In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney @ The Drawing Center, New York

In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney

The Drawing Center, New York

May 30 – September 14, 2025

Beauford Delaney 

Self-Portrait, 1964

Watercolor and gouache on paper, 

29.75 x 22.25  inches (75.6 x 56.5 cm)

Courtesy Ruth and Joe Fielden, Knoxville 

Photo credit: Knoxville Museum of Art 

© Estate of Beauford Delaney, 

by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire, 

Court Appointed Administrator, 

Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

Beauford Delaney 

Charcoal of a Black Woman, 1929

Charcoal on laid paper

19 5/8 x 14 3/4 inches / 49.8 x 37.5 cm 

19 1/4 x 14 inches / 48.9 x 35.6 cm sight size

Private Collection

© Estate of Beauford Delaney, 

by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire, 

Court Appointed Administrator, 

Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

Beauford Delaney 

James Baldwin, 1945

Pastel on paper, 23.5 in. x 18.5 inches

MacDowell, Gift of the Baldwin family to MacDowell (2018)

© Estate of Beauford Delaney, 

by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire, 

Court Appointed Administrator, 

Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

Beauford Delaney 

Yaddo, 1950 

Pastel on paper, 18 x 24 inches 

Courtesy of the Knoxville Museum of Art 

Image credit: Knoxville Museum of Art

© Estate of Beauford Delaney, 

by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire, 

Court Appointed Administrator, 

Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

The Drawing Center presents In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney, featuring works on paper by the American artist BEAUFORD DELANEY (1901–1979). The exhibition is the first comprehensive Delaney exhibition at a New York museum in over three decades, and the first-ever exhibition devoted to drawing—the medium that was central to his oeuvre.

Beauford Delaney holds a place in the history of American art of the postwar period that is challenging to define. Born in 1901 in Knoxville, Tennessee, he grew up in the segregated South and studied fine art at the Massachusetts Normal School in Boston in the late 1920s. By 1929, he had moved to New York, where he continued his artistic practice at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, producing realistic portraits and Cubist-inflected street scenes of the Greenwich Village neighborhood where he lived. In 1953, at the urging of his friend, James Baldwin, Beauford Delaney moved to Paris, the city where he would spend the rest of his life. In Paris, Delaney drew and painted portraits, while at the same time, he developed an all-over calligraphic abstract painting style. For two decades, he painted abstract and figurative works simultaneously, sometimes combining both languages by inserting barely visible figures into abstract compositions, or by working up backgrounds full of abstract incident that often competed with the fully realized portraits embedded within them. Beauford Delaney produced drawings from the beginning of his career in the early 1920s in Knoxville, until his mental illness prevented him from continuing in the early 1970s. Although he rarely drew preparatory sketches, his works on paper closely followed techniques and motifs he used in his paintings.

Beauford Delaney 

Central Park, 1950 

Pastel on paper, 18 x 24 inches / 45.7 x 61 cm

Private Collection

© Estate of Beauford Delaney, 

by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire, 

Court Appointed Administrator, 

Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

Beauford Delaney 

Paris, 1953

Pastel on paper 

19 x 24 1/2 inches / 48.3 x 62.2 cm 

18 5/8 x 24 1/4 inches / 47.3 x 61.6 cm sight size

Private Collection

© Estate of Beauford Delaney, 

by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire, 

Court Appointed Administrator, 

Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

Beauford Delaney

Self-Portrait, 1962 

Oil on canvas, 25 1/2″ x 21 1/4″ x 3/4″

Private Collection

Collection of halley harrisburg and Michael Rosenfeld

© Estate of Beauford Delaney, 

by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire, 

Court Appointed Administrator, 

Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

Beauford Delaney

Self-Portrait, 1970

Gouache on paper, 12 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches

Private Collection

© Estate of Beauford Delaney, 

by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire, 

Court Appointed Administrator, 

Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

For Beauford Delaney, drawing was both a sanctuary and a space for experimentation. Through his works on paper, he could explore ideas with intimacy and spontaneity, yet this vital area of his oeuvre has been largely overlooked. As a Black, queer artist who defied traditional art historical categorization, Beauford Delaney persistently interrogated his place within narratives that often excluded figures like himself. In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney marks New York's first major Beauford Delaney museum exhibition in over 30 years and the first ever focused on his drawings—a medium central to his artistic practice. 

