A Women’s HBCU Will Sell a Record-Smashing Aaron Douglas Painting of Harriet Tubman to Support Women’s Health Programs

A monumental painting by a leading artist of the Harlem Renaissance, showing a legendary figure from the struggle for African American liberation, will come to auction at Sotheby’s New York next month.

Aaron Douglas’s painting Harriet Tubman (1931) is expected to sell for between $2.5 million–$3.5 million, the highest estimate ever placed on a work by Douglas. The painting will go to the block as part of the house’s marquee modern art auction on November 18.

The first example by the artist ever to be featured in such a high-profile sale, it will go on public view at the house’s New York headquarters beginning November 7. The work carries a house guarantee, Sotheby’s confirmed to ARTnews.

The Douglas painting is on offer from the holdings of Bennett College, in Greensboro, North Carolina, one of just two historically Black women’s colleges in the US. Proceeds from its sale will be used to support initiatives including women’s health equity.

The painting is bound to set a new record for Douglas, whose auction high stands at just $600,000, achieved against a $150,000 high estimate in 2008, when the small painting Building More Stately Mansions (1944) sold at New York’s Swann Galleries, which is responsible for six of the artist’s top 10 prices at auction. Measuring six feet wide, Harriet Tubman is dramatically larger than any of his top works at public sales.

“The thing about the market for Aaron Douglas is the paintings don’t exist, period,” said David Galperin, Sotheby’s vice chairman and head of contemporary art, told ARTnews in a phone interview. “The most significant painting was offered nearly two decades ago. It was on Masonite and it’s about 20 inches high. Of course, since then, the market for modern art has evolved, and artists from Norman Lewis and Jacob Lawrence to Romare Bearden have been reappraised.“

He continued, “We haven’t seen a major work [by Douglas] come to auction ever because they are so, so rare. There have been a few that have sold privately at prices in excess of our low estimate, that have gone directly to museums like the Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art. These institutions have all acquired important works, but only in the past 15 years. I wouldn’t be surprised, given the importance of this work, if we see major museums globally compete for this piece.”

Kansas-born Douglas moved to Harlem in the 1920s and became a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance, which also included artists like Archibald J. Motley, Augusta Savage, Hale Woodruff, and James Van Der Zee. The era-defining cultural movement looked to create a new Black identity through literature, music, painting, photography, and thought, as Shantay Robinson wrote for ARTnews, noting that Douglas was inspired by African forms and used them to create art comparable to that of European modernists like Picasso and Matisse. “By flattening his figures, using bold geometric shapes, painting silhouettes, and employing African motifs,” she wrote of Douglas, “his work defined the visual art of the movement.” Philosopher Alain Locke would call Douglas “the father of Black American Art.”

Douglas’s dramatic painting shows Tubman on an elevated bit of turf, breaking a chain as others look on; Douglas described his subject as “a heroic leader breaking the shackles of bondage and pressing on toward a new day.” The painting echoes the composition of Eugène Delacroix’s 1830 masterpiece Liberty Leading the People, which hangs in the Louvre in Paris. Among the figures around Tubman is a man working his own land and a young woman reading a book. Harriet Tubman shares some formal qualities with Douglas’s most famous work, Aspects of Negro Life, painted just three years later.

The painting depicts the famed abolitionist and social activist who, after escaping slavery herself in 1849, went on some 13 death-defying missions back into the Southern states to rescue about 70 enslaved people, some of them her family and friends, via the network known as the Underground Railroad. She would serve as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army during the Civil War and would later also play a role in the movement for women’s suffrage. (Actress Cynthia Erivo depicted her in the 2019 feature film Harriet, which film critic Owen Gleiberman observed as a depiction “with a mournful fury.”)

“It’s powerful,” Bennett College’s acting president Ronald Carter said of the painting in a phone interview. “It’s awesome to look at the symbolism, and for me as an African American to actually say, Yes! When I looked at it I went, Yes! We are where we are because Harriet Tubman had a vision. We are who we are because we were able to do hard work to make things happen for our future. We are where we are because we are social activists.”

Carter, who first visited the school when he was 14 years old, continued, “Looking at it summed up my experience growing up in the ’50s and into the ’60s and the civil rights movement. If you look at it and see the breaking of the chains and people going into the future and what it can mean to be free, all these things are integral to our institutions. It represents the best of what we are.”

Since a 2007 traveling retrospective, which was organized by the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, Douglas’s art has been slowly on the rise. His work also prominently featured in the 2024 exhibition “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which first acquired an oil on masonite by the artist in 2015. The National Gallery of Art acquired two paintings by the artist in 2014.

Chicago philanthropist Alfred K. Stern commissioned the Douglas work for a dining hall at the college, which was founded in a church basement in 1873, just a decade after the Emancipation Proclamation. It became a women’s college in 1926, and, with Atlanta’s Spelman College, is one of just two all-women HBCUs.

The painting has hung for two deades at the North Carolina Museum of Art, where it went after the school, which does not have a museum, determined it couldn’t responsibly care for it. The decision to sell the painting comes after more than two years of deliberation, Carter said. The proceeds will support the school’s future growth, including expanding its Women’s Health Initiative, which was launched in January to addres healthcare disparities and advances health equity for women.

Bennett College’s alumnae, known as the Bennett Belles, include late artist Beverly Buchanan; US congresswoman Alma Adams; Carolyn Payton, the first woman and first African American director of the Peace Corps; and Glendora Putnam, the first African American woman to serve as assistant attorney general in Massachusetts. In 1955, Bennett became the first four-year college in the US to be led by a Black woman, Willa Beatrice Player.

During her tenure, Player welcomed Martin Luther King, Jr. to speak on campus in 1958 when the local chapter of the NAACP invited him to the city. Students also organized key civil rights sit-in protests in Greensboro. “People don’t know, but they worked out that plan of action right here on Bennett’s campus,” Carter said.

A new set of Bennett Belles made headlines this month when they marched about 45 minutes to a polling location to cast ballots in the state’s early voting after the county board of elections denied early polling locations on the campuses of Bennett, UNC Greensboro, and North Carolina A&T that have been open in past election seasons.

Carter added, “Everything about what we are doing represents not only the legacy and history but empowering the figure with Bennett Belles who will continue to shake the foundations of this country through their grace, grit and growth.”