How the Black Portraiture Boom Went Bust

The racial reckoning of 2020 sent prices soaring. Now, no one's buying.

- By Rachel Corbett

Serge Attukwei Clottey's Fashion Icons sold for £340,200 in October 2021.

IN OCTOBER 2021, the artist Serge Attukwei Clottey watched anxiously as a painting he had made just a few months earlier went up for sale at the Phillips auction house in London. The portrait—of a stylish Black couple whose clothes were rendered in colorful strips of duct tape—was his first ever to go to auction.

It was “really, really scary,” Clottey, now 39, tells me. He wouldn't profit directly from the sale—he had already sold the piece to a collector, who had brought it to Phillips—but a low auction price could devalue all his other work. A high price could set off a speculative furor. For years, Clottey had been known mostly for his tapestries, made from tile-like pieces of discarded plastic bottles. One had sold for $6,875 in 2019. But portraiture was a fresh experiment.

The auction house had estimated the value of the painting, titled Fashion Icons, to be between £30,000 and £40,000—on par with Clottey's other prices at the time. But in the end it went for ten times that range: £340,000. Over the next few months, Clottey's paintings were quickly brought to auction, where many sold for six figures.

That's when the “craze” began, Clottey tells me. In late 2021, strangers from around the world started flooding his Instagram, his galleries, and his studio with requests to buy his art. Some showed up in Accra in person. And he wasn't alone in this surreal experience: The same thing was happening to dozens of other young Black artists, especially those from Africa and those who painted portraits of Black people. A month after the sale of