How Black painters use color to create meaning, provoke remembrance, stir emotion, and uplift the spirit
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, Herv T l maque, 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
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 will be in conversation with Tope Folarin, a Nigerian-American writer based in Washington DC, who serves as Director of the Institute for Policy Studies and the Lannan Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Georgetown University. He is the recipient of the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Whiting Award for Fiction, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other awards. Tope serves as a board member of the Avalon Theater in Washington DC, the Pen/Faulkner Foundation, and as a member of the President’s Council of Pathfinder. In addition, he will serve as the inaugural critic-at-large for The Georgia Review in 2025.