Richard J. Powell (NHC Fellow, 1995–96; 2023–24)
Project Title, 2023–24
Colorstruck! Painting, Pigment, Affect
Duke University
Project Title, 1995–96
Subjugation and Agency in Nineteenth-Century Images of Blacks
Duke University
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Fellowship Work Summary, 2023–24
Richard J. Powell completed a draft of the book Colorstruck! Painting, Pigment, Affect (Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2025). He wrote an essay, “Hughie Lee-Smith’s Fourth Wall,” for the exhibition catalog Karamu House Prints, edited by Erin Benay and Britany Salsbury (Cleveland Museum of Art, forthcoming, 2025). Powell also wrote a preface for Michael D. Harris, Sanctuary: Conjuring an Africana Art Aesthetic (Duke University Press, forthcoming, 2025). His essay “The Boys in the Back Room: Gambling Imagery during the Harlem Renaissance” appeared in The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, edited by Denise Murrell (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2024). Powell’s essay “Audacity and Awesomeness” appeared in Barkley L. Hendricks: Solid! edited by Zoe Whitley (Skira, 2024).
Fellowship Work Summary, 1995–96
Richard J. Powell completed research for and wrote Black Art in Culture in the Twentieth Century for Thames and Hudson’s World of Art Series to appear in January 1997. He also wrote and expanded upon several sections of another book project on subjugation and agency in nineteenth-century images of blacks. He published four essays, the first two of which were significantly edited at the Center: “The Return to Bertrandville,” in Willie Birch: From Bertrandville to Brooklyn (Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, 1995); “Two Paintings by William H. Johnson,” in The Seductions of Biography, edited by Mary Rhiel and David Suchoff (Routledge, 1996); “Art, History, and Vision,” Art Bulletin (September 1995); and “African American Postmodernism and David Hammons: Body and Soul,” in African American Visual Aesthetics: A Postmodernist View, edited by David C. Driskell (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995).