?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 5,000
ROSE PIPER (1917 - 2005) Death Went Out to the Sinner's House. Gone and Go with Me.
Sinner Cried Out, I Ain't Ready to Go, I Ain't Got no Travelin' Shoes.
Acrylic on masonite, 1988. 300x228 mm; 11 3/4x9 inches. Signed in acrylic, lower right.
Provenance: the artist, with her ink stamp and label on the frame back; Bomani Gallery, San Francisco; John Axelrod, Boston (1994); the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2011).
This is one of 10 miniature paintings by Rose Piper from her Slave Song Series in which she revisited African-American forms of music--a subject that had once made her early reputation. According to Graham Lock in his essay "Blues on the Brush: Rose Piper's Blues and Negro Folk Spiritual Paintings of the 1940s," Piper showed this group in her second solo exhibition at the Phelps Stokes Fund in New York in 1989--over 40 years after her first solo show. Lock describes how Piper used the lyrics of spirituals for the titles for each work, and was inspired by her reading of John Lovell's book Black Song: The Forge and the Flame. Lock/Murray pp. 61-62.
