?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 10,000 - $ 15,000
MICHAEL A. CUMMINGS (1945 - ) African Jazz #3.
Quilt of various cloth fabrics, with button additions, 1990. 2642x1830 mm; 104x72 inches. Sewn signature and date, lower right recto. Signed, titled and dated in ink on fabric label, verso.
Provenance: collection of the artist, New York.
Exhibited: Jazz Museum, Kansas City, MO; Hallmark Cards Gallery, Kansas City, MO; Saint Peter's Church, New York; Francine Seders Gallery, Seattle; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse; Reader's Digest headquarters, Chappaqua, NY; The Piano 300, the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Pieced Together: Moscow Meets Harlem, Russian American Foundation, the National Arts Club, New York.
From his 12 African Jazz Series, this is the first of Michael Cummings' celebrated art quilts to come to auction. Other quilts from this series are in the collections of Camille O. and William H. Cosby, Jr. and City College of New York.
Michael Cummings is regarded as the nation's leading African-American male quilter. A Los Angeles native, he moved to New York City in 1970 and became friends with Romare Bearden. In the early '70s, he experimented with collage in various mediums, and by 1975, had moved strictly to fabric. Today, he lives and works in Harlem.
Other quilts by Michael Cummings are in the permanent collections of Arco Corporation, the American Craft Museum, New York, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, the California Afro-American Museum, Atlanta Life Insurance, Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, and the Museum of Art and Design, New York. Cummings has also been commissioned to create an Absolut quilt for the House of Seagram, and quilts for the City of Knoxville, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, the PerCent for Art, NYC Dept of Cultural Affairs, and HBO.
