Daniel Larue Johnson (1938 - 2017) Untitled (Black Box Series)

Lot description

DANIEL LARUE JOHNSON (1938 - 2017) Untitled (Black Box Series) Assemblage in a painted wooden box, circa 1965. 162x149x108 mm; 6 3/8x5 7/8x4 1/4 inches. Provenance: the estate of Naomi Caryl Hirshhorn, Los Angeles, CA. Naomi Caryl (1931 - 2022) was a singer, actress, artist and a longtime collector and patron of the arts in Los Angeles. She was the daughter of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, the financier, philanthropist, and collector of modern art whose gift to the nation of nearly 6,000 works of art established his namesake museum on the National Mall. She also was a longtime friend of Joan Wheeler Ankrum, the founder of the Ankrum Gallery in Los Angeles, whose gallery exhibited many African American artists. This small assemblage is an excellent example of Daniel LaRue Johnson's early Black Box series. Born in 1938 in Los Angeles, Johnson studied painting, sculpting and printmaking at the Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts) in the early 1960s. After graduating in 1965, Johnson received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship, which allowed him and his wife, artist Virginia Jaramillo, to live in Paris. There he studied with Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti before settling back in New York. With his return to the US, Johnson shifted to colorful abstract paintings and Minimalist steel sculpture. Johnson's work has been exhibited in the Whitney Annual, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1964, 1970), the Some American History at the Institute for the Arts, Rice University, Houston (1971), Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and MoMA, New York (2011-2013) and the traveling exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, the Tate Modern, London (2017).