Wadsworth Jarrell valuation
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.
What a work by Wadsworth Jarrell is worth
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Bio
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.
OBAC, Howard and Athens
Jarrell grew up on a farm near Athens, Georgia, and moved to Chicago after military service. In the mid-1960s he joined the Organization of Black American Culture, out of which came the Wall of Respect mural on Chicago's South Side, and in 1967 he married Jae Jarrell, who ran a clothing boutique and became a fellow founder of AfriCOBRA.
He taught at Howard University in Washington until 1977, when the family moved to Athens, Georgia, and he became an assistant professor at the University of Georgia; a journey to Africa that year drew him to the art of the Senufo. He retired from teaching in 1988 to concentrate on his own work.
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