Tupac Shakur’s Private Life Goes Up for Sale at Sotheby’s

The legendary rapper Tupac Shakur is getting the masterpiece treatment Sotheby’s, as poetry, letters and personal memorabilia valued at over $350,000 go up for bid online. An icon even before his 1996 murder in Las Vegas, Nev., at the age of 25, the musician has been granted his own gallery, Picasso-style, at the auctioneer.

It’s dominated by a towering floor-to-ceiling image of the rapper and a video of readings of his poetry. Cabinets filled with love letters he wrote as a teenager flank the room. The centerpiece is a book of poems and drawings Shakur sent to his godfather, Black Panther Jamal Joseph, while Joseph was incarcerated in Leavenworth Prison. The book alone carries an estimate of more than $200,000.

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Marlow Stern

Shakur’s possessions are one component of Sotheby’s ambitious 120+-item auction seeking to document “the art and influence of Hip Hop culture.”

It launched the sale (which closes online bidding tomorrow, Wednesday, in staggered one-minute intervals) with a raucous party Friday. It was a reunion of sorts of some of the industry’s biggest players: DJ Jazzy Jeff, longtime music partner of Will Smith; Ice-T producer Afrika Islam; Shakur’s godfather Joseph, and Master Gee of the Sugarhill Gang. Monica Lynch, former president of Tommy Boy Records, co-curated the sale. ”I went back in time to get some of the stuff [the sound equipment] we used in Colors and Squeeze the Trigger” for the auction, says Islam.

Ice-T missed the party, but is shown autographing some of the items on Instagram. At Sotheby’s, gold-painted boom boxes, bourbon shots, pomegranate cocktails, a fur coat and a red sports car parked in the lobby completed the picture.

This is Sotheby’s second sale of Hip Hip memorabilia. A Sept. 2020 sale, which included Biggie Smalls’ autographed plastic crown, raised $2 million. The crown worn by Smalls, another legendary rapper, rival and Shakur’s and victim of a still-unsolved 1997 murder, sold for $594,750. That sale came under criticism from the music industry, with Pitchfork’s Alphonse Pierre writing at the time: “But is Sotheby’s the right organization to canonize hip-hop culture?”

Of this sale, Don Geiger, a Washington, D.C., musician and hip hop t-shirt collector, says “to be kind, the alliance [with Sotheby’s] does not compute, but at least the artists may make money.”

“On one hand, its amazing, the upside of this auction,” says Queens, N.Y., rapper Mic Geronimo, who recorded “Time to Build” in 1995 with Ja Rule, Jay-Z and DMX. “I remember when people said the music wouldn’t last, and to see it go to a place like Sotheby’s is phenomenal. But its a double-edged sword, putting these things in glass cases where they are collected by the privileged, maybe for the wrong reasons. I hope the people who buy these things love them.”

Shakur was a “a historian, a seer and a journalist,” says Joseph, and his worldview, much like artist Jean-Michel Basquiat’s, was ahead of its time. Joseph was one of the “Panther 21” arrested and prosecuted in 1969. Shakur’s mother, Afena Shakur, was another and was pregnant with the rapper during much of her incarceration awaiting trial. (All 21 were later acquitted of the charges against them.)

Hanging out with Jazzy Jeff was Rocky Bucano, who heads the Universal Hip Hop Museum under construction in the Bronx. Its founders include Kurtis Blow and Grandwizzard Theodore, “Inventor of the Scratch.” Bucano praised the wide variety of material on view, and the fact that it was being taken seriously as history. But some of the items “should be in a museum,” he notes, and adds he is happily “accepting donations” for his institution.

More than a quarter-of-a-century after his death, Shakur’s murder remains unsolved, although there are a host of opinions and conspiracy theories.

Joseph believes Tupac was “targeted” because “he had an activism,” and “millions of ears listening to him around the world.” Joseph is famous for his 1969 firebrand speech to Columbia University students who began chanting “burn down the school” in response. He later became chair of film studies there and now serves as Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia’s School of the Arts.

At the time of writing, many of the items in the sale do not yet have a bid (although the rapper-owned leather jackets seem to be popular). However, one lot already up to $5,000 is a postcard, letter and illustrated envelope sent circa 1990 to Shakur’s then-girlfriend Cosima Knez. It reads, in part: “THIS IS TO LET YOU KNOW THAT I AM HERE 4 ETERNITY. I WILL NEVER LEAVE YOUR ♥... BUT ‘GOD’ KNOWS THAT 4U I WOULD GO THROUGH THE FIERY DEPTHS OF HELL.”