Actor Jesse Williams consigns Amoako Boafo portrait to Phillips

Actor and collector Jesse Williams is sending a 2017 portrait by Ghanaian-British artist Amoako Boafo to auction at Phillips this season. The painting, titled "Red Dress," depicts Thelma Golden, the director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem—a figure central to contemporary Black art in New York.

The work carries an estimate of $150,000 to $200,000, reflecting the current market reality for Boafo's paintings. His work has cooled from its pandemic-era peak, when collectors were bidding aggressively on emerging artists. In 2021, a Boafo painting set the artist's record at $3.4 million at Christie's Hong Kong. These days, his pieces typically sell between $100,000 and $300,000—still significant, but a recalibration from those heights.

Williams, who appears on ARTnews's Top 200 collectors list, has built a collection focused on artists from the African diaspora, often working alongside his ex-wife, Aryn Drake-Lee. The "Red Dress" portrait was loaned to Boafo's 2022 solo exhibition "Soul of Black Folks" at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, where it reached a wider audience before now entering the market.

This isn't Williams's first time selling through Phillips. In 2021, the auction house sold a figurative portrait by artist Noah Davis that had been in the couple's collection. For Williams, the auction block appears to be part of an active collecting strategy—rotating works, testing market appetite, and letting pieces move to new homes rather than holding indefinitely.

What's worth noting here is the ecosystem at play: a collector with genuine expertise in Black artists, a work that's been exhibited and documented, a subject who is herself a gatekeeper in the art world, and a market that's stabilizing after years of speculation. This is how contemporary art moves—not always up and to the right, but thoughtfully, through people who actually know what they're holding.