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In this chapter, Abbe Schriber illustrates how Beauford Delaney’s canvases elicit new expressive modes not through interiority, but through redefining vision as both visual and tactile. For Delaney, intimacy can be understood as an extension of seeing, and his relationships with James Baldwin and other close artist-friends, such as Herbert Gentry, are essential to reading his paintings not as indices of any form of social intimacy but as an intimacy borne of multisensory stimuli and affiliations and social exchanges embodied in the complexity of color. In the worked, dense chromatic surfaces of Delaney’s canvases is a retranslation, into forms of freedom, of the circumscription of queerness that resulted from heteronormative conventions of care shaped by US homophobia and racial segregation in the 1950s and 1960s.

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