Key Points
- Walter and Cathy Shannon launched Black Crown, the only active Black-owned US fine art auction house.
- They debuted it in February at the 18th Annual Harlem Fine Art Show.
- The Shannons have run Louisville's E&S Gallery since 1989, dealing African American art.
- Black Crown's first auction is set for August in Martha's Vineyard, featuring Harlem Renaissance artists.
ARTnews has profiled Walter and Cathy Shannon, the husband-and-wife dealers behind Black Crown Art Auctions — the only active Black-owned and Black-operated fine art auction house in the United States. The couple launched the house in February at the 18th Annual Harlem Fine Art Show, and built it to hold value, authorship, and legacy for African American artists, gallerists, and collectors in Black hands.
The Shannons are not new arrivals. For nearly four decades they have dealt, curated, and collected African American art through E&S Gallery, which they opened in Louisville in 1989 and grew from a 2,500-square-foot strip-mall space into an 11,000-plus-square-foot building they own downtown. Through E&S they represent painter Kevin West, fiber artist Sherry Shine, and collage artist Yolanda Ward; Walter is a formally trained auctioneer who has, as he put it, "been around art and the auction process forever."
What makes Black Crown more than a new business is which link in the chain the Shannons are claiming. Black artists have made the work and Black collectors have bought it for generations, but the machinery that sets prices and confers legitimacy has stayed in other hands. "The platforms that determine artistic value, visibility, and legacy have not been ours," Cathy Shannon told ARTnews. "Others have profited from our culture while excluding us from ownership, authorship, and authority." Owning the auction house — not just the art — is a bid for that authority, the same instinct that ran through George E. Johnson's decision to take Johnson Products public rather than sell into someone else's distribution.
The first Black Crown auction is set for August on Martha's Vineyard — a longtime seat of Black affluence and cultural gathering — with a catalog the Shannons say leans on Harlem Renaissance artists. It reads as of a piece with a broader move to build and hold Black cultural institutions, from gallery walls to endowments like Young Guru's full-tuition Roc Nation School scholarship. For a market that has spent the last several years rediscovering Black artists at record prices, a Black-owned house setting those prices is the part that has been missing.
Source: ARTnews.
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