Walkers With the Dawn and Morning

A painting made for New Orleans

Curator Dan Cameron conceived of an international biennial for New Orleans during a visit to the city in early 2006, months after Hurricane Katrina. At a public meeting with local artists he heard their frustration at the slow pace of rebuilding and wanted to help. In January 2007 he founded a nonprofit to stage it, and Prospect.1 New Orleans ran from November 2008 to January 2009, showing 81 international artists at more than 24 venues across the city.

Mehretu painted Walkers With the Dawn and Morning for that exhibition, and it was first shown at the New Orleans Museum of Art. The Prospect.1 catalogue illustrated it on pages 244 and 245 under the shorter title Walkers with Dawn. Made in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, it has been described as a celebration of the Black community's survival and resilience.

The title comes from a short poem by Langston Hughes, the Harlem Renaissance poet, now in the public domain: 'Being walkers with the dawn and morning, / Walkers with the sun and morning, / We are not afraid of night, / Nor days of gloom, / Nor darkness, / Being walkers with the sun and morning.' It appeared in the 1925 anthology The New Negro.

The artist who maps power

Julie Mehretu was born in Addis Ababa on November 28, 1970, the first child of an Ethiopian geography professor and an American Montessori teacher. The family fled political turmoil in 1977 and settled in East Lansing, Michigan, where her father taught economic geography at Michigan State University.

She earned a bachelor's degree at Kalamazoo College, with a junior year at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal, and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997, where she studied painting and printmaking. Residencies followed at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2005 she received a MacArthur Fellowship.

Since the late 1990s she has built her large canvases on architectural drawings, maps and construction plans, then layered gestural marks over them. 'I think architecture reflects the machinations of politics,' she has said, 'and that's why I am interested in it as a metaphor for those institutions. I don't think of architectural language as just a metaphor about space, but about spaces of power, about ideas of power.'

The year it was painted

Mehretu was moving fast in 2007 and 2008. In 2007 a New York investment bank commissioned a lobby mural the size of a tennis court for $5 million. That spring she was a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and during her time there she made Grey Area, a series of seven paintings exploring Berlin as a historical site of building and destruction. She married the artist Jessica Rankin in 2008.

Outside the studio, 2008 was the year the financial system cracked. The federal government took control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on September 7, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy on September 15, and on November 4, the same month Prospect.1 opened, Barack Obama was elected the first African American president. On September 1 Hurricane Gustav came ashore in Louisiana, three years after Katrina.

From the biennial to the record

According to the auction catalogue, the painting was bought from the artist's New York gallery of the time by the owner who later consigned it. One market report says it had changed hands only once before 2023. Press reports identified the consignor as the Los Angeles collector and former talent agent Michael Ovitz, who sent it to auction anonymously along with several other works.

It was offered on November 15, 2023, in an evening sale of contemporary art in New York, estimated at $7 million to $10 million. The lot was guaranteed and backed by an irrevocable bid. Bidding opened at $5.5 million and climbed quickly to a hammer price of $9.5 million, won by a specialist in the room bidding for an anonymous client.

The official result was $10,737,500. One market analyst noted that this figure was reported net of the fees paid to the third-party guarantor and calculated that the full price with all premiums would have been about $11.25 million, which would have made it the top lot of the evening. One report gave the price as $10.38 million; the auction catalogue result and most coverage give $10,737,500.

The sale broke the record Mehretu had set only the month before, when an untitled 2001 painting sold at auction in Hong Kong for about $9.32 million. Walkers added about $1.42 million to her high mark and set the auction record for any African-born artist. It was also, by reports, the highest price for a Black female artist, living or dead.

How to read it

The canvas measures 95 5/8 by 142 1/8 inches, nearly eight by twelve feet. One market writer described it as a tour de force of linework and calligraphy, intersected by red strips that activate a mostly grisaille, or gray, composition.

It came to auction four years after the opening of her 25-year traveling retrospective, co-organized in 2019 by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, which presented about 75 paintings and works on paper dating from 1996.

