A painting by an African-born artist sold for $10.7 million. Here's who actually got paid

A painting by an African-born artist sold for $10.7 million. Here's who actually got paid

On 15 November 2023, at a Sotheby's evening sale in New York that totalled $310 million, Julie Mehretu's 2008 painting "Walkers With the Dawn and Morning" hammered at $9.5 million and closed at $10.7 million with fees, a new high for an artist born in Africa at auction. The headline is real. What it doesn't tell you is who received the money.

What's known

Mehretu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and has worked in the United States since childhood; she's usually described as Ethiopian-American, and her record that November broke her own prior mark of $9.3 million, set the month before. Both facts are well documented. What's less often said in coverage of a record sale like this one: it was a resale. Someone who already owned the painting consigned it to Sotheby's. The proceeds, minus Sotheby's commission, went to that consignor. Not to Mehretu.

Whether an artist gets anything at all from a resale is a matter of law, not custom, and the law varies sharply by where the sale happens. The UK and EU have required an artist's resale right since a 2001 EU directive, in force in the UK from 2006; something like 90 countries now have some version of it. The United States has none at the federal level. California has a narrow state-level version with a contested legal history. This sale happened in New York.

Where Okasen data fits

Nowhere. Mehretu isn't an artist Okasen currently tracks, and resale-royalty law is a legal mechanism, not a market signal any Okasen index measures.

What it means

A record price at a major evening sale is real evidence of demand for an artist's work. It is not, by itself, evidence that money from that specific sale reached the artist. In a jurisdiction without a resale right, structurally, it didn't, not because of anything unusual about this sale, but because that's how the law works absent a right built to change it.

This isn't a story about hardship. Mehretu is one of the most commercially successful living painters, gallery relationships and primary sales have made her wealthy independent of any single auction result. The point is the mechanism itself: the next time a headline reads "African artist's work sells for millions," the honest first question is whether that sale was a resale, and if it was, whether the artist had any legal claim on it at all.