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NGA | The Bronze Thrill
May 1, 2022 @ 10:00 am - 11:30 am
Join the NGA for the final talk of the 71st annual A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, hosted by Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University, Richard J. Powell.
*We welcome you to attend this event in-person (in our West Building Lecture Hall) or virtually.*
Through a six-part lecture series that provides a close look at works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Nina Chanel Abney, Sam Gilliam, Jacob Lawrence, Raymond Saunders, and Alma Thomas, the National Gallery of Art invites you to examine how color can strike a chord for freedom and reclamation in art and life. 
#AboutThisLecture — titled “The Bronze Thrill” — This talk probes a shared passion for brown silhouettes in art, whose proxies for Black bodies do more than pictorially nod toward a racial verisimilitude: they reorient the paintings and their audiences in cultural and chromatic terms and endow the works with catalysts that produce a special kind of affect, a psychological frisson, especially in Black audiences. Richard J. Powell closely examines the sensations that arise from the color brown in the paintings of the British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and the American artist Nina Chanel Abney.
(Registration is required to attend in person or virtually.)
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, An Assistance of Amber, 2017, oil on linen. © Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, and Corvi-Mora, London