?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
EARLIE HUDNALL, JR. (1946 - ) Street Champion, 4th Ward, Houston, TX.
Silver print, 1986. 406x508 mm; 16x20 inches. Edition of 25. Signed, titled and dated in ink, verso.
Additional prints of this photograph are in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Exhibited: African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, The Civil Rights Movement, and Beyond, Smithsonian American Art Museum, curated by Richard J. Powell and Virginia M. Mecklenburg, April 27 - September 3, 2012, then traveled to Muscarelle Museum of Art, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, The Mennello Museum of American Art, Orlando Florida, National Academy Museum, New York, Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanhooga, Tennessee and the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California.
Illustrated: Mecklenburg, Virginia and Powell, Richard J., African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, The Civil Rights Movement, and Beyond, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2012, p. 126.
Street Champion uses composition and contrast to capture the duality of life in the 4th Ward. Amongst the crumbling infrastructure of shotgun houses, children are at play unknowingly of the difficulties life has dealt them. The child on the left is armed with boxing gloves to counter-attack whatever obstacles may come his way.
Born 1946 in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, Earlie Hudnall, Jr. photographed African American life in the Third, Fourth and Fifth Wards of Houston, Texas. After serving as a Marine in the Vietnam War from 1966-68, he moved to Houston to study art at Texas Southern University in 1968, where he met John Biggers, who became his mentor. While at Texas Southern, Hudnall was hired by Dr. Thomas Freeman, professor of philosophy who tasked him to photograph the communities impacted by President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and War on Poverty. Hudnall continued to photograph children and the elderly of those communities as a means to document urban life in the greater Houston area.
Hudnall is the university photographer for Texas Southern University and is also on the executive boards of the Houston Center for Photography and the Texas Photographic Society. His artworks are in the collections of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