The exhibition features about 90 works on paper spanning key periods of his career, as well as works on canvas and an array of ephemera—documentary photographs, correspondence, exhibition brochures, and press clippings—that contextualize his unique artistic trajectory.

In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney is organized by Rebecca DiGiovanna, Assistant Curator and Laura Hoptman, Executive Director at The Drawing Center. 

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring contributions by the exhibition’s curators, Laura Hoptman, Executive Director and Rebecca DiGiovanni, Assistant Curator at The Drawing Center, as well as an essay by Jessica Lynne, art critic and founding editor of ARTS. Black.

THE DRAWING CENTER

35 Wooster Street, New York, NY 10013

drawingcenter.org

Related Posts on Wanafoto:

Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962 

Grey Art Museum, New York University, March 2 - July 20, 2024

Beauford Delaney’s Metamorphosis into Freedom

Asheville Art Museum, April 2 - June 21, 2021

Explorations in the City of Light: African-American Artists in Paris, 1945 - 1965

Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, January 12 - March 23, 1997

Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962 @ Grey Art Museum, New York University + Other venues

Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962 

Grey Art Museum, New York University

March 2 - July 20, 2024

Ralph Coburn 

Aux Bermudes, 1951–52 

Oil on six painted panels, painted wood, 28 3/4 x 55 1/4 in. 

Private collection, New York. Courtesy David Hall Gallery, LLC

James Baldwin and Beauford Delaney, Paris, c. 1960  

© Estate of Beauford Delaney by permission of 

Derek L. Spratley, Esquire, Court Appointed Administrator 

Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

Ed Clark 

The City, 1952 

Acrylic on canvas, 51 x 78 1/2 in. 

Collection of Melanca Clark, Detroit 

Courtesy Hauser and Wirth 

© Estate of Ed Clark. 

Photo: Hollister and Young, Michigan Imaging 

Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962, the first major exhibition to examine the historical impact of the expatriate art scene in Paris after World War II, opens on March 2024 at the Grey Art Museum at New York University, formerly the Grey Art Gallery. This international loan exhibition is the museum’s inaugural presentation in its new home at 18 Cooper Square in the NoHo Historic District in downtown Manhattan.

Showcased in the new galleries are more than 130 paintings, sculptures, photographs, films, textiles, and works on paper. Loans from a wide range of collections—public and private, from the U.S. and abroad—provide a fresh perspective on a moment of creative ferment too often overshadowed by the contemporaneous ascendancy of the New York City art scene. The exhibition also sheds new light on the contributions of artists who relocated to France hoping to escape institutionalized racism, sexism, and homophobia.

Six years in the making, Americans in Paris is organized by the Grey Art Museum, New York University, and curated by the independent scholar Debra Bricker Balken with Lynn Gumpert, Director of the Grey. Lynn Gumpert says, “When Debra and I began to discuss the idea for this exhibition, we were astonished to find that there had been no other major show or publication on this mid-century phenomenon, despite the fact that a number of the artists are very well known.”

Says Debra Bricker Balken, “This has been an intellectual adventure far richer than we could have anticipated. Along the way, we have encountered artists whose achievements deserve more scholarly attention. We’ve also gained new insight into the cultural, social, and aesthetic complexities these artists were grappling with as they forged new modernist territory in the postwar era.”

Seventy artists are represented in Americans in Paris, including many whose work has not received the recognition it merits—James Bishop, Robert Breer, Ralph Coburn, Harold Cousins, Claire Falkenstein, Shirley Jaffe, Kimber Smith, and Shinkichi Tajiri among them. Others are well-known, even canonical, figures, such as Sam Francis, Leon Golub, Ellsworth Kelly, Joan Mitchell, Kenneth Noland, Peter Saul, Nancy Spero, Mark Tobey, and Jack Youngerman.

Intense experimentation among these closely knit, if shifting, circles of artists generated a variety of formal inventions and personal artistic styles. Visitors to Americans in Paris encounter such works as The City (1952), by Ed Clark, a vibrant large-scale painting where primary and secondary colors collide like bumper cars; an abstract painting by Shirley Jaffe that wrests an individual imprint from the period’s default style; and masterly works by Joan Mitchell, all explosions and tangles of paint skeins in her inimitable palette.

