Mar 31, 2022 - Sale 2599

Sale 2599 - Lot 217

Price Realized: $ 1,062
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
FRANCIS A. SPROUT (1940 - 2017)
El Medio from Convent Street.

Graphite on cream wove paper, 1995. 533x419 mm; 21x16 1/2 inches. Signed, titled, dated "9/4/95" and inscribed © in pencil, lower margin. From the artist's Plaques series

Provenance: private collection, New York.

This intriguing drawing is from Sprout's later career exploration of the forms of plaques, doorways, books and masks. Sprout considered them as both spiritual and physical vehicles as well as gateways between African and Western culture. Sprout is best known for his 1970s Muslim Tile Pattern series of paintings and prints, and his painting Azo had pride of place at the Johnson Publishing Company - hanging in the executive dining room.

Born and raised in Arizona, Sprout studied studio art and art education in the School of Art at the University of Arizona in the 1960s. He enrolled in the MFA program of the University of California, San Diego, in fall 1970, where he progressed from figuration into abstraction, and learned of Islamic ornamentation and imagery in his art history studies of North African culture. Sprout had a long career as a painter, printmaker and art educator. He taught visual art through the 1980s in Denver; first at the University of Denver before becoming a tenured professor at Metropolitan State College. He took a sabbatical, returning to Los Angeles in 1984, and earned an MA in African Studies with a concentration on African art history from UCLA in 1990. Sprout moved to Purchase, New York with his wife, museum director and curator Lucinda Gedeon, where he taught at Purchase College and the Pratt Institute of Art. They then moved to Vero Beach, Florida, where Sprout continued to teach and paint. Sprout exhibited widely, and his artwork is in the collections of Arizona State University Museum of Art, the Neuberger Museum of Art, the Johns Manville Corporation, Atlanta and Pfizer Learning Center, Rye Brook, New York.