A few weeks ago, Greg Kucera was poking around the ReStore and found Timothy Brown’s installation from the now defunct Crawl Space, titled Place/Setting. It appeared at the ReStore without attribution. (If anyone needed a dining set suspended in resin, that was their lucky day.) More recently, artist (and Kucera employee) Matt Browning was looking through a local Goodwill and found a framed photo by Chris Engman in pristine shape. The price? $5.
Engman is represented by Kucera, where the artist’s early photos, such as the found one, typically sell in the $1,200-$1,600 range. Turns out that Engman made only two prints of the image in question. One he gave to a friend, who still has it. The other he donated to Artist Trust.
What happened after that? Artist Trust is no more responsible for the art it sells than galleries are. In the case of Engman’s print, it got lucky. Its new owner is not just pleased to have found an Engman in his price range, he is not likely to mistreat the work of a peer.
This year’s Artist Trust auction takes place Saturday night. Choosing one artist out of the hundreds donating their work, I hope whoever buys Dawn Cerny’s We Get High (Not Very) (19″ x 24″,
Muslin, felt, silk) values it enough to take care of it. The prospect of it popping up at Goodwill in a banners’ box leaves me anything but high.
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