Calendar

Meet Richard J. Powell, John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University, who organized Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist, the first retrospective of the American artist’s paintings in two decades, at the Nasher Museum. Powell is the recent recipient of the Smithsonian’s Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History. He teaches courses in American art, the arts of the African Diaspora and contemporary visual studies, and writes extensively on topics ranging from primitivism to postmodernism. He wrote African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement, and Beyond (2012, with Virginia Mecklenburg), Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (2008), Black Art: A Cultural History (1997 and 2002), Jacob Lawrence (1992), and Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson (1991).  At the Nasher Museum, Powell and his students curated the exhibition Romare Bearden with an accompanying catalogue (2006).