Press Release

African-American Art from the Johnson Publishing Company

We welcome a new decade with 100 fine artworks from the collection of the Johnson Publishing Company, a great institution of American publishing and an icon of African-American culture. The sale will feature paintings, sculpture and works on paper from diverse periods, with 75 artists featured, from Henry Ossawa Tanner to Carrie Mae Weems. The majority of the artwork dates from the period when the company’s headquarters building, at 820 S. Michigan Avenue in Chicago, opened in 1971.

Highlights are Moonrise near Kasbah, circa 1913, by Henry Ossawa Tanner, a beautiful nocturne of a Moroccan kasbah, and a significant midcareer oil painting. Richmond Barthé’s The Negro Looks Ahead, 1940, and Elizabeth Catlett’s Sister, 1973, are two important bronze sculptures.

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Significant abstraction includes Upper Egypt, by Kenneth Victor Young, 1971, Red Berries, by Thomas Sills, 1959, and Azo, by Frances Sprout, 1971. The Sills and Sprout paintings are currently on view in Theaster Gates: Assembly Hall at the Walker Art Center, Gates’s firstmajor museum exhibition. Carrie Mae Weems’s Untitled, 1996, seven C-print photographs with etched text on glass, commissioned by the City of Chicago Public Art Program in an edition of three, is an outstanding example of the artist’s work.

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Exhibition Begins January 25

The exhibition is free to attend and open to the public. We welcome special and educational groups with advance notice—send an inquiry to [email protected].