Trembling Vistas, Primal Youth: William H. Johnson’s Painterly Expressionism

Speakers

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  Richard J. Powell

  Richard J. Powell is the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art & Art History at Duke University. Along with teaching courses in American art, the arts of the African Diaspora, and contemporary visual studies, he has written on a range of topics, including such titles as Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson (1991), Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (2008), Going There: Black Visual Satire (2020), and Black Art: A Cultural History (1997, 2002, and 2021).

  Bio
  

  Richard J. Powell

  Richard J. Powell is the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art & Art History at Duke University. Along with teaching courses in American art, the arts of the African Diaspora, and contemporary visual studies, he has written on a range of topics, including such titles as Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson (1991), Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (2008), Going There: Black Visual Satire (2020), and Black Art: A Cultural History (1997, 2002, and 2021).

  Powell has also organized numerous art exhibitions, most notably: The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism (1989); Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance (1997); To Conserve A Legacy: American Art at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (1999); Back to Black: Art, Cinema, and the Racial Imaginary (2005); and Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist (2014). From 2007 until 2010, Powell was Editor-in-Chief of The Art Bulletin, the world’s leading English language journal in art history. In 2013 Powell received the Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, and in 2016 was honored at the College Art Association's Annual Conference as the year's most Distinguished Scholar. In 2018 Powell was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2021 he was offered membership in the American Philosophical Society. In 2022 Powell delivered the 71st Annual Andrew W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art, and in 2023-24 he was the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center Distinguished Scholar at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Henry Luce Fellow at the National Humanities Center.