Jun 04, 2020 - Sale 2535

Sale 2535 - Lot 103

Price Realized: $ 8,125
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 8,000 - $ 12,000
JAMES LITTLE (1952 - )
Pittance, Treasure.

Oil on linen canvas, 1977-78. 914x1168 mm; 36x46 inches. Signed, titled and dated "12/77 - 1/78" in blue crayon, upper left verso.

Provenance: obtained directly from the artist; private collection, New York.

Pittance, Treasure is a striking and experimental abstraction by New York painter James Little. It comes from an early 1977 body of work in which he combined oil painting with a dispersing agent to create a unique cratered, organic texture.

Born in Memphis, Little earned a BFA from the Memphis Academy of Arts in 1974, and a MFA from Syracuse University in 1976. His paintings are in the collections of the New Jersey State Museum, the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Library of Congress, Washington, DC and the Paul R. Jones Collection, Atlanta. He has received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in Painting in 2009 and the Pollock-Krasner Award in 2000. In 2016, Little was commissioned by the Metropolitan Transit Authority to create a public artwork for the Long Island Rail Road's new Brooklyn-bound platform at Jamaica Station - an installation of 33 colored glass windows, expected to be unveiled in February of 2020.