That abstraction also took an entirely different turn from gestural, painterly compositions is seen in Ralph Coburn’s semaphore-like Aux Bermudes (1951–52); Ellsworth Kelly’s Fond Jaune (1950), where fragmented forms balance delicately on a yellow ground; and Carmen Herrera’s elegant Curves: Orange, Blue and White, 1949. Figuration was present, too, as is seen in Barbershop (1950), by Haywood “Bill” Rivers, wherein the Black North Carolina-reared artist renders a scene from the American South in an impastoed faux-naif style. In Shinkichi Tajiri’s Lament for Lady (for Billie Holiday) (1953), the sculptor creates a disjunctive assemblage of industrial cast-offs that combines symbolic elements, like a bent-and-crumpled brass gardenia, with an actual photograph of the jazz icon.

Because a good number of the works on view come from early in the artists’ careers, Americans in Paris contributes to the understanding of the development of many of the featured artists—dramatically so in the case of the abstract paintings by William Klein, works that preceded his experiments in photography and his later success as an art and commercial photographer and a filmmaker.

While the first section of Americans in Paris focuses on 25 American artists who lived and worked in France for a year or more, the second section—the “Salon”—provides visitors with a snapshot of art that the expats themselves would have encountered in the influential salons and galleries of postwar Paris, such as works by Jean Dubuffet, Georges Matthieu, and Wols. Also featured in this section are contributions by artists who likewise spent a year or more in the City of Light, including Louise Bourgeois, Bernard Childs, William Copley, and Liliane Lijn. Black American artists Emil Cadoo, Herbert Gentry, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Larry Potter, and filmmaker Melvin van Peebles; Filipino American Alfonso Ossorio; Chinese American Walasse Ting; and Native American George Morrison, are likewise represented.

“When Being an American in Paris Seemed the Thing to Be”

Jack Youngerman, one of the first GIs to land in Paris, was quoted as saying that being an American in Paris after the war seemed the thing to be. He could have been speaking for any number of the artists represented in Americans in Paris.

The exhibition covers a 17-year period beginning in 1946, when the U.S. Embassy in Paris began processing applications from ex-service members for the new GI Bill. A monthly stipend of $75 allowed expats to live fairly comfortably in postwar Paris, which was still recovering from the Nazi occupation. Enrollment in the city’s numerous ateliers was not only easy, but was paid for by the GI Bill. Modern masters such as Ferdinand Léger and Ossip Zadkine, as well as schools such as the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and Académie Julian, welcomed Americans, whose tuition provided a steady income stream. Study in Paris offered the opportunity to visit the capital’s famed museums and to hang out in its legendary cafés frequented by the likes of Alberto Giacometti, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1950, American artists even established their own cooperative gallery, Galerie Huit, named for its address at 8, rue Saint-Julien-le Pauvre on the Left Bank.

At the same time, the Americans encountered undercurrents of nationalistic tension, as French artists and critics sought to maintain the centuries-long artistic preeminence of the City of Light. By 1962—when the show concludes—many artists felt that the once-inspiring atmosphere in Paris had diminished. That same year, Algeria achieved independence from France after many years of demonstrations and riots, and ultimately, war. By then, many Americans had decided to return to the U.S., which was experiencing a burgeoning Civil Rights movement of its own, along with––due to the rise of artist-run galleries in New York––more opportunities to exhibit.

Tour: After its debut at the Grey, Americans in Paris travels to the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and The NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery in the United Arab Emirates.

Americans in Paris: 

Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962

Co-published by Hirmer and the Grey Art Museum, New York University

Publication: Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962 is accompanied by a 300-page volume of the same name, which was released in fall 2022. Co-published by Hirmer and the Grey Art Museum, New York University, it has been shortlisted for the 2023 American Library in Paris Book Award. In addition to an introduction by Lynn Gumpert, essays by Debra Balken, Rashida K. Braggs, Elisa Capdevila, and J. English Cook investigate the distinctive nature of the postwar scene, the Black experience in Paris, the critical reception of American artists by the Parisian art world and its salon system, and the Hollywood films that mythologized the expat experience, respectively. Americans in Paris also includes an extensive, illustrated chronology of the period, along with never-before-published interviews from the early 1990s, where artists, dealers, critics, and curators active in mid-century Paris spoke to Billy Klüver and Julie Martin. $55 retail. Available in the Grey Art Museum Bookstore and online.

