"Colorstruck!" by Dr. Richard Powell: Book Talk & Signing

About "Colorstruck!" by Dr. Richard Powell: Book Talk & Signing

Celebrate the release of Dr. Powell's new book, "Colorstruck! Painting, Pigment, Affect" at the Gantt.

Join us with Dr. Richard Powell, the author of Colorstruck! Painting, Pigment, Affect, for an engaging book talk about his latest release. Dr. Powell's presentation will include live readings of excerpts from his book and powerful images & videos to expand upon its cultural context. After the presentation, guests will have the opportunity to meet Dr. Powell and purchase signed copies of his book.

About the Book:

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, Hervé Télémaque, 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.

About the Author:

Richard J. Powell is the John Spencer Bassett Distinguished Professor of Art & Art History at Duke University, where he has taught since 1989. After receiving his B.A. at Morehouse College, he earned the M.F.A. from Howard University, and the M.A. in African American Studies and M.Phil. and Ph.D. in the History of Art from Yale University. Powell, a recognized authority on African American art, has 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). Powell has published books on a range of topics, including such titles as Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson (1991), Black Art: A Cultural History (1997, 2002 & 2021), Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture(2008), Going There: Black Visual Satire (2020), and Colorstruck! Painting, Pigment, Affect (2026). 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 he was the College Art Association's most Distinguished Scholar. In 2018 Powell was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2025 he was inducted into the American Philosophical Society. In 2023, Powell was the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center’s Distinguished Senior Scholar at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in 2024, Powell was the Henry Luce Fellow at the National Humanities Center.