Robert Colescott’s ‘Miss Liberty’ Freed from Private Collection

Robert Colescott 1925-2009, United States Follow +

The Robert Colescott painting Miss Liberty (1980) fetched US $4.5 million at Bonhams Post-War & Contemporary Art auction in Los Angeles on 17 February.

It was acquired by the Art Bridges Foundation, which works with museums to expand access to American Art and deepen engagement with audiences. Art Bridges was founded by Walmart heiress Alice Walton in 2017.

The work entered a private collection soon after it was painted by Colescott, who died in 2009. Decades later, the acquisition by Art Bridges means Miss Liberty will finally be available for the public to view.

The price paid for Miss Liberty at Bonhams is Colescott’s second highest at auction after George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (1975). It sold for $15.3 million at a Sotheby’s auction in 2021 to the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which will open in Los Angeles in 2025.

George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware is currently on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where a discussion of Colescott’s legacy featuring the Lucas Museum’s Sandra Jackson-Dumont, artist Rashid Johnson, and Met curator Sylvia Yount will be held at 6pm on Thursday 23 February (rsvp here).

The talk is part of the Met’s programming for Black History Month this February.

Among other notable shows shining a light on Black artists is the Winfred Rembert (1945–2021) exhibition All of Me, which occupies all three floors of Hauser & Wirth‘s location on New York‘s 69th Street from 23 February to 22 April.

Rembert’s vibrant, powerful dyed leather works include Cain’t to Cain’t II (2016), which uses blackened sides of the canvas to evoke the long days the artist spent picking cotton blending into nights, and All of Me (date unknown), a commotion of mallet-wielding men in prison-stripe uniforms swinging hammers on a chain gang.

The New Orleans Museum of Art continues with its exhibition Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club through 7 May.

The exhibition takes its name from the African American social realist painter’s visits to Nigeria.

Across the pond, Rites of Passage opens at Gagosian in London on 16 March. It features works by 18 contemporary artists who share a history of migration, including British African-Caribbean artist Elsa James, Ghana-born artist Patrick Quarm, and London-based Nigerian artist Àsìkò.

And the exhibition In The Black Fantastic, which first showed at Hayward Gallery in London, continues at the Kunsthal Rotterdam until 9 April 2023. It showcases works of speculative fiction by 11 contemporary artists from the African diaspora, including Nick Cave, Hew Locke, and Wangechi Mutu. —[O]

Main image: Robert Colescott, Miss Liberty (1980). Courtesy Bonhams.