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. Learn more about the series.
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.
Registration is required to attend in person or virtually.