?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 10,000 - $ 15,000
MICHAEL KELLY WILLIAMS (1950 - ) Ganawa.
Oil on thick wove paper, 1988. 1118x762 mm; 44x30 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower right.
Provenance: June Kelly Gallery, New York, with the label on the frame back; the collection of George T. Wein, New York; the estate of George T. Wein (2021).
Exhibited: Syncopated Rhythms: 20th Century African American Art from the George and Joyce Wein Collection, Boston University Art Gallery, Boston, November 18, 2005 - January 22, 2006.
Illustrated: Patricia Hills, Melissa Renn and Ed Bradley. Syncopated Rhythms: 20th Century African American Art from the George and Joyce Wein Collection, p. 88.
Painter, sculptor, printmaker and educator Michael Kelly Williams created this expressive artwork during his 1988 fellowship of study at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. The imagery was informed by his passion for music and travels in Morocco in the 1980s. Williams described the significance of this imagery - "Ganawa is about the music of the Ganawa people of Morocco, who play large metal castanets, string instruments and drums. I was given a tape of the music that I listened to while creating the piece.....(I was) inspired by the music."
Williams was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, just outside of Paris where his father, the artist Kelly Williams, was studying under the GI Bill. He grew up in Detroit, Michigan, where he attended Cass Technical High School. Williams has a BFA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and an MFA in sculpture from Brooklyn College, CUNY. Williams has had several prestigious residencies, including at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Materials for the Arts in Long Island City, and Wave Hill in the Bronx. He also received the first Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop Legacy Publishing Fellowship at the Elizabeth Foundation and was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Grant. His work can be found in several museum and institutional collections, such as The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, the Library of Congress, the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
All proceeds to benefit the Newport Festivals Foundations, Inc., the non-profit organization created by George Wein to carry on the legacy of his Newport Jazz and Newport Folk Festivals. Hills/Renn/Bradley p. 89.
