Significant Mid-Career Painting by Hughie Lee-Smith and Contemporary Art to Benefit the Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation to Sell With Swann Auction Galleries

Ball Player is a significant, mid-career painting by Hughie Lee-Smith, and it leads the upcoming African American Art auction, presented by Swann Auction Galleries. This oil on linen canvas was painted in 1970 and depicts a youth playing handball in a particularly desolate urban space. Lee-Smith effectively created a new type of American landscape – an existential urban space in which the Black figure was the protagonist. His protagonists stood out in figure paintings in a social-realist surrounding. Lee-Smith often portrayed youth playing or improvising games, from balancing sticks and tires to flying kites and playing ball games. This painting depicts an essential aspect of his oeuvre, where the subject finds moments of pleasure and escape despite their environs. 

Also available is a glazed terracotta vessel, an early sculpture made by Simone Leigh in the 1990s. Simone Leigh’s water pot sculptures reference traditional forms from Africa and the diaspora. Her interests in African and Black American art manifested in these robust vessels 30 years ago. Chronicling an early period of Simone Leigh’s life, Calvin Tomkins of The New Yorker describes the critical development of Leigh as a young artist. Leigh’s early practice was focused on these traditional forms. Leigh told Tomkins: “For ten years, I was obsessed with these water pots. It was a kind of a perfect form, and it was something women had been making all over the world for centuries, this anonymous labor of women.” Leigh continued this practice, calling it “important work” despite struggling to get the attention of either the pottery or art worlds in the 1990s. The upcoming auction will feature contemporary art to be sold to benefit the Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation from works donated by Derrick Adams, Hank Willis Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, and more. Visit Swann Auction Gallery to view the complete catalog and register to bid in the upcoming African American Art sale.