work today in America,” Carter says. “And yet, there are those who do not consider him a black artist; I’m not one of them. But because his work has nothing to do with social issues or recognizable imagery, he’s not a black artist to some.”
Frank Frazier, a noted self-taught Harlem born abstract and impressionistic painter who works out of Dallas and whose work is widely exhibited, learned he had a natural talent for painting while recovering from wounds he suffered in combat in Vietnam.
Posting at blackartinamerica.com recently, Frazier, who also mentors young artists, wrote that representing the black experience in art and making money need not be mutually exclusive.
“One of the best reasons for me to continue to identify myself as a black artist is so that my children and my people will always be able to recognize me for what and who I am,” he wrote. “It's not that I don't want to sell my work to non-blacks. I have no problems with anyone purchasing my works, but when a black person buys my work it feels to me that I’m free.”
Milford Prewitt is a gallery guard at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art and a freelance writer who, in addition to the arts, writes about the restaurant industry and the particular challenges of black chefs in fine dining. His work can also be found at www.slitelychilled.com