“In a Speculative Light:
The Arts of James Baldwin and Beauford Delaney”
Symposium dates: February 20-21, 2020
Location of Event: UT Student Union, Cumberland Avenue, Knoxville
A scholarly symposium free to UT faculty, students, and staff.
Plenary sessions will be live-streamed at this website.
The keynote lecture by Fred Moten is free and open to the public as part of the UT Humanities Center’s Distinguished Visiting Lectures series.
Symposium Schedule
Thursday, February 20 (UT Student Union, floors 2 and 3)
Pop-up Portrait Studio (live art portrait sessions), Room 262B
Public Displays and Book Exhibit, Room 262B
8:30-10:00 Session 1: Dialogues
Student Union, Room 362B-C
• Walton M. Muyumba, Indiana University Bloomington
“Through the Unusual Door: Seeing Differently After Baldwin”
• Robert O’Meally, Columbia University
“Uses of Yellows and the Blues: Delaney and Baldwin”
• Rachel Cohen, University of Chicago
“Shared Subjects: Conversations Between the Self-portraits of Delaney and the Autobiographical Essays of Baldwin”
10:45-12:00 Session 2: Biographies and Legacies
Student Union, Room 362B-C
• Magdalena Zaborowska, University of Michigan
“A Question of Identity: Delaney’s and Baldwin’s Black Queer Domesticity and the U.S. National House”
• David Leeming, Professor Emeritus, University of Connecticut at Storrs
“Jimmy and Beauford: The Bond at the Unusual Door”
1:30-2:45 Session 3: Relationship and Abstraction
Student Union, Room 262A
• Rich Blint, The New School
“‘My Principal Witness’: Baldwin, Delaney, and the Abstractions of Race”
• Shawn Christian, Wheaton College
“Leading the ‘Inner and Outer Eye’: Delaney, Baldwin, and the Legacy of African American Artistic Inspiration”
• Ed Pavlić, University of Georgia
“‘you pay for your life with our life’: Jimmy Baldwin’s Politicized Privacy”
1:30-2:45 Session 4: Apart and Together
Student Union, Room 262C
• Monika Gehlawat, University of Southern Mississippi
“Choosing Both: Abstraction and Singularity in Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin”
• Tyler T. Schmidt, Lehman College, CUNY
“Queer Radiance: Beauford Delaney at the Bathhouse”
• Miller Wilbourn, University of Texas at Austin
“‘The Essence of Our Work’: Love and Delaney’s Spiritual Paternity in Baldwin’s Writing”
3:30-5:00 Keynote Lecture
Student Union Auditorium, Room 180
Fred Moten, NYU
“Blue(s) as Cymbal: Beauford Delaney (Elvin Jones) James Baldwin”
Friday, February 21 (University of Tennessee Student Union, floors 2 and 3)
Pop-up Portrait Studio, Student Union Room 262B
Public Displays and Book Exhibit, Student Union Room 262B
8:30-10:00 Session 5: Art and Contexts
Student Union, Room 362B-C
• Levi Prombaum, Curatorial Assistant, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
“Delaney, Van Gogh, and The Fire Next Time”
• Nicholas Boggs, NYU
“For Beauford: ‘Looking Again’ at James Baldwin and Yoran Cazac’s Little Man, Little Man”
• Mary Campbell, University of Tennessee
“Encounters in the Archive”
10:30-11:45 Session 6: The Lightness of Being
Student Union, Room 362B-C
• Robert Reid-Pharr, Harvard University
“Bright Baldwin/Dark Delaney: Twentieth-Century African American Intellectuals and the Erotics of Seeing and Being Seen”
• Michele Elam, Stanford University
“Speculative Light in the Age of AI”
2:00-3:15 Session 7: History and Aesthetics
Student Union, Room 362B-C
• Michelle Commander, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NYC
“Archival Speculation: Southern Specters, Haunting, and Flight”
• Stephen M. Best, University of California at Berkeley
“Baldwin’s Beauty Demand”
3:30-5:00 Session 8: Connections
Student Union, Room 262A
• Abbe Schriber, Columbia University
“Color Pleasure: Intimacy in Downtown Painting After Delaney & Baldwin”
• Indie A. Choudhury, Stanford University
“you thought I was too dark until I stretched into a galaxy”
• D. Quentin Miller, Suffolk University
“Shadow and Light: Chiaroscuro in Delaney and Baldwin’s ‘Sonny’s Blues’”
3:30-5:00 Session 9: Irrevocable Conditions
Student Union, Room 262C
• Keith Clark, George Mason University
“In Moonlight Black Boys (Can’t) Look Gay? The Curious Cases of If Beale Street Could Talk, 1974-2018”
• Marc K. Dudley, North Carolina State University
“Painting (with Words) Those Blues Away”: If Beale Street Could Talk, The Blues, and a Legacy of Resistance”
• Sarah Winstein-Hibbs, University of Virginia
“Building A Black Queer Archive of Charisma: James Baldwin’s Civil Rights
Historiography”