?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 7,000 - $ 10,000
KERMIT OLIVER (1943 - ) Burnt Church.
Lacquer and Japanese oil glaze on wood panel, circa 1965. 229x356 mm; 9x14 inches. Signed in oil, lower right.
Provenance: private collection, Texas.
This haunting nocturne, depicting the silhouette of a burned out church under moonlight, is a fascinating, early painting by Kermit Oliver. The powerful subject matter is an unusual direct response by the Texan artist to the unrest of the mid-1960s, and a condemnation of the violent campaigns of terror, including the bombing of Black churches, during the Civil Rights period. Oliver continued to paint nocturnal subjects in the 1970s. This painting is also one of the earliest works of Oliver to come to auction.
From a young age, growing up in Refugio, Texas, Kermit Oliver had a passion for depicting his rural surroundings through painting and drawing. Oliver's father was an African American cowboy who worked on cattle ranches. He attended Texas Southern University in 1960, where his professor John Biggers inspired him to stay "true to your own message, your own language." After graduating from TSU, Oliver rose to prominence as an artist in Houston in the 1970s. When the DuBose Gallery began to represent him in 1971, he became the first African American artist in Houston to be represented by a commercial gallery. Oliver and his family moved to Waco in 1984 where, despite the fame from his many Hermès scarf commissions, he retreated from the art world. Oliver was honored with a retrospective exhibition of his work at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 2005, and at the Art Center of Waco in 2021. His paintings are in many museum collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Southern University, Houston, the Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC.