What the record says about her market

Mehretu's auction prices rose steadily for two decades. A painting called Ringside sold for about $62,000 in 2003. Untitled 1 (2001) brought $1.02 million in September 2010 against an estimate of $600,000 to $800,000. Records followed at $2.32 million in 2010, about $4.6 million in 2013, $5.64 million in 2019 and $6.5 million in 2021 before the two 2023 sales.

The record arrived as institutions were consolidating her standing. Time named her one of the 100 most influential people in 2020, the Whitney gave her retrospective an entire floor in 2021, and The New York Times called her a rare contemporary Black female painter who had already entered the canon. In 2023 she was one of two women whose works ranked among the top ten contemporary auction prices.

She has not profited from the resale: as one analyst pointed out, the artist received nothing from the 2023 transaction. Her work continues to appear in museums, including a 2024 painted-glass window, Uprising of the Sun, about 85 feet tall, installed at the Barack Obama Presidential Center.

The numbers

Medium

Ink and acrylic on canvas

Dimensions

95 5/8 x 142 1/8 in. (242.9 x 361 cm)

Catalogue raisonne

No catalogue raisonne number published in the sources consulted

Exhibition

Prospect.1 New Orleans, New Orleans Museum of Art, Nov. 2008 - Jan. 2009 (catalogue pp. 244-245, as Walkers with Dawn)

Current owner

Private collection; the 2023 buyer was not named

Timeline

1. Nov 28, 1970

   Julie Mehretu is born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

2. 1977

   Her family leaves Ethiopia for East Lansing, Michigan.

3. 1997

   Mehretu earns her MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design.

4. 2005

   She receives a MacArthur Fellowship; Hurricane Katrina devastates New Orleans.

5. 2006

   Curator Dan Cameron conceives a New Orleans biennial after visiting the city.

6. Jan 2007

   Cameron founds the nonprofit that will stage Prospect.1.

7. 2008

   Mehretu paints Walkers With the Dawn and Morning for the biennial.

8. Nov 2008

   The painting goes on view at the New Orleans Museum of Art in Prospect.1, which runs to January 2009.

9. Sep 2010

   Untitled 1 (2001) sells for $1.02 million at auction, against an estimate of $600,000 to $800,000.

10. 2019

    Her mid-career retrospective, co-organized by LACMA and the Whitney, opens.

11. 2021

    The Whitney devotes an entire floor to the retrospective.

12. Oct 5, 2023

    An untitled 2001 painting sells for about $9.32 million at auction in Hong Kong, a record for an African-born artist.

13. Nov 15, 2023

    Walkers With the Dawn and Morning sells at auction in New York for $10,737,500, a new record.

The world in 2008

• Jun 3, 2008

  Barack Obama secures the Democratic presidential nomination.

• Aug 8, 2008

  The Beijing Summer Olympics open; Michael Phelps wins a record eight gold medals.

• Sep 1, 2008

  Hurricane Gustav makes landfall in Louisiana.

• Sep 7, 2008

  The federal government takes control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

• Sep 15, 2008

  Lehman Brothers files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

• Nov 4, 2008

  Barack Obama is elected the first African American president.

• Dec 1, 2008

  Economists declare the U.S. has been in recession since December 2007.

Price record

A realized auction price is what a buyer actually paid on the date shown, including the buyer's premium where the sale reported it. It is the strongest kind of reference price, and it is a record of one sale of one object on one day, not a promise of what the next example will bring.

By reference price, Walkers With the Dawn and Morning is number 21 of 100 in the art entries of the FLOAT 100. 88 of those 100 rest on a realized sale; the rest carry an asking price or a guide value, and each page says which. Rank within the FLOAT 100 itself (21 here) is editorial: how much an object defines its field, not price alone.

Did you know

• The painting's hammer price was $9.5 million, higher than the $9.2 million hammer of the lot that was listed above it as the evening's top seller; the difference came down to how guaranteed lots were reported.
• The Prospect.1 catalogue printed the painting under a shorter title, Walkers with Dawn.
• Mehretu's previous record lasted just six weeks, from early October to mid-November 2023.
• The Hughes poem behind the title is only six lines long and is in the public domain.
• Mehretu has said she sees architectural drawings as being about 'spaces of power,' not just space.
• Twenty years before this sale, a Mehretu painting sold at auction for about $62,000.