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Book Talk by Richard J. Powell: Colorstruck! Painting, Pigment, Affect
How Black painters use color to create meaning, provoke remembrance, stir emotion, and uplift the spirit.
Join ICA Miami for a book talk with distinguished art historian Richard J. Powell celebrating the publication of Colorstruck! Painting, Pigment, Affect. Drawing from his new book, Powell will explore the powerful role of color in Black American painting and consider how artists have used hue and pigmentation to create meaning, evoke memory, and articulate experiences of freedom and reclamation. The presentation will be followed by an audience Q&A.
Color does more than capture a viewer’s attention. It assaults one’s equilibrium physically and psychologically. In this stunning book, Richard Powell draws on the concept of “colorstruck,” a twentieth-century slang term describing prejudice toward people with darker skin complexions, to provide a new history of Black American art.
Powell charts the dynamics of paint and pigment in the works of artists such as Jacob Lawrence, Alma Thomas, Raymond Saunders, Sam Gilliam, Hervé Télémaque, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Nina Chanel Abney, and Henry Taylor. Using blue, green, yellow, orange, black, red, brown, and their combinations, he considers the historical and cultural contexts in which these colors unleash their visual magic and shows how the artists’ vibrant palettes collide with undercurrents of race in unanticipated and thought-provoking ways. Powell shares compelling insights into the powerful chromatic forces manifested through artists’ actions and viewers’ reactions.
A landmark work by an acclaimed art historian, this richly illustrated book offers a dazzling look at the transformative use of color by some of today’s most exciting painters, revealing how hue and pigmentation strike a chord for freedom and reclamation in life as well as art.
Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Speaker Biography
Richard J. Powell is the John Spencer Bassett Distinguished Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University. His many books include Going There: Black Visual Satire, Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture, and Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson. Powell is one of the foremost scholars of African American art and visual culture.