This was my first museum sale, within weeks of leaving my interesting but stressful and underpaid job as Director of Collections and Exhibitions at the Allentown Art Museum. I found the painting in a high-level antiques shop in Easton, PA. Attracted to its dark setting of a mine, I discovered that the painting was by a prominent black Philadelphia artist, Allan Freelon. Coincidentally, the Woodmere Art Museum had sponsored a Freelon retrospective just a year or two earlier, which I had missed viewing. Having a nodding acquaintance with the Woodmere's curator, I contacted him to ask if there had been an exhibition catalogue as I had stumbled across an interesting but atypical Freelon, and wanted to do research on the artist. "No catalogue was published," I was told. I then asked if I could stop by to view the Woodmere's Freelon art holdings but was told they had nothing by the artist. The curator then asked me if the painting I found was available for sale. "I think so," I said and went back to the shop to transact the purchase, assisted by a very generous boyfriend who enjoyed my art adventures. Perhaps six weeks later, I sold the painting for several times its asking price. By coincidence, my colleague and friend, paintings conservator Steven Erisoty, examined the painting for the Woodmere, and testified to its good condition recommending only a surface cleaning. When I viewed the painting installed in one of the Woodmere's galleries, I thought maybe I sold it too quickly, as I might have gotten even more once it had been cleaned. But hey! a bird in the hand....what made it even more cool was that a friend and patron scoffed at me when I told him how much I planned to ask for it. I quietly told him some weeks later that the painting had sold at my price. Nuff said!

Allan Freelon, "Nine Coming Up," 1953