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How the Black Portraiture Boom Went Bust
The racial reckoning of 2020 sent prices soaring. Now, no one’s buying.
In October 2021, the artist Serge Attukwei Clottey watched anxiously as a painting he had made just a few months earlier went up for sale at the Phillips auction house in London. A month after the sale of Fashion Icons, Kwesi Botchway, a friend of Clottey’s in Ghana, saw one of his own paintings, a portrait of a red-eyed, indigo-skinned woman, go to auction with an estimated price range of $30,000 to $50,000 and then sell for $214,200. “A lot of people exploited us,” says Botchway, whose paintings were subject to a buying spree until late 2023, after which several publicly flopped: One sold for roughly a third of its presale estimate and one failed to sell at all.
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