Anthony & Davida Artis base their art collection on the three things that are most important to them: faith, family, and African American faces.

Through this distillation of their collecting priorities the Artis’s have brought together works that foreground minority stories and artists, predominantly African American. It is the Artis’s goal to use their collection as a tool to encourage people not only to engage with African American Art, but to become collectors themselves, of artwork that tells the stories that move them.

Anthony Artis had to be led to his love of art. In the mid-2000s, Artis was a former stockbroker working as the Program Officer at The Ruth Mott Foundation in his home of Flint, Michigan, when the curator of The Mott-Warsh Collection, Camille Ann Brewer, told him he could choose art from the collection for the office. Artis wasn’t particularly interested, so he let Brewer choose for him. She hung pieces by Elizabeth Catlett, Charles White, and Jacob Lawrence. Artis looked at the Lawrence and had the classic art novice reaction: he thought “my kid could make that.”

All three artists from the Artis Collection whose work is being offered in The Signature Summer Auction have roots in the American South. Part of Anthony and Davida’s motivation to sell these works at Leland Little is to reintroduce them to the art market in the region that informed their work. They are eager for these artists to find the recognition in the South that they have had elsewhere.

Rembert, who was born in Cuthbert, Georgia, in 1945, passed away just two months ago, on March 31, 2021. When he was 19, he was arrested for participating in a civil rights protest, and then was lynched when he broke out of jail. Unbelievably, he survived both the lynching and the seven dark years that followed, doing hard labor on a chain gang. He describes those years as the worst of his life.

Many years later, with his wife Patsy’s encouragement, Rembert turned his painful memories into art, using techniques for carving and dyeing leather that he learned in prison from a fellow inmate. Most of his works are tooled leather, but he also made a number of works on paper, which he often hand-colored to make the impressions unique. We offered three of these prints by Rembert from the Artis Collection in The Signature Summer Auction.

For the "drapes," Gilliam painted unstretched canvases and draped them in large-scale installations. He has continued to develop his own unconventional techniques throughout his long career, as seen in the monotype printed on a collage-like base offered in The Signature Summer Auction. Gilliam’s work will be the subject of a major retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. in 2022.

Emma Amos lived and worked in New York most of her adult life, but she was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. Though the city, including the schools Amos attended, were segregated during her childhood, she found refuge and hope in the arts. In the artist’s statement on her website, Amos said that “I hope that the subjects of my paintings dislodge, question, and tweak prejudices, rules, and notions relating to art and who makes it, poses for it, shows it, and buys it. The work reflects my investigations into the otherness often seen by white male artists, along with the notion of desire, the dark body versus the white body, racism, and my wish to provoke more thoughtful ways of thinking and seeing…

The Signature Summer Auction
Saturday, June 12th
9:00am (EDT)