Swann holds African American Art auction today on the department’s 20th anniversary: Elizabeth Catlett’s complete series leads with an estimate of up to $180,000

New York. The auction house Swann holds today, October 1, 2026, at 12:00 noon (New York local time), its African American Art auction — this year with special significance, as it marks the 20th anniversary of the founding of the house’s African American Art department, a pioneering department which, as Swann Galleries announces, set the auction market for many African American artists, with a live auction open to the public.

The sale’s leading lot is the series ‘I Am the Black Woman’ (1946–47) by Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012): a complete series of 14 linocuts (three of them in colour), printed in 1989 and numbered 9/20, first shown at the artist’s first solo exhibition at the Barnett-Aden Gallery. The estimate is $120,000–180,000 and, according to the announcement by Swann Galleries, this is only the second time a complete series has ever appeared at auction — the last time was also at Swann, in 2013.

Another important lot is the complete portfolio ‘The Legend of John Brown’ by Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000): 22 vivid colour screenprints, from 1977, with an estimate of $75,000–100,000. The auction also features an important group of prints from the collection of Russell and Rowena W. Jelliffe, produced at Karamu House in Cleveland, Ohio — the integrated arts centre founded by the Jelliffe family in 1915, today the oldest African American theatre centre in the US — with rare prints by Elmer Brown, Charles Sallee, Hughie Lee-Smith and William E. Smith and other WPA-era artists, as Swann Galleries makes known.

In sculpture, the highlight is ‘Black Majesty’ (1969) by Richmond Barthé (1901–1989), cast during the artist’s brief period in Florence, Italy — a rare example of a large female bronze by Barthé, with an estimate of $30,000–40,000. Among the contemporary highlights is ‘Blue Black Boy’, Carrie Mae Weems’s iconic photograph with text from her well-known ‘Colored People’ series, with an estimate of $25,000–35,000, while Beauford Delaney is represented with ‘Untitled (Two Women on a Park Bench)’ (1941), with an estimate of $50,000–80,000.

The auction also includes post-war paintings by Barbara Zuber and Thomas Sills, as well as modernist works from the estates of Felrath Hines and Walter Augustus Simon — among them his impressive acrylic work ‘Musawwarrat es-Sufra (Sudan)’, with an estimate of $20,000–30,000, as listed in the catalogue published by Swann Galleries.