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 Wicks, Magdalena Zaborowska
- Cover
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Gallery
- Introduction. Speculative: Light The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin / Amy J. Elias
- I. Circuits of Selfhood
- One. Jimmy and Beauford: The Bond of the Unusual Door / David Leeming
- Two. The Mentor: James Baldwin, Beauford Delaney, and the Habit of Doing / Hilton Als
- Three. “You Pay for Your Life with Your Life”: James Baldwin’s Search for Jimmy Baldwin, 1969–1972 / Ed Pavlić
- Four. Beauford Delaney’s Black Queer Fatherhood / Magdalena J. Zaborowska
- II. Synesthesia and Arts in Dialogue
- Five. Blue(s) as Cymbal: Beauford Delaney (Elvin Jones) James Baldwin / Fred Moten
- Six. Baldwin and Delaney Tell the Story Using Yellows and the Blues / Robert G. O’Meally
- Seven. Chiaroscuro, Delaney’s Aesthetic Vision, and Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” / D. Quentin Miller
- Eight. Yellow Light, Black Abstraction: Jazz, Writing, and Ethical Shattering in Baldwin’s and Delaney’s Works / Walton Muyumba
- Nine. Baldwin/Delaney/Cazac / Nicholas Boggs
- Ten. Singed Innocence: Baldwin, Delaney, and the Problematic Black Child / Robert F. Reid-Pharr
- III. Visibility, Performance, Abstraction
- Eleven. Baldwin and Delaney: The Politics and Performance of Black Sight / Indie A. Choudhury
- Twelve. Shared Subjects / Rachel Cohen
- Thirteen. Choosing Both: Abstraction and Singularity in Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin / Monika Gehlawat
- Fourteen. “Architects of the Spirit”: Color and Intimacy in Beauford Delaney’s Post-1950 Abstractions / Abbe Schriber
- Fifteen. Feeling Modernist: Beauford Delaney’s Self-Portrait (1944) / Levi Prombaum
- Sixteen. “The Giacometti Effect”: Reconsidering Beauford Delaney’s 1966 Portrait Bust of James Baldwin / Stephen C. Wicks
- IV. Continuing Influence
- Seventeen. Queer Radiance: Beauford Delaney at the Bathhouse / Tyler T. Schmidt
- Eighteen. Baldwin, Delaney, and Black Artists’ Genealogical Legacies / Shawn Anthony Christian
- Nineteen. In a Speculative Light: The Portrait Project / Jered Sprecher
- Bibliography
- Contributors
- Index
- Plate Credits
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