William H. Johnson Foundation for the Arts Gala Silent Auction OCTOBER 2, 2004

“Pass the Butta” 2004 Auction List and Artist Bios 1. Mark Steven Greenfield

ITEM # 1 Mark Steven Greenfi eld

Okeh, 2003 Drawing on clayboard 16 x 20 inches

Retail value: $3000 Minimum bid: $1500 Bidding increment: $100

Mark Steven Greenfi eld (b. 1951) has deep roots in ’ African American art scene. His art education began at the Saturday sessions led by Charles White and William Pajaud at Golden State Mutual Insurance Company during his high school years. In addition, at Los Angeles High School, his teacher was John Riddle, the noted Los Angeles sculptor. He earned a BA at Cal State Long Beach and an MFA at Cal State Los Angeles. For eight years he served as Director of the Art Center and is currently serving as Executive Director of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery.

Since 2000, Greenfi eld has created a range of work inspired by images of the 19th century minstrel show. These works have been included in several museum exhibitions including Color, Culture and Complexity, Museum of Contemporary Art, Atlanta, 2002; Whiteness: A Wayward Construction, Laguna Art Museum, 2003; Only Skin Deep, International Center for Photography, New York, 2003; and Broad Territories, Museum of Photography, Riverside, 2004. In addition, one of these works was recently acquired by the Baltimore Art Museum.

Okeh was featured in Post-Minstrel, Greenfi eld’s March 2004 solo exhibition at Steve Turner Gallery, Beverly Hills. 2. Artis Lane

ITEM # 2 (Portrait Commission) Oil and pastel on paper

Retail value: $5000 Minimum bid: $2000 Bidding increment $100

Born in 1927, and educated at Ontario College of art, University of Toronto, Cranbrook Art Academy, and at UCLA, Artis Lane has created an impressive output over the course of her career. While she is best known for her sculpture, she also has painted hundreds of portraits over the years.

Her work is owned by numerous private collectors including Sidney Poitier, Bill and Camille Cosby, Oprah Winfrey, Quincy Jones, Cary Grant, Diahann Carroll, Cicely Tyson, Mr. and Mrs. Reuben Cannon, Henry Kissinger, Michael Jordan, James Worthy and Bernard and Shirley Kinsey. In addition, works are owned by AT&T, United Negro College Fund, Howard University and the Smithsonian Institute. 3. Kori Newkirk

ITEM # 3 Kori Newkirk Black and Blue, 2004 Artifi cial hair, pony beads and aluminum 11 3/4 x 8 3/4 inches

Retail value: $1000 Minimum bid: $500 Bidding increment $50

Born in 1970 in New York, Kori Newkirk received a BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1993, an MFA from the University of California at Irvine in 1997, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1997. He has since established a reputation for his broad range of work, which includes sculpture installations, photographs and beaded curtains. The curtains, made of plastic pony beads, typically used as hair ornaments, are strung on strands of artifi cial hair.

His work has been shown at the Rosamund Felson Gallery, Los Angeles and the Project Gallery in both Los Angeles and New York. Newkirk’s work was included in Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem, 2001, and featured in a one-person exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. He received an honorable mention in the 2002 from the William H. Johnson Foundation for the Arts. He lives and works in Los Angeles. 4. Nadine Robinson

ITEM # 4 Born in London in 1968, Nadine Robinson received a BA from State University at Nadine Robinson Stony Brook, New York in 1995, and an MFA from New York University in 1997. She has Study for Bling Bling Boom, 2004 been honored with artist in residencies at several prestigious venues including at the Swarovski rhinestones, aluminum, paint, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1997 and the Studio Museum in Harlem canvas, wood in 2000. Two ‘paintings’ each 9 1/4 x 9 1/4 x 3 1/2 inches Known for her large-scale sculpture and sound installations called “boom paintings”, Nadine Robinson has situated herself at the crossroads of the white modernist canon Retail value: $3500 and the African-American musical aesthetic. She works within a minimalist vocabulary, Minimum bid: $1700 combining sounds, audio equipment and unconventional materials in a way that Bidding increment $100 challenges our defi nitions of painting and art making.

In the last several years, Robinson’s work has been steadily exhibited, most notably in three prestigious museum group exhibitions–Freestyle, at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2001; One Planet Under a Groove: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art, at the Bronx Museum of Arts and at the Walker Center for the Arts; and in Greater New York at PS1/MOMA. She also had a 2003 solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Robinson was the recipient of the 2003 William H. Johnson Prize. 5.

ITEM # 5 Alison Saar Red, 2002 Color woodcut From an edition of ten 9 x 7 inches

Retail value: $700 Minimum bid: $350 Bidding increment $50

Born in Los Angeles in 1956, Alison Saar received her BA from Scripps College and her MFA from Otis Art Institute. In the last twenty years she has created an impressive output having had many one-person exhibitions at galleries and museums throughout the country.

Her work is in numerous museum collections including Baltimore Art Museum, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, High Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Newark Art Museum, Santa Barbara Museum, Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Walker Art Center and the Whitney Museum of American Art. 6. La Monte Westmoreland

ITEM # 6 La Monte Westmoreland (b. 1941) has been an active presence in the Los Angeles art La Monte Westmoreland scene for the past thirty years. Since his inclusion in the 1972 exhibition, A Panorama of Jean-Leon Gerome’s Bather with Black Artists at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, he has been on the scene, not Servant and Hammons, 2003 only as an artist, but also as a respected teacher, curator and collector. Mixed media collage 22 x 27 inches He earned his MFA at California State University, Los Angeles in 1985 after earning his undergraduate degree at the same institution in 1971. He has taught at a number of Retail value: $1200 colleges including Los Angeles Community College and California Minimum bid: $600 State University, Los Angeles and has been regularly exhibiting since the early 1970s Bidding increment: $50 with more than twenty solo exhibitions since 1980. 7. Richard Wyatt

ITEM # 7 Richard Wyatt Thelonius Monk, 2003 Pencil drawing on paper 15 x 22 inches

Retail value: $3500 Minimum bid: $1500 Bidding increment $100

For more than twenty-fi ve years, Richard Wyatt (b. 1955) has actively produced art for public and corporate spaces with more than thirty major murals to his credit. His most well-known commissions were for the Big Blue Bus Facility, Santa Monica; Long Beach City Hall; Los Angeles International Airport; Ontario International Airport; Union Station, Los Angeles; William R. and Norma B. Harvey Library, Hampton University; National Afro-American Museum, Wilberforce, Ohio; Screen Actors Guild, Los Angeles; Spike’s Joint, Spike Lee Mural Project, Los Angeles; Capitol Records, ; Southern California Gas Company, Los Angeles; and the Golden State Mutual Insurance Company, Los Angeles.

In addition to his large-scale public work, Wyatt has produced a signifi cant body of smaller scale paintings and drawings which are highly prized for their precision and detail. These works have been regularly exhibited at galleries and museums for more than thirty years, including in the 1972 exhibition, A Panorama of Black Artists at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and most recently in Representing L. A., a traveling museum exhibition organized by the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. In the latter exhibition, Wyatt was recognized as one of the best representational artists working in Los Angeles.

A one-person show of Wyatt’s new work is scheduled to open at Steve Turner Gallery, Beverly Hills in March 2005.