ARTS & LITERARY ARTS RESIDENT FELLOWS PROGRAM
1. What is the purpose and goal of your project? (250 words)
During my Bellagio Residency, my goal is to examine formal and informal aspects of this creative relationship during the 1961-71 period, when Baldwin and Delaney intermittently lived together in France and Turkey. Focusing on shared characteristics of their work, I will explore similarities in their creative practices. Baldwin was a teenager when Delaney began teaching him about light. “It was humbling,” the writer recalled, “to be forced to realize that the light fell down from heaven, on everything on everybody and that the light was always changing.” Delaney was plagued by psychological problems throughout his adult life. After one hospitalization, the painter wrote to Henry Miller about moving from his sickness to “enlightenment…morning [light] comes after the darkest night.” Painting with light involved more than analyzing color and tone and loading his canvases with rapid paint-laden brushstrokes for Delaney. Light was a means of transcendence—something artists in traditional cultures, as well as modernists like Delaney, sought in the act of painting. My research suggests that, within their respective disciplines, Baldwin and Delaney both explored light as a path to greater consciousness and, in doing so, fueled each other’s creative
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My exhibitions have positioned Black artists and their works in a wider spectrum of American art production by articulating and offering other contexts for their works beyond their race through noteworthy exhibitions curated at and for Black museums. Publications accompanied most of the exhibitions. The exhibitions and publications served to increase the profile of the museums, improve their cultural sustainability in the minds of visitors and supporters, and enhance the livelihood of residents the respective communities where the museums were