Laverne Nelson Black

Laverne Nelson Black, sometimes styled LaVerne Nelson Black, was born in 1887 in Viola, Wisconsin, in the Kickapoo River Valley. A single Wisconsin local-history source gives an exact birth date of April 25, 1887, but that day is not corroborated by museum or auction-house records, which give the year only. After his family moved to Chicago, he studied at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, where he won a scholarship after his first year; no degree or graduation year is documented.

Black worked as an illustrator in Chicago, New York, and Minneapolis while spending his summers between 1908 and 1925 traveling in the American Southwest, painting Navajo and Apache subjects, horses, and landscape. Small bronze sculptures by Black were reportedly sold through Tiffany's in New York, according to the Tacoma Art Museum. In 1925 he moved to Taos, New Mexico, and became part of the Taos art colony; some accounts attribute the move to declining health. He later relocated to Phoenix, Arizona, where during the 1930s, through the federal Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project, he painted a mural for the Phoenix post office (some accounts describe murals, plural).

Black died in 1938, at about age fifty one. Sources disagree on the location: the Tacoma Art Museum records his death in Chicago, Illinois, while a Wisconsin local-history account places it in Phoenix, Arizona. One gallery source gives 1939 rather than 1938, but the majority of museum, gallery, and auction-house records agree on 1938, which this profile uses. The Medicine Man Gallery's biography of the artist describes a sudden illness in his final weeks that it describes as presumably caused by lead poisoning from paint, though that account is not corroborated by a second source and is presented here as reported rather than established fact.

There is no verified verbatim critical assessment of Black from a named critic in a major outlet in the available record. His standing instead rests on institutional and market indicators: inclusion in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, and the Denver Art Museum; a federal mural commission during the Depression; and steady, if modest, secondary-market demand from collectors of historic Taos and Southwestern painting. Dealers who handle his work, including Medicine Man Gallery, describe his reputation as having grown substantially in the decades after his 1938 death relative to his recognition during his lifetime, though this is a paraphrase of gallery marketing language rather than an independent critical assessment.

Black's market runs through specialist Western and American Indian art auction houses rather than through major contemporary-art salerooms. The best-documented result with a specific work, price, and house attached is Along the Old Trail, an oil on canvas, which sold for USD 238,000 at Coeur d'Alene Art Auction; the exact sale date is not published on the house's own artist results page. Other results from the same auction house include Along the Trail at USD 226,100 and Gathering for the Chief at USD 175,500, placing his strongest fully documented sales in a fairly tight band in the low-to-mid six figures. A separate market-data aggregator, MutualArt, lists a realized price of up to USD 531,200 for a Black painting, but without naming the specific work, auction house, or sale date, so this figure cannot be independently corroborated and is not used as the headline figure here. A separate, widely shared claim of a USD 2,130,000 sale in 2023 for a work titled The Pony Boy could not be located on Coeur d'Alene Art Auction's own published results page and has not been corroborated by a second independent source; it is not treated as his confirmed auction record here.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Laverne Nelson Black, and no gallery or estate could be confirmed as currently representing him; buyers should expect to authenticate through the specialist auction houses and dealers that handle his work rather than through a foundation or estate program. His fully documented auction results cluster in the low-to-mid six figures, and collectors should treat both the higher, unattributed MutualArt figure and the much higher, unconfirmed price reported for a work called The Pony Boy with caution until either can be checked against a primary saleroom catalog or a recognized price database. Basic biographical facts, including his exact death date and the city where he died, remain unresolved across otherwise reputable sources, which is a useful reminder that even well-collected historical artists can have real gaps in the documentary record.