Be Your Wonderful Self: The Portraits of Beauford Delaney

Description

Fully illustrated 180-page hardcover publication with essay by Professor Mary Campbell, statements by Glenn Ligon, Julie Mehretu and Amy Sherald and artist chronology.

A large-format publication, Be Your Wonderful Self: The Portraits of Beauford Delaney includes new scholarship by Professor Mary Campbell of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, along with fifty color plates which portray the range Delaney displayed in his mastery of portraiture. An extensive, fully-illustrated chronology highlights profound events, landmark moments, and influences in the artist’s life. The catalogue features statements from contemporary artists Glenn Ligon, Julie Mehretu, and Amy Sherald.

…Delaney repeatedly turned to art to annihilate the boundaries of fixed identity in ways that were not simply aesthetic—“plastic” as he would say—but also spiritual. Such ecstatic annihilations ran between his purely abstract paintings and his portraits, animating his figurative and non-figurative work alike.
—Mary Campbell in “Beauford Delaney in Ecstasy”

…Delaney’s immense, incessantly exuberant persistence on liberation and possibility in marks, light, color and form through and out of abstraction and blackness is his triumph, no matter what. And ours.
—Julie Mehretu, p.13

Since 2018, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC has been the special advisor and representative of the Estate of Beauford Delaney.

To order your copy, please email publications@michaelrosenfeldart.com or call the gallery at 212.247.0082.

Contributors

Mary Campbell is an associate professor of art history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville whose research focuses on the intersections of American visual, religious, and legal culture. She is currently writing the first book-length, art historical study of Beauford Delaney and his art, and her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville Humanities Center.