This talk probes a shared passion for brown silhouettes in art, whose proxies for Black bodies do more than pictorially nod toward a racial verisimilitude: they reorient the paintings and their audiences in cultural and chromatic terms and endow the works with catalysts that produce a special kind of affect, a psychological frisson, especially in Black audiences. Richard J. Powell closely examines the sensations that arise from the color brown in the paintings of the British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and the American artist Nina Chanel Abney.

This is the final talk of the six-part series “Colorstruck! Painting, Pigment, Affect,” presented by Richard J. Powell of Duke University for the 71st A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts.