Over the course of a thirty-eight-year friendship, painter Beauford Delaney and writer James Baldwin shared their private lives and shaped one another’s artistic values. Speculative Light brings together scholars, critics, and artists who analyze the stylistic and historical import of Delaney's and Baldwin’s works and examine how this friendship fundamentally shaped the pair's ideas about art and life. The book’s contributors explore how the two men, sharing identities as queer Black American artists, first in New York and then as expatriates in France, created a speculative space in their work to think about more just and creative Black futures. Essay topics and issues range from masculinity, queerness, Blackness, and Americanness to the relationship between jazz, painting, and writing. Throughout, the contributors establish a positive history for Delaney's and Baldwin’s arts that refuses a subordinate role to white artists of the modernist avant-garde. Ultimately, Speculative Light demonstrates that Delaney and Baldwin's bond provides revolutionary grounds for theorizing contemporary Black art and life.
Contributors. Hilton Als, Nicholas Boggs, Indie A. Choudhury, Shawn Anthony Christian, Rachel Cohen, Amy J. Elias, Monika Gehlawat, David Leeming, D. Quentin Miller, Fred Moten, Walton M. Muyumba, Robert O’Meally, Ed Pavlić, Levi Prombaum, Robert Reid-Pharr, Tyler T. Schmidt, Abbe Schriber, Jered Sprecher, Stephen C. Wicks, Magdalena Zaborowska
List of Illustrations xiii
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction. Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin / Amy J. Elias 1
I. Circuits of Selfhood
1. Jimmy and Beauford: The Bond of the Unusual Door / David Leeming 39
2. The Mentor: James Baldwin, Beauford Delaney, and the Habit of Doing / Hilton Als 50
3. “You Pay for Your Life with Your Life”: James Baldwin’s Search for Jimmy Baldwin, 1969–1972 / Ed Pavlić 53
4. Beauford Delaney’s Black Queer Fatherhood / Magdalena J. Zaborowska 66
II. Synesthesia and Arts in Dialogue
5. Blue(s) as Cymbal: Beauford Delaney (Elvin Jones) James Baldwin / Fred Moten 79
6. Baldwin and Delaney: Yellows and Blues / Robert G. O’Meally 98
7. Chiaroscuro, Delaney’s Aesthetic Vision, and Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” / D. Quentin Miller 119
8. Yellow Light, Black Abstraction: Jazz, Writing, and Ethical Shattering in Baldwin’s and Delaney’s Works / Walton M. Muyumba 131
9. Baldwin/Delaney/Cazac / Nicholas Boggs 146
10. Singed Innocence: Baldwin, Delaney, and the Problematic Black Child / Robert F. Reid-Pharr 160
III. Visibility, Performance, Abstraction
11. Baldwin and Delaney: The Politics and Performance of Black Sight / Indie A. Choudhury 171
12. Shared Subjects / Rachel Cohen 187
13. Choosing Both: Abstraction and Singularity in Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin / Monika Gehlewat 197
14: “Architects of the Spirit”: Color and Intimacy in Beauford Delaney’s Post-1950 Abstractions / Abbe Schriber 208
15. Feeling Modernist: Beauford Delaney’s Self-Portrait (1944) / Levi Prombaum 224
16. “The Giacometti Effect”: Reconsidering Beauford Delaney’s 1966 Portrait Bust of James Baldwin / Stephen C. Wicks 240
IV. Continuing Influence
17. Queer Radiance: Beauford Delaney at the Bathhouse / Tyler T. Schmidt 251
18. Baldwin, Delaney, and Black Artists’ Genealogical Legacies / Shawn Anthony Christian 266
19. In a Speculative Light: The Portrait Project / Jered Sprecher 278
Bibliography 289
Contributors 309
Index
Plate Credits
