New Yorker Nancy Cavaliere started trending online after sharing her thrift store find on social media. Cavaliere unknowingly purchased four authentic ceramic plates by Pablo Picasso from a Salvation Army joint in New York for around $8. Little did she know these plates would be the giveaway that would continue to be given, as three of them went up for auction and raised a total of $41,000.
Cavaliere started saving in 2014 to furnish her apartment before it became a fun hobby that became a habit. In a recent TikTok video, she recalled the experience of delving into her frequently visited local Salvation Army on her way home from work on a hot summer day in 2017 and finding the set of four plates sitting on a table in a particularly uninspiring china section. .
“I was going to buy them to make a table runner because although I knew very well art furniture and period styles, I did not know that Picasso made ceramics”, she says.
When she got home and googled the black plates depicting abstract faces for more information, she found she was sitting on a set of authentic Picasso “Black Face” ceramic hand painted plates. ” from the 1940s, made at the Madoura pottery workshop in Vallauris, a seaside town in the south of France. Picasso had designed, painted and signed or stamped more than 3,500 ceramic works spread over 633 collections between 1947 and 1971, and its fleet of working artists produced an additional 120,000 “authentic replicas” known as “Edition Picassos”.
Cavaliere said she contacted all New York-based auction houses for authentication and price estimates and was told her plates were worth around $3,000 to $5,000 each. She raked in far more than that – three of the four plates sold for $12,000, $13,000 and $16,000 respectively, and Cavaliere kept a plate signed by Picasso in a safe to auction later as gift for her daughter when she is older. . “It’s crazy that I actually own something signed by Picasso himself,” Cavaliere said in his video.
“It wasn’t hard to part with them because they weren’t mine, I had no emotional attachment to them,” Cavaliere said. Hyperallergic. “The only thing that made me sad was wondering who they might have belonged to, and why or how they ended up in a thrift store in the first place.”
Apparently, lightning can strike the same spot twice, as this isn’t even the first time Cavaliere has made a major profit from a thrift store find. A few summers ago, she spent $20 on a genuine Alexander McQueen jumpsuit from one of her early collections and sold it for over $8,000.
Some of us are born lucky. But Cavaliere’s number one tip for newbies and savings enthusiasts is to “research, research, research!”
“Learn to spot things that might be worth something, and learn about things like silk, wool, and natural fibers that would make a garment more cost-effective than a polyester garment,” she said. “Learn more about art, different styles and artists. Always, ALWAYS, Google “thrift store near me” if you have spare time, wherever you are, and POP IN. The first rule about saving is that you have to be in it to earn it. The further you go, the more likely you are to find something amazing.
