Amy J. Elias is Chancellor’s Professor and Director of the Denbo Center for Humanities and the Arts at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the author of
“Architects of the Spirit”: Color and Intimacy in Beauford Delaney's Post-1950 Abstractions
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Published:January 2025
Abbe Schriber, 2025. "“Architects of the Spirit”: Color and Intimacy in Beauford Delaney's Post-1950 Abstractions", Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin, Amy J. Elias
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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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