A deliberate sale of a mysterious assortment of round 1,400 African artwork items that was deliberate for Thursday (April 4) morning in Houston, was referred to as off on the final minute after the works’ proprietor filed for chapter Wednesday night.
Sam Njunuri, the proprietor of the gathering, filed for Chapter 13 chapter the evening earlier than the sale, in response to native media stories by Click2Houston and Houston Touchdown. He had been ordered to promote the gathering to be able to pay $989,000 in damages to 2 former tenants who sued him after the locks on their house have been modified and their belongings have been taken.
The artefacts have been to be offered collectively, as one lot, with a beginning bid of $4,400. The sale’s abrupt cancellation annoyed many potential bidders, a few of whom solely heard about it as individuals began arriving on the web site of the sale Thursday morning, within the two cramped workplace rooms the place they’ve been saved for the previous two years.
“They might’ve publicised higher that it was cancelled as an alternative of permitting everybody to get excited,” Reginald Butler, a potential bidder from close by Meyerland, advised Houston Touchdown. “I’ve been ready years to see one thing like this.”
The huge assortment of masks, wooden carvings, clay sculptures, steel statues and extra first got here underneath public scrutiny in 2020 after native media investigations revealed that the artefacts had come into the possession of Harris County Precinct 1 commissioner Rodney Ellis and have been being saved at taxpayers’ expense in a renovated warehouse in south Houston. The revelations prompted a corruption investigation of Ellis. In 2021, a grand jury in Harris County declined to deliver felony prices towards Ellis.
Ellis’s workplace didn’t reply to The Artwork Newspaper’s inquiry concerning the cancelled public sale.
“I’m glad this lovely artwork assortment will discover a house, after being tied up for years as a part of a shameful political stunt by the outgoing district legal professional,” Ellis stated on the time, in response to Houston Public Media, in reference to Kim Ogg, the district legal professional whose workplace carried out the investigation.
Njunuri—an actual property agent based mostly in Houston who’s initially from Kenya—had at one time meant to create a museum to deal with his assortment. Nonetheless, in response to a Houston Chronicle report, he has no possession or provenance supplies for the objects in his assortment.
Njunuri has not commented publicly on the chapter submitting however, via a consultant and enterprise accomplice, Stanley Reid, has stated he nonetheless hopes the artwork might be proven in a museum. “This assortment has been occurring for greater than 20 years within the curiosity of doing one thing that will likely be of relevance to the neighborhood,” Reid advised KHOU.
