?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
THELMA JOHNSON STREAT (1911 - 1959) Black Kings.
Color screenprint, circa 1945-50. 342x270 mm; 13 1/2x10 1/2 inches, full margins. Diagonal hard crease, upper right corner. A good, bright impression of this scarce, experimental screenprint.
Thelma Johnson Streat was a multi-talented African-American artist who focused on ethnic themes in her work. Born on August 29, 1912, in Yakima, Washington, Streat began painting at the age of seven and received art training at the Portland Museum Art School in the mid-1930s. Streat moved to San Francisco in 1938 and began working in Works Progress Administration art programs. She participated in exhibitions at the De Young Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Art, and others. Her gouache Rabbit Man, 1941, was the first painting by an African-American woman to be exhibited and purchased by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1942. She also painted murals that attracted attention for their intense content, such as her 1943 Death of a Black Sailor, which drew threats from the Ku Klux Klan. Her work is found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Mills College, Oakland, the San Francisco Museum of Art, and the Honolulu Academy of the Arts. She was given a one-person exhibition at the Portland Art Museum in 2003.
