?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 30,000 - $ 50,000
CHARLES SEARLES (1937 - 2004) Indoctrination.
Acrylic on canvas, 1971. 1270x915 mm; 50x36 inches. Signed and dated in acrylic, lower left.
Provenance: the artist; obtained directly from the artist, private collection; private Pennsylvania collection.
Exhibited: Charles Searles: Universal Reflections of Color and Rhythm, Diggs Gallery, Winston-Salem State University, Winston-Salem, NC, Februrary 8 - March 21, 2009.
Indoctrination is the earliest and most significant painting by Charles Searles to come to auction. This large canvas embodies the artist's career-long interest in African tribal arts--he first incorporated mask forms and colors from Africa in his late 1960s and early '70s figurative paintings. By 1971, Searles had risen to prominence with the inclusion of his 1970 painting, News, in the exhibition of Contemporary Black Artists in America at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Searles studied at the University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, graduating with honors, and later taught at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia for 19 years. His works are found in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Montclair Museum of Art, Montclair, NJ, the Dallas Museum of Art, the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, the Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum, Philadelphia and Howard University.
