?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 25,000 - $ 35,000
WADSWORTH JARRELL (1929 - ) Midnight Poet at 125th Street & Lenox.
Acrylic on linen canvas, 1979. 1372x1067 mm; 54x42 inches. Signed and dated in acrylic, lower left.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; private collection, Georgia.
Illustrated: Robert L. Douglas, Wadsworth Jarrell: The Artist as Revolutionary, plate 29, p. 57.
In Midnight Poet at 125th Street & Lenox, Wadsworth Jarrell combines the Senufo facial treatment that is often seen through his mid- to late 1970s work with a street scene theme. Alongside his male figures, Jarrell adds new images - a midnight sun-moon and a turtle. The turtle is representative of a messenger or the importance of a message. The use of the coolade colors, African patterns and symbols all represent AfriCOBRA symbols. Wadsworth Jarrell was a leading figure of the Black Arts movement and one of the founding members of the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists (AfriCOBRA), the artist collective that he and fellow artists Barbara Jones-Hogu, Jeff Donaldson, Jae Jarrell, Napoleon Henderson, Nelson Stevens and Gerald Williams formed in Chicago in 1969. Douglas pp. 55-56.