About the Curators

Debra Bricker Balken is an award-winning independent curator, scholar, and writer who has assembled numerous exhibitions internationally for major museums on subjects relating to American modernism and contemporary art. Most recently, she authored Harold Rosenberg: A Critic’s Life (University of Chicago Press, 2021), and Arthur Dove: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings and Things (Yale University Press, 2021). In 2017, she curated Mark Tobey: Threading the Light, which was organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art, and opened at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection with that year’s Venice Biennale.

Lynn Gumpert has been director of the Grey Art Museum, New York University’s fine arts museum, since 1997. Among the more than 75 exhibitions she has overseen at the Grey are Modernisms: Iranian, Turkish, and Indian Highlights from NYU’s Abby Weed Grey Collection (2019); The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal (2018); and Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965 (2017). She previously worked as a writer, consultant, and independent curator, organizing shows in New York, Japan, and France, and as senior curator at the New Museum, New York. In 1999, she was made Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.

GREY ART MUSEUM, New York University

18 Cooper Square, New York, NY 10003

greyartgallery.nyu.edu

Homage to Martin Luther King Jr. @ James Barron Art, Kent, CT

Direct Action / Homage to Martin Luther King Jr. 

James Barron Art, Kent, CT  

Through April 24, 2021 

James Barron Art Gallery 

Exhibition view 

© and Courtesy of James Barron Art 

In his eminent 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham City Jail,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “You may ask: ‘Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches, and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?’ You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action… to foster such a tension that a community… is forced to confront the issue. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent register may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word ‘tension.’ …There is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth.”

James Barron Art presents an exhibition of works by Black artists, ranging from 1949 through the present, that encompass the spirit of Dr. King’s call to action. The exhibition featured works by Charles Alston, Romare Bearden, Beauford Delaney, Awol Erizku, Vanessa German, Sam Gilliam, Lonnie Holley, Clementine Hunter, Norman Lewis, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, Zanele Muholi, Faith Ringgold, Winfred Rembert, Bob Thompson, Mose Tolliver.

“Our current exhibition is the logical follow up to our show Fifty Years After: Gordon Parks, Carrie Mae Weems, Mickalene Thomas, LaToya Ruby Frazier in the summer of 2016,” says James Barron. “Tragically, in the past four years, we have erased many of the gains made towards a more just world with civil rights. This show marks a new beginning. We hope to highlight the direct action in art that has been a consequence of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s remarkable ‘Letter From a Birmingham City Jail.’ Our show not only pays tribute to the achievement of Black American artists, but is a call to action and an opening of the door for further equality in the arts.” 

This exhibition highlights works created contemporaneously with the Civil Rights movement, as well as contemporary works that embrace the spirit of alternative action. Faith Ringgold’s 2007 portfolio and accompanying book illustrate Dr. King’s letter with scenes of protests, segregation, and racial injustice alongside daily tableaux, bringing the inequalities King describes into sharp focus. Self-taught artists Clementine Hunter, Mose Tolliver, Lonnie Holley and Winfred Rembert used their artistic practices to record memories of Southern life prior to, and during, the Civil Rights Movement.

Abstract expressionists Norman Lewis, Beauford Delaney, and Charles Alston were founding members of Spiral, a New York collective of Black artists formed in 1963 to explore their artistic relationship to the Civil Rights movement and American politics and culture. The group’s members worked in a variety of styles, though often within the tradition of modernist abstraction, and often held varying viewpoints on the merging of art and politics, which contributed to a lasting dialogue that is still relevant today.

Vanessa German uses unconventional materials to create her sculptural compositions, which use historical references to communicate the contemporary Black experience in America. Similarly, photographers Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, Awol Erizku, and Zanele Muholi take inspiration from art historical canon, particularly portraiture, to inform their compositions. Erizku riffs on Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring to create a work that is wholly unique. Identifying as a ‘visual activist,’ Zanele Muholi creates portraits of Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex people living in their native South Africa, which serve to promote King’s legacy across the globe.

A catalog is available.

Gallery is open by appointment only.

