The Dinner Party That Set Faith Ringgold's Auction Record

Faith Ringgold's, Dinner at Gertrude Stein's: The French Collection Part II, #10 (1991) sold for $1.57m, more than twice the low estimate at Sotheby's in New York on May 13, 2024.

The work, acrylic on canvas and ink on stitched printed and dyed fabric, which had a guarantee, had been traded once in the past.

The tapestry is one of the 12 the artist created in a series featuring a fictional young Black artist, Willia Marie Simone, who was based on Ringgold herself and her mother.

Measuring seven-feet wide, it was among the fabric pieces featured in Ringgold's critically acclaimed retrospective organized by the New Museum in 2022, which toured the US until 2024, the year of the artist's death.

The avant-garde writer and patron Gertrude Stein is the center of Ringgold's work, shown beneath her celebrated portrait by Picasso. Alongside sits her partner Alice B. Toklas. The tapestry also features other Americans in Paris, including Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin and Langston Hughes.

The work came from the collection of Stanley and Mikki Weithorn. He was a lawyer who defended social and political causes, while Mikki was a speech pathologist who served as a board member and docent at several art museums across US after she retired. They only began collecting in the late 1980s and acquired Ringgold's work shortly after it was first shown in 1991.

The previous record was set by *Maya's Quilt of Life * (1989), which sold for $461,000 at Swann Galleries on September 15, 2015. The work had not been traded before.