photo: Marianna Massey
From left: An untitled painting by Cora Kelley Ward in collectors Tim and Dana Miller’s home in Lafayette, Louisiana; Ward in 1950; a selection of Ward’s artworks from the 1960s and ’70s.
Her name was Cora Kelley Ward, and they’d arranged her paintings in piles on the floor of a loading bay. At the start of the sale there had been around eight hundred works to choose from. Now, four days later, there were fewer than three hundred left, and the price for a canvas had been reduced to a dollar a square foot, down from two dollars.