JAMES BARRON ART

17 Old Barn Road, Kent, CT 06757

jamesbarronart.com

Beauford Delaney’s Metamorphosis into Freedom @ Asheville Art Museum

Beauford Delaney’s Metamorphosis into Freedom

Asheville Art Museum

April 2 - June 21, 2021

Featuring more than 40 paintings and works on paper, Beauford Delaney’s Metamorphosis into Freedom examines the career evolution of modern painter BEAUFORD DELANEY (Knoxville, TN 1901–1979 Paris, France) within the context of his 38-year friendship with writer James Baldwin (New York 1924-1987 Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France). The exhibition will be on view in the Asheville Art Museum’s Explore Asheville Exhibition Hall.

The works in this exhibition bring into special focus Delaney’s experiments with abstraction sparked by the artist’s 1955 move to the Paris suburb of Clamart, as well as the ways that the artist and Baldwin’s ongoing intellectual exchange shaped one another’s creative output and worldview from their first meeting in 1940 until Delaney’s death in 1979.

Metamorphosis into Freedom also calls attention to Baldwin’s role as “witness” to the painter’s evolution, which he deemed “one of the most extraordinary personal and artistic journeys of our time.” Baldwin found in Delaney a father figure, muse, and model of perseverance as a gay man of color, who opened for him the transformative possibility that a Black man could become an artist. Delaney found in Baldwin a powerful intellectual and spiritual anchor who inspired some of his finest works and who provided vital emotional support and creative validation.

“The Asheville Art Museum is excited to partner with the Knoxville Museum of Art to bring Beauford Delaney’s work this side of the Blue Ridge Mountains,” says Hilary Schroeder, assistant curator at the Asheville Art Museum. “An Appalachian-born artist, Delaney’s portraits, landscapes, and abstractions offer an important view into his experiences in both the region and abroad. Combined with materials related to his friendship with James Baldwin, Metamorphosis into Freedom presents visitors with a unique opportunity to journey through Delaney’s rich and deeply thoughtful career accentuated by materials from his sketchbooks and other ephemera.”

The wealth of powerfully vibrant works of art that Delaney produced during his fifty-year career is nothing less than a remarkable and unlikely triumph. Seemingly at every turn, he faced daunting obstacles in the surrounding environment and from within his own psyche. Although gregarious and charismatic, Delaney left behind journals and letters that afford insight into an already well-documented battle with mental illness, depression, poverty, marginalization, and loneliness. As James Baldwin once observed, Beauford Delaney “has been starving and working all his life . . . He has been menaced more than any other man I know by his social circumstances and also by all the emotional and psychological stratagems he has been forced to use to survive; and more than any other man I know, he has transcended both the inner and the outer darkness.” His artistic practice provided a steadying influence and a lifelong source of intellectual engagement and creative experimentation. To Beauford Delaney, art was an act of love and faith capable of revealing inner truths and offering entry into a world of illumination. Over the course of his career, Delaney made a winding journey through artistic territory whose technical borders and stylistic intersections have only begun to be examined and documented. The broad expressive range the painter navigated reflects his boundless creative drive and tireless pursuit of lofty and far-reaching artistic goals.

Designed to underscore the powerful presence of Baldwin in Delaney’s life, Metamorphosis into Freedom includes more than 40 works by the painter that depict Baldwin, were inspired by or dedicated to Baldwin, illustrate key turning points in Delaney’s development as described in Baldwin’s writings, or document key places and events where their ongoing dialogue unfolded. The exhibition focuses special attention to a chapter in Delaney’s studio practice in which he intensified experiments with abstraction after moving to the Paris suburb of Clamart in late 1955. The relatively quiet suburban surroundings of his new studio sparked Delaney’s pursuit of representing light in bold abstractions in which references to the physical world appear incinerated. Baldwin witnessed this exciting new development and considered Delaney’s Clamart abstractions as representing the pinnacle of his artistic achievement, and the fullest realization of his lifelong search to express metaphysical concepts of light and movement. In an essay for a 1964 show at Galerie Lambert, Baldwin noted Delaney’s extraordinary painted light was such that it “held the power to illuminate, even to redeem and reconcile and heal.”

Beauford Delaney’s Metamorphosis into Freedom is organized by the Knoxville Museum of Art, which owns the largest and most comprehensive public collection of Beauford Delaney’s art.

