Claude Lawrence’s Works from the Estate

Keyes Art Gallery opens “New Works From the Estate,” an exhibition featuring the work of Claude Lawrence, on Friday, July 17, from 7 to 9 p.m.

Born in 1944, Lawrence is a product of South Side Chicago — a city that was on the forefront of the civil rights movement with its burgeoning arts, music and cultural scene, and jazz clubs of international repute. He picked up the tenor saxophone as a high school student and, after playing the Chicago jazz club circuit, in 1964 he set his sights on New York.

It was the first of his many moves to New York, where he maintained a career as a musician and, by the 1980s, as a serious painter, too. The art world then was over-hyped, over-saturated and unsupportive of African-American artists like Lawrence, according to artist and critic George Negroponte.

In 2013, three of Lawrence’s paintings were accepted into the permanent collection of the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill. A year later, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art followed suit. Then came the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the National African American Museum and Cultural Center, the National Gallery of Art, and dozens more, as well as private collectors.

In 2016, he made a public appearance and gave an alto saxophone performance for the opening of “Modern Heroics: 75 Years of African-American Expressionism” at the Newark Museum, where his work was also on view.

Keyes Art Gallery is at 45 Main Street at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor. Visit juliekeyesart.com for details.