Black art for people who collect it.

Duty-free is a category, not a compliment

Original paintings, drawings, prints and sculpture enter the US free under Chapter 97 of the tariff schedule. Craft, textiles, furniture and anything mass-produced do not — they pay their ordinary material rate.

• Sculpture is capped at the original work or model and the first twelve castings, replicas or reproductions. Number thirteen isn't duty-free sculpture — 19 CFR 10.48(b).
• The canvas from an Accra gallery is Chapter 97. The carved bowl from the craft market usually isn't.
• Your invoice must name the artist and say whether the work is original, a replica, a reproduction or a copy — 19 CFR 10.48(a).
• Prints should carry the artist's genuine signature or mark; without it you'll be asked for other proof of authenticity — 19 CFR 10.48(d).
• Shipments over $2,500 fall outside informal entry, which in practice means a customs broker — 19 CFR 143.21(a).
• Buying the work buys the object, not the right to reproduce it. Copyright stays with the artist unless it is transferred in writing — 17 U.S.C. § 202.

The wood will catch you out

Not the painting — the frame and the stretcher. Phase VII of the Lacey Act declaration schedule took effect 1 December 2024 and is the broadest yet: it reaches every remaining plant-product tariff code that isn't 100% composite material, from plywood and cork to handbags and footwear. Furniture came in under earlier phases — APHIS. The whole Dalbergia genus, including African blackwood, sits on CITES Appendix II.

• Ask for the work to ship unframed. Cheaper, safer, and it removes the species question entirely.
• Elephant ivory is a practical total bar. There is no buy-and-import channel.
• Shell, feather, bone and horn all trigger checks nobody expects.
• A CITES permit comes from the country's CITES authority, not its culture ministry. A museum letter has no effect.

You are almost certainly not insured

This is the gap that costs real money, and all three layers fail differently.

• Travel policies exclude "antiques and collector items" by name and cap around $300 per article.
• Standard homeowner's cover is named-perils. A truck overturning is covered. A handler dropping the crate is not.
• Shipper liability defaults to $0.60 per pound. A 40-lb canvas worth $180,000 carries $24 of carrier liability.
• Hand-carrying internationally caps at roughly $2,000 under the Montreal Convention.

Bind a scheduled fine-art rider before the trip, with transit covered. Get the bill of sale signed and dated with artist, title, medium and dimensions — that's what you'll schedule against.

How we check this

Every price here was read on the seller's own live page on the date stamped at the top of this site — nothing estimated, nothing rounded. Legal statements cite the statute or regulation rather than commentary, and where an official source and a common belief disagree, the statute wins and we name the belief.

Every legal source in this section is linked, and every one of them was read on 3 September 2026. Click the citation and you land on the regulation itself, not on someone's summary of it. If a link has gone stale, that is a fault worth telling us about.

A .gov page isn't automatically current. Researching this site turned up a live US Customs page stating the opposite of the regulation it describes. So everything carries the date it was checked, and you can re-check the one fact that matters to you.

Origin isn't subject. Work tagged Accra often ships from London, and work tagged Bahia is often by a European artist painting Pelourinho. We record shipping origin separately, and say when an artist isn't from the place the work depicts.