The Work of Tennessee-born Painter Beauford Delaney (1901-1979) through Music and Voices

FAIN: FEL-281814-22

Mary Katherine Campbell
University of Tennessee, Knoxville (Knoxville, TN 37916-3801)

Research and writing leading to a book on the life and works of African American artist Beauford Delaney (1901-1979). 

Beauford’s Sound explores the work of the Tennessee-born painter Beauford Delaney (1901–1979) through the lens of music and voices. The first book-length study of the artist and his images, it uses themes of literal and metaphoric sound to situate Delaney’s practice in its full social, political, and art historical context. In the process, the book expands current understandings of American, African American, and modernist art, while simultaneously calling these categories into question. As a poor, black, Southern gay man who suffered from racist, homophobic auditory hallucinations, Delaney spent his life hounded by labels. Repeatedly, the outside world and the paranoid voices in his mind tried to reduce him and his art to stereotypes dictated by his body and its desires. Treating the four primary periods of the Delaney’s career—Knoxville (1919–23), Boston (1923–29), New York (1929–53), and France (1953–75)— I illuminate the ways in which his work defies such categorization.