Bennett College, one of only two historically Black women’s colleges in the country, is putting its Harriet Tubman up for sale. Sotheby’s will auction Aaron Douglas’s 1931 painting in New York on Nov. 18, with an estimate of $2.5 million to $3.5 million.
The canvas shows Tubman breaking chains. Douglas, a leading artist of the Harlem Renaissance, painted it for the Greensboro, N.C., college, and Chicago philanthropist Alfred K. Stern commissioned it in the early 1930s. The proceeds will fund Bennett’s Women’s Health Initiative, which the college says is meant to address healthcare disparities and advance health equity for women.
The top estimate is nearly six times Douglas’s previous auction record of $600,000, set in 2008, according to the art news site Artsk, which also reported that the canvas is his largest ever offered at auction. Sotheby’s expects museums around the world to compete for it.
The painting has not hung at Bennett for years. The college has no museum to care for a work this large, so it has been on long-term loan to the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh since the early 2000s. Bennett says the sale also marks 100 years since it became a women’s college. Its acting president said the decision followed more than two years of deliberation, Artsk reported.
“This will help support a vibrant future for the school and its students,” said Cassandra Jones Havard, chair of Bennett’s board of trustees.
Bennett’s choice is a defensible one. A painting in a loaned-out crate does nothing for the women on campus, and health care for Black women is a place where money is badly needed. Black women in the United States die in pregnancy and childbirth at far higher rates than white women, and a school that trains them is entitled to spend its assets on that.
But the sale also shows what small HBCUs are asked to do. Colleges that were shut out of white philanthropy for generations are still holding the art that Black genius left them, and sometimes have to sell it to carry out their mission. A Douglas canvas of Tubman is also part of the national record of Black freedom, and once it goes to the block, nothing guarantees it stays where Black students and families can see it.
The painting goes on public view at the Breuer building in New York on Nov. 7. The hammer falls Nov. 18. The question for Black museums, collectors and donors with deep pockets is whether they show up to bid.
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