Christie’s notched new auction records for Firelei Báez, Joan Brown, and Olga de Amaral during its 21st-century evening sale on Wednesday, underscoring strong demand for historically under-recognized women artists.
Báez’s monumental 2021 painting Untitled (Colonization in America, Visual History Wall Map, Prepared by Civic Education Service) sold for $1,111,250, setting a new record for the Dominican-born artist whose work interrogates colonial histories through layers of archival maps, Caribbean symbolism, and swirly swaths of paint—in this case, densely rendered feathers. (All prices are reported including buyer’s premiums.)
Brown’s After the Alcatraz Swim #2 achieved $596,900, a benchmark for the Bay Area Figurative artist whose psychologically charged self-portrait draws from a near-fatal 1975 swim in San Francisco Bay.
The highest price of these three came for Amaral’s gold-laced fiber work Pueblo H (2011), which soared to $3,125,000—more than double her previous auction record. Offered from Elaine Wynn’s collection, the result reflects the Colombian artist’s surging international visibility, including her participation in the 2024 Venice Biennale and her retrospective, which debuted at the Fondation Cartier in Paris in 2024 before traveling to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami earlier this year. A pioneer of textile-based abstraction, Amaral’s architectonic woven compositions have increasingly been reevaluated as central contributions to postwar art.
Christie’s also set two other records for sculpture during the sale: a new high for a neon/sculptural work by Glenn Ligon, which realized $3,125,000, as well as a record for a three-dimensional work by Richard Prince, whose Untitled (Cowboy) sculpture, from 2011, brought in $3.4 million. Together, the results marked a significant night within an already strong season for artists historically underrepresented at the top end of the auction market.