This exhibition is the result of an exhibition exchange between the Asheville Art Museum and the Knoxville Museum of Art, born in response to the impact of COVID-19 but hopefully the first of future collaborations of its kind that celebrate the holdings of regional institutions. The Knoxville Museum of Art, who organized Metamorphosis into Freedom, has in turn presented A Lasting Imprint: Rendering Rhythm and Motion at Black Mountain College, organized by the Asheville Art Museum.

More About Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin

During his youth, Beauford Delaney’s precocious talent was recognized by Lloyd Branson (1853–1925), Knoxville’s first full-time professional artist, who as Delaney’s mentor explained that all painting should be studies in light. It was a lesson Delaney increasingly took to heart as his studio practice and creative vision took shape years later. Branson, recognizing that African Americans had little chance of pursuing careers in the segregated South, helped send Delaney to Boston for professional training. Soon after settling in New York in 1929, Delaney attracted a distinguished circle of cultural luminaries including Georgia O’Keeffe, Henry Miller, and Willem de Kooning, yet enjoyed little commercial success.

James Baldwin entered Beauford Delaney’s world at age 15, and from the beginning the two recognized in each other kindred spirits, sojourners along a difficult road whose personal circumstances were strikingly similar. James Baldwin considered Beauford Delaney a “spiritual father,” as he once described, to whom “I owe a debt that can never be repaid,” and credited the artist as the individual most responsible for broadening his creative vision. Baldwin, in turn, inspired Delaney with his fearless social conscience and commitment to civil rights causes. The painter produced more than a dozen works depicting Baldwin or inspired by him, and the writer dedicated several novels and essays to his mentor. Baldwin wrote eloquently about Delaney and his art, noting essential qualities in the artist and musing on the implications of significant changes in his work. His vivid prose and detailed observations offer a uniquely informed and articulate perspective on key developments in the painter’s evolving studio practice.

Both Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin embraced transnational identities and, in their work, sought to reveal truths beneath surface appearances. Delaney in his portraits, for example, employed vibrant color and expressive brushwork in a way that increasingly sacrificed superficial physical qualities in order to project what he considered the more important and essential spiritual identity of the sitter. Baldwin regarded America’s social woes as the product of systemic myths that caused citizens to view themselves and each other as if through a distorted lens, and credited Delaney for teaching him “to see, and to trust what I saw.” In many cases, ordinary daily observations—reflections in puddles in the streets of Greenwich Village or the quality of light filtered through window—sparked extraordinary creative exchanges between the two that informed their individual production.

ASHEVILLE ART MUSEUM

2 South Pack Square, Asheville, NC 28801

www.ashevilleart.org

Updated Post

Explorations in the City of Light: African-American Artists in Paris, 1945 - 1965, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

Explorations in the City of Light: African-American Artists in Paris, 1945 - 1965
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
January 12 - March 23, 1997

Marla Price, Director of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth announced that the museum will be the only Southwest venue for Explorations in the City of Light: African-American Artists in Paris, 1945 - 1965. Organized by The Studio Museum in Harlem, this exhibition examines the importance of Paris (the City of Light) as an artistic mecca for African-American artists in the years following World War II and continues the Studio Museum's mission to conduct scholarship in previously unexplored areas of African-American artists' experience. Explorations in the City of Light showcases the work of seven African-American artists whose imagery, styles and philosophies were shaped by their experience in postwar Paris: Edward Clark, Harold Cousins, Beauford Delaney, Herbert Gentry, Lois Mailou Jones, Larry Potter and Barbara Chase-Riboud.

Following the war, Paris—known as the City of Light for its intellectual enlightenment, gleaming beauty and the quality of its natural light—became a seminal destination for a diverse group of artists, writers and musicians. African-American artists enjoyed acceptance in diverse Paris and embraced the historic and visual stimulation of the city. Featuring over sixty paintings and sculpture, Explorations in the City of Light presents the rich work of African-American artists that resulted from their encounters with the unique beauty and creative forces found in postwar Paris.

African-Americans who wished to pursue an art education in the United States following World War II often encountered difficulties caused by racial segregation. Few prestigious art schools accepted African-American students, and study abroad was seen as an important prerequisite for success. Although the desire to escape discrimination was a significant factor in the African-American artists' sojourn in Paris, several post-WWII artists have said that their primary goal was a quest for artistic freedom and a need to experience modernism firsthand.

