Jan 30, 2020 - Sale 2528

Sale 2528 - Lot 14

Price Realized: $ 27,500
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 5,000 - $ 7,000
EVA HAMLIN MILLER (1911 - 1991)
Sound into Sight - A Rhapsody.

Triptych of oil on linen canvas, 1964. 584x1753 mm; 23x69 inches assembled. Each 584x584 mm; 23x23 inches. Each signed, titled, dated and inscribed "Florence, Italy" in ink, verso.

Provenance: the Johnson Publishing Company, Inc., Chicago.

This colorful abstraction is a scarce oil painting of Eva Hamlin Miller: this mid-career work was painted in Florence, Italy during her postgraduate study at the Graduate School of Fine Arts. Hamlin also did her postgraduate studies at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria before moving back to North Carolina.

Born in Brooklyn, NY, Miller grew up in Greensboro, NC. She taught art at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama before becoming Bennett College's first art instructor in 1937. She later received a BFA from Pratt Institute in 1940, and an MFA from Columbia University in 1945 where she studied painting. She went on to be the chair at the Winston-Salem Teachers College and the first African-American supervisor for Greensboro schools. Her work has been extensively exhibited, including at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the National Museum of Art, Dakar, Senegal. Her profile is included in Samella Lewis and Ruth Waddy's 1969 Black Artists on Art, Volume 1 and bell hooks and Leslie King-Hammond's 1995 Gumbo Ya Ya Anthology of Contemporary African-American Women Artists. Lewis/Waddy pp. 107 and 128; hooks/King-Hammond pp. 171-172.