Works donated by more than 100 artists—including Jeff Koons, Amy Sherald, Jenny Holzer, Hank Willis Thomas, Kara Walker and George Condo—are being sold to raise funds for the US presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. The sale, dubbed Artists for Kamala, has been organised by the Harris Victory Fund, with more than 100 works available for direct purchase while 41 pieces are being offered via an online auction on Artsy.
While the sales include some apolitical works or rare pieces by late artists (including Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Price, Carmen Herrera and Richard Serra), others are overtly political—or ambiguously patriotic. The sale portion features a poster print by Jonathan Horowitz, Harris '24 (2024), that includes Harris’s portrait at the end of a timeline of all the previous and current US presidents. And Maynard Monrow’s mixed-media text work Untitled/Democracy (2022) consists of the phrase “Democracy Come Hell or High Water” spelled out on a pink support.
Jeff Koons, American Flagpole (Gazing Balls), 2024, est $300,000 © Jeff Koons
Koons’s contribution to the auction, meanwhile, is a new work in his Gazing Balls series that involves red, white and blue reflective balls at the foot of a flagpole flying the US flag (as of this writing, the leading bid is $150,000). Sheila Hicks has contributed a new assemblage of linen threads to the auction, titled Irreversibly Evolving Democracy, estimated at $27,000. Another piece on offer in the auction, Josh Smith’s colourful apparent tribute to the late film-maker Jonathan Demme (Demme, 2017), is being offered not by the artist but from the personal collection of another Hollywood figure, the actor and art collector Leonardo DiCaprio.
Condo’s offering, the work on paper Women Are Beautiful (2024), is titled after the photographer Garry Winogrand’s series of the same name, the artist said in a statement. “I am hoping that Kamala Harris will restore the faith that we put in women in our society,” he added. “I believe the Harris-Walz team will look out for each and every one of us and that the light of their vision will deliver us from the darkness that we no longer wish to dwell in.”
George Condo, Women Are Beautiful, 2024, est $150,000 © George Condo
Sales from the Artsy auction portion of the Artists for Kamala fundraiser (which runs through 8 October) are expected to bring more than $1m, while the 117 pieces available for direct purchase have a cumulative value of more than $2.4m.
“Art has always been a powerful way to express one's vision and ideals and to mobilise people into action,” Julie Chavez Rodriguez, the manager of the Harris for President campaign, said in a statement. “The artworks in the Artists for Kamala collection do so brilliantly. We are so grateful to the art community for using their creativity, trusted voices, and powerful work to support Vice President Harris’s campaign to turn the page on hate and division, and move our country forward.”
Jenny Holzer, Selection from Truisms: There are too few…, 2023, est $200,000 © Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
No comparable “Artists for Trump” fundraiser appears to exist in support of the former president Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance. However, their campaign’s official store includes a vast range of products, including several with a version of Trump’s mugshot in the style of Shepard Fairey’s famous Hope poster design for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. (Fairey, meanwhile, has contributed multiple works to the Artists for Kamala fundraiser.)
Many influential artists, collectors and philanthropists—including several involved in the Artists for Kamala campaign—have very prominently pledged their support for Harris and Walz. Many of the more right-leaning collectors and arts philanthropists in the US put significant funds towards supporting Trump's opponents in the Republican primaries earlier this year.
In 2020, David Zwirner hosted a similar fundraising sale of art by more than 100 artists in support of Joe Biden's campaign via the gallery's online sales channel, Platform.