?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
RICHARD W. DEMPSEY (1909 - 1987) Cow Creek.
Watercolor on heavy cream wove paper, circa 1956-60. 559X756 mm; 22x29 3/4 inches. Signed and inscribed "North Carolina" in ink, lower right.
Provenance: Evans-Tibbs collection, Washington DC; private collection, Washington DC (1989).
Exhibited: Art in the Embassies Program, State Department, Washington DC, with the program label supplying the title; Evans-Tibbs Collection, Washington DC, November 30, 1985 - January 5, 1986. Cow Creek was one of Richard Dempsey's many works which traveled for two decades internationally through the Art in the Embassies Program beginning in 1964.
This colorful abstraction is an excellent example of the mid-career work of Dempsey. In 1951, he had became associated with the Washington DC school with his inclusion in the first Annual Exhibition of the Loïs Mailou Jones & Céline Tabary Studio Group. Alongside Delilah Pierce and Alma Thomas, Dempsey showed at the Barnett-Aden Gallery in Washington, DC through the 1950s. These watercolors are organic abstractions of the local color and scenery that Dempsey encountered on his travels to Haiti, Jamaica, and North Carolina. His work today is found in the Atlanta University Collection of Afro-American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Harriet and Harmon Kelly Collection of African American Art, San Antonio.
