What stood in the glass auction case in front of me was apparently someone’s collection. The porcelain figures were clean, and didn’t seem to have a scratch or nick on them. They appeared to be…
Month: March 2011
I was standing aside from the auction not paying much attention when the sounds of the auctioneers’ voices struck me. I’m so familiar with their chants that they’re like white noise to me. But on…
Postcards of black women with hats
Posted in Black history, Clothing, Photos, Postcards, and Style
In the auction catalog, the description of the postcards sounded a lot like “Crowns,” a book of photographs about black women and their love affair with hats: “Group of 275 real photo post cards of African…
Top dollar for Black Panthers posters
Posted in Art, and Black history
When I was in college, I was a radical of sorts, probably more in my mind than in actuality. It was during the early 1970s when college campuses were hotbeds of revolutionary ideas and action:…
The bids kept going higher and higher – past $5,000, then $6,000 and way past $10,000. I stretched my neck to take an even closer look at this item that was demanding so much money and causing…
A painting by artist Henry Bozeman Jones
Posted in Art
The two women waited patiently in the plain chairs at the auction house, through more than three hours of bidding on Chinese vases and furniture, mantle clocks, shoe-store furniture, stained-glass windows and then artwork by…
Show me a beautiful pair of shoes, and I become putty. Like that pair of Casadei wedges that came up for auction a few weeks ago. But it’s hard to get excited about an S-shaped…
A couple weeks ago, a fierce wind blew into the Philadelphia area and lingered, knocking over trash cans, uprooting trees and snapping their limbs, de-shingling rooftops, and sweeping up trash and debris. I had been out…
The pages of the photo album had been soiled by water, making them both coarse and puffy. The front and back covers were missing, and some photos had been deliberately cut out. It was lying in a glass…