CHARLES SEARLES (1937 - 2004)
Warrior's Dance.

Acrylic on primed wood construction, 1998. Approximately 1041x953x140 mm; 41x37½x5½ inches.

Provenance: acquired from Sande Webster Gallery, Pennsylvania (with the gallery label verso); private collection.

Beginning in the late 1980s, Charles Searles created a new body of work in sculpture. He created three dimensional abstract works in painted wood, as both wall pieces and free standing sculpture, which he exhibited at Sande Webster Gallery, Philadelphia.

Born and raised in Philadelphia, Searles enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1967. He gained national attention with the inclusion of his 1970 painting, News, in the 1971 exhibition of Contemporary Black Artists in America at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1972, Searles graduated, following in the footsteps of his friends and fellow PAFA students, Barkley Hendricks (1967) and James Brantley (1971). With his 1971 William Emlen Cresson Memorial European Traveling Scholarship award, Searles travelled to Nigeria, Ghana, and Morocco after graduation. After returning from Africa, Searles began teaching at the Ile Ife Cultural Center in Germantown, which had become a center of the Black Arts movement in the late 1960s. His artworks today are found in numerous institutional collections, including the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.