Wadsworth Jarrell
AfriCOBRA founder, and the painter of Revolutionary — Angela Davis built out of the letter B.
Wadsworth Jarrell was born in Albany, Georgia in 1929, studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and in 1968 was a founding member of AfriCOBRA — the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists — with Jeff Donaldson, Barbara Jones-Hogu, Jae Jarrell and Gerald Williams. The group set out a deliberate visual programme: bright Kool-Aid colours, the written word inside the image, and positive images of Black people made for a Black audience. Revolutionary, his 1971 portrait of Angela Davis assembled from the repeated letter B and words from her speeches, is the best-known painting to come out of it.
Institutional demand has driven this market since the AfriCOBRA reassessment of the 2010s and the major museum acquisitions that followed, and supply of period work is genuinely limited. Paintings from 1968 to 1975 lead by a wide margin. The palette depends on very saturated acrylic that is vulnerable to fading, so light history matters. Jarrell has also worked in printmaking and sculpture, and later paintings continue the programme. Provenance through the original Chicago exhibition record carries real weight.
If you own a work by Wadsworth Jarrell
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