Oct 07, 2008 - Sale 2156

Sale 2156 - Lot 86

Price Realized: $ 6,480
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 5,000
KAY BROWN (1932 - )
The Devil and His Game.

Collage of various papers and mixed media on canvas, 1970. 1127x912 mm; 48x36 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower right. 4 small punctures (3 patched) and some lifting of collage.

Illustrated: Tradition and Conflict, Images of a Turbulent Decade, 1963-73, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, p. 54.

Exhibited: Weusi Nyumba Ya Sanaa Gallery, Harlem, New York; Tradition and Conflict, Images of a Turbulent Decade, 1963-73, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, January 27 - June 30, 1985 (traveling exhibition), with the labels on the frame back. This work is dated on its labels and in exhibition literature as 1968, but is dated 1970 on the painting.

Kay Brown is best known for this political, large-scale collage work which incorporated images of protest with painting. Brown graduated from City College in 1968 and joined the Weusi artists collective as their only female member. Farrington describes this early work as one of her "prefeminist images....which deify the male protagonists of black liberation." An active feminist, participant in the Black Arts movement and opponent of the Vietnam War, Brown founded the support group Where We At: Black Women Artists in 1971 with Faith Ringgold. Farrington pp. 144-45 and 167-69.