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
In this chapter, Jered Sprecher discusses Beauford Delaney’s commitment to portraiture as an embodiment of transactional beauty. Delaney attempted to draw not only the physical likeness but also the “inner light” of his subjects. This commitment prompted artists Joshua Bienko, Eleanor Conover, Rubens Ghenov, Mary Laube, Lilly Saywitz, and Sprecher himself to create the Portrait Project at the 2020 University of Tennessee-Knoxville symposium on Delaney. The Portrait Project combined an implicit tribute to Delaney with an art studio and what became a warm, friendly communal meeting space on campus. During the run of the symposium, the artists participated in ninety-minute drawing sessions, producing portraits of symposium attendees (some presented in this essay) in what all felt to be an enacted “economy of generosity” prompted by Delaney’s own aesthetics of portraiture.
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