Karl-Anthony Towns and Jordyn Woods will guest curate the latest edition of Sotheby’s Contemporary Curated auction, selecting ten works that offer a personal view of their developing collection and the artists they have come to admire. The selection will be exhibited at Sotheby’s New York from October 2 ahead of the live auction on October 7.
Spanning several generations of postwar and contemporary art, the group runs from Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Helen Frankenthaler to George Condo and Rashid Johnson, with Alma Thomas, John Chamberlain, Sam Gilliam and Ed Ruscha also represented. Instead of tracing a movement or a period, Towns and Woods have chosen works that hold personal meaning, each connected to a memory, a place or a relationship in their lives as collectors.
“Art holds memories and tells stories,” the couple said of the project. Their collecting, they explain, follows the associations a work gathers over time, whether with an artist, a place, a period in their lives or an experience shared together.
George Condo’s I Want My Brain Back, from 2020 and estimated at $1 million to $1.5 million, is among the most personal choices in the sale. Towns has connected its fractured figure to his own experience of that year, while the couple’s friendship with Condo and their familiarity with his practice have deepened their interest in his work. The painting distills the psychological intensity and surreal distortion that have long defined Condo’s approach to portraiture.
The highest estimates belong to two pillars of American Pop. Andy Warhol’s Flowers from 1964, estimated at $2.5 million to $3.5 million, carries a personal charge for Woods, who links flowers to family and remembrance and to a garden the couple hopes to plant one day. Formerly in the collection of the architect Robert A.M. Stern, the canvas comes from the celebrated series that marked a decisive moment in Warhol’s career.
Roy Lichtenstein’s Green Head from 1979 shares that $2.5 million to $3.5 million estimate. From the artist’s Expressionist series, it reworks the bold forms and heightened feeling of early twentieth-century Expressionism in his own Pop idiom. A second Lichtenstein, Interior with Painting of Nude (Study) from 1997, comes directly from the collection of Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein and is estimated at $1 million to $1.5 million.
The selection also turns to abstraction. Helen Frankenthaler’s Return and Exit from 1974 carries an estimate of $1.5 million to $2 million, while Alma Thomas’s Red Mums Display from 1977, estimated at $500,000 to $700,000, is a chrysanthemum-inspired canvas from the radiant late period of her career that Woods was drawn to first for its color. A 2021 watercolor on washi paper by Sam Gilliam completes the group.
Rashid Johnson, whose work the couple already collects and whom they count as a friend, is represented by Untitled (Anxious Men), estimated at $400,000 to $600,000. Towns speaks of it in terms of hardship and self-recognition, an “ugly beauty” he finds in the struggle to know oneself. The work belongs to one of Johnson’s central motifs, the anxious face built up in gestural marks as a study in psychological tension and identity.
Ed Ruscha’s Cities Across the Globe, from 1980 and estimated at $500,000 to $700,000, holds a biographical significance for Towns, who connects its reference to Los Angeles with Woods and the city where the couple met. Across the elongated canvas, the names of eleven cities, including Los Angeles, Miami and Mexico City, appear in diminutive type, turning geography into both subject and visual device.
The collaboration places Towns and Woods within a longer history of guest curators for Sotheby’s Contemporary Curated series. Established in 2013, the format has invited figures including Victoria Beckham, Robert Pattinson, Oprah Winfrey, Swizz Beatz, Karlie Kloss, Cynthia Erivo and Rich Paul to select works according to their own tastes and collecting perspectives.
Towns and Woods come to the project as collectors in their own right, with Johnson already part of their collection and Condo among the artists they have long admired and followed closely. Their choices for Sotheby’s range across Pop, postwar abstraction and contemporary art, held together less by a particular school or category than by the connections they have formed with individual artists and works. That approach gives the sale its coherence and, ultimately, its intimacy.
Sotheby’s Contemporary Curated will be on view in New York from October 2, with the live auction on October 7, 2026.
