Sotheby’s and the Yale School of Art will hold a benefit auction in New York this May, during The New York Sales, to support a long-term initiative to expand access to arts education. The sale brings together works donated by artists, alumni, collectors, and galleries, with proceeds directed to the Yale School of Art Dean’s Scholarship Fund.
Funds raised will be placed within Yale’s endowment and invested to provide long-term support for MFA student scholarships. Since 2021, the School has increased scholarship funding and broadened access to its Master of Fine Arts program, and is now working toward a further expansion of endowed scholarships aimed at supporting all students admitted through its need-blind admissions process, helping MFA graduates avoid the burden of debt.
The advisory committee includes Yvonne Force and Leo Villareal, Yana Peel, Lucas Zwirner, Komal Shah, and Mickalene Thomas, among others. Additional donors include Ilana Savdie, William Cordova, Wardell Milan, and Iwan and Manuela Wirth.
The offering is led by Richard Prince’s Spiritual America IV (2025, est. $500,000 to $700,000), which revisits imagery associated with a widely debated 1983 photograph. Mickalene Thomas, who received her MFA from Yale in 2002, is represented by Josephine Baker (2002, est. $250,000 to $350,000), a stylized portrait of the performer and activist. Do Ho Suh, an MFA graduate of 1997, contributes Staircase/s (2019, est. $200,000 to $300,000), a work on paper related to his large-scale fabric architectures.
Further works include Josef Albers’s Study for Homage to the Square (1976, est. $80,000 to $120,000), from the series he developed during his influential tenure leading design at Yale; Barkley L. Hendricks’s Quarry Shortcut (2008, est. $60,000 to $80,000), a Jamaican landscape by the artist who earned both his BFA and MFA at the School; and Howardena Pindell’s Untitled #123 (2024, est. $20,000 to $30,000), by an artist who received her MFA in 1967 and was among the first Black women to study art at the institution.
Additional lots include Dominic Chambers’s Blue Day Dream (Shikeith in Blue) (2021, est. $40,000 to $60,000), Tammy Nguyen’s With Rarest Juices, Guard Her (2024, est. $20,000 to $30,000), a further Barkley L. Hendricks work, Gratz 2 Yale, New Haven, CT (1971, est. $8,000 to $12,000), and Walker Evans’s Municipal Trailer Camp, Mangrove, Florida (1942, est. $5,000 to $7,000).
Founded in 1869 as the first professional fine arts school in the United States, the Yale School of Art was the first school at Yale to admit women. Its critique-driven pedagogy was shaped by Bauhaus master Josef Albers, who arrived in 1950 and helped relaunch the design department, and its faculty has included figures such as photographer Walker Evans. The School offers graduate study in Painting and Printmaking, Graphic Design, Photography, and Sculpture.
(Press Release)
