Sotheby’s New York held its Now & Contemporary Evening Auction on November 18 at the newly opened Breuer building, featuring works by Black artists. Noah Davis’s “The Casting Call” (2008) sold for $2 million, setting a new auction record for the late artist, while Antonio Obá’s “Alvorada – Música Incidental Black Bird” (2020) achieved $1.016 million, nearly ten times its low estimate. However, major paintings by Barkley L. Hendricks and Kerry James Marshall went unsold, highlighting a mixed market for exceptional figurative works. The auction followed a blockbuster sale of Leonard A. Lauder’s collection, where Gustav Klimt’s portrait sold for $234 million.
The mixed results underscore the volatility and selectivity of the high-end art market, particularly for works by Black artists. While records for Davis and Obá signal strong demand for emerging and mid-career figures, the failure of Hendricks and Marshall to sell suggests that even heavily promoted masterpieces can fail to find buyers at elevated estimates. The auction also marked Sotheby’s inaugural sales at its new world headquarters in the Breuer building, a landmark with a storied institutional history, signaling a new chapter for the auction house’s presence in New York.