Kinshasha Holman Conwill, Director of The Studio Museum in Harlem, explains the premise of the Explorations in the City of Light project: "Past exhibitions have dealt with the subject of the expatriate experience of African-American artists in Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth century. None, however, has concentrated on this specific period, nor with this fascinating group of artists." The seven African-American artists featured in Explorations in the City of Light received significant critical attention while in Paris and have influenced subsequent generations of artists working in America. The power and diversity of creative expression evident in their art continues to inspire others. The endurance of these qualities confirms the significance of their artistic careers that were cultivated in the City of Light. 

A major catalogue containing over 100 illustrations accompanies the exhibition. Essayists for the catalogue are Valerie J. Mercer, Curator of the exhibition and Curator of Collections at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Catherine Bernard, Peter Selz and Michael Fabre. Also included is an introduction by Kinshasha Holman Conwill and a foreword by Geoffrey C. Bible, Chairman and C.E.O. of Philip Morris Companies Inc. 

Biographical information of the artists featured in the exhibition:

EDWARD CLARK

1926 Born in New Orleans, Louisiana

1947-1951 Studies at the Chicago Art Institute

1952 Travels to Paris, studies at L'Académie de la Grande Chaumière, under the GI Bill. Remains in Paris, continues to paint and exhibit

1956 Goes to New York, becomes member of the Tenth Street art scene

1966 Returns to Paris, begins to experiment with the ellipse form in his art

1969 Returns to the United States where he continues to reside, but spends summers in Paris

HAROLD COUSINS

1916 Born in Washington, D.C.

1947 Receives BFA from Howard University, Washington, D. C.

1948 Studies at the Art Students League, New York

1949 Arrives in Paris, studies at L'Académie de la Grande Chaumière

1952 Exhibits in Paris, New York, Toronto and other European cities

1967 Leaves Paris to live in Brussels, Belgium. Continues to work and exhibit

1992 Dies in Brussels

BEAUFORD DELANEY

1901 Born in Knoxville, Tennessee

1918 Moves to Boston at the age of 17

Studies at the Massachusetts Normal Art School, the South Boston School of Art and the Copley School of Art

1929 Arrives in New York where his work is exhibited at various galleries, Meets Henry Miller who writes about Delaney's art

1953 Arrives in Paris where he exhibits his work steadily at various galleries

1978 Retrospective exhibition at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York

1979 Dies in Paris

HERBERT GENTRY

1919 Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

1938-1939 Participates in WPA Program

1940-1942 Attends New York University

1946 Arrives in Paris

1946-1949 Studies at L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes and L'Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Paris, under the GI Bill

1948 Opens club, Chew Honey, frequented by artists and musicians

1952 Returns to the United States

1954 Returns to Paris, then moves to Malmo, Sweden

Present Divides time between Malmo, Paris and the United States

LOIS MAILOU-JONES

1905 Born in Boston, Massachusetts

1923-1927 Studies at Boston Museum School of Fine Arts

1930 Joins faculty of Howard University as a professor of design and watercolor painting

1937-1938 Makes first trip to Paris to study at the Académie Julian

1953 Marries Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Noel, well-known Haitian artist

1954 Is guest professor at Centre d'Art and Foyer des Arts Plastiques, Port-au-Prince, Haiti

Present Returns to Paris annually; continues to exhibit in Paris, Haiti U.S.

LARRY POTTER

1925 Born in Mount Vernon, New York

1945-1950 Studies at Cooper Union and later at the Art Students League, N.Y.

1956 Travels to Paris where he paints and exhibits art

1966 Dies in Paris

BARBARA CHASE-RIBOUD

1939 Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

1957 Receives her BFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University

1960 Receives her MFA from Yale University

1961 Arrives in Paris

Present Continues to reside in Paris, exhibits in Europe and the United States

The exhibition is organized by The Studio Museum in Harlem. Following its premiere at the Studio Museum in January 1996, Explorations in the City of Light: African-American Artists in Paris, 1945 - 1965 began a four-city tour of the United States. 

MODERN ART MUSEUM OF FORT WORTH
Fort Worth's Cultural District
www.mamfw.org

Updated 23.06.2019