Beauford Delaney
Encyclopedia
Beauford Delaney was an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 modernist painter
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...

.

Early life

Beauford Delaney was born in Knoxville, Tennessee
Knoxville, Tennessee
Founded in 1786, Knoxville is the third-largest city in the U.S. state of Tennessee, U.S.A., behind Memphis and Nashville, and is the county seat of Knox County. It is the largest city in East Tennessee, and the second-largest city in the Appalachia region...

, USA, in 1901. Delaney’s parents were prominent and respected members of Knoxville's black community. His father Samuel was both a barber and a Methodist minister. His mother Delia was also prominent in the church, and earned a living taking in laundry and cleaning the houses of prosperous local whites. Delia, born into slavery
Slavery
Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation...

 and never able to read and write herself, transferred a sense of dignity and self-esteem to her children and preached to them about the injustices of racism
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...

 and the value of education. Beauford was the eighth of ten children, only four of whom survived into adulthood. He summed up the reasons for this in a journal entry from 1961, saying “so much sickness came from improper places to live – long distances to walk to schools improperly heated… too much work at home – natural conditions common to the poor that take the bright flowers like terrible cold in nature…”

Beauford and his younger brother, Joseph
Joseph Delaney (artist)
Joseph Delaney was an African American artist who became a part of the New York art scene at the time of the Harlem Renaissance....

, were both attracted to art from an early age. Some of their earliest drawings were copies of Sunday school cards and pictures from the family bible. ”Those early years which Beauford and I enjoyed together I am sure shaped the direction of our lives as artists. We were constantly doing something with our hands - modelling with the very red Tennessee clay, also copying pictures. One distinct difference in Beauford and myself was his multi-talents. Beauford could always strum on a ukulele and sing like mad and could mimic with the best. Beauford and I were complete opposites: me an introvert and Beauford the extrovert.”

When he was a teenager, he got a job as a "helper" at the Post Sign Company. However, he and his younger brother Joseph were drawing signs of their own. Then some of his work was noticed by Lloyd Branson
Lloyd Branson
Enoch Lloyd Branson was an American artist best known for his portraits of Southern politicians and depictions of early East Tennessee history....

, an elderly American Impressionist and Knoxville's best known artist. By the early 1920s, Delaney became the apprentice of Branson. With Branson’s encouragement, the 23-year-old Delaney migrated north to Boston to study art. With perseverance, he achieved the artist's education he desired - including informal studies at the Massachusetts Normal School, the South Boston School of Art and the Copley Society. He learned what he called the “essentials” of classical technique. It was also while in Boston that Delaney had his first "intimate experience" with a young man in the Public Garden. Through letters of introduction from Knoxville, he also received what he referred to as a "crash course" in black activist politics and ideas; having associated socially during his years in Boston with some of the most sophisticated and radical African-Americans of the time, such as James Weldon Johnson
James Weldon Johnson
James Weldon Johnson was an American author, politician, diplomat, critic, journalist, poet, anthologist, educator, lawyer, songwriter, and early civil rights activist. Johnson is remembered best for his leadership within the NAACP, as well as for his writing, which includes novels, poems, and...

, writer, diplomat and rights activist; William Monroe Trotter
William Monroe Trotter
William Monroe Trotter was a newspaper editor and real estate business man, and an activist for African-American civil rights. He earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Harvard University, and was the first man of color to earn a Phi Beta Kappa key...

, founder of the National Equal Rights League
National Equal Rights League
The National Equal Rights League is the oldest nationwide human rights organization dedicated to the liberation of black people in the United States...

; and Butler Wilson, Board member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, usually abbreviated as NAACP, is an African-American civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909. Its mission is "to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to...

. By 1929, the essentials of his artistic education complete, Beauford decided to leave Boston and head for New York.

New York

His arrival in New York City at the time of the Harlem Renaissance
Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after the 1925 anthology by Alain Locke...

 was exciting. Harlem was then the centre of black cultural life in the United States. But it was also the time of the “Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...

” and it was this that Beauford was confronted with on his arrival. ”Went to New York in 1929 from Boston all alone with very little money…this was the depression, and I soon discovered that most of these people were people out of work and just doing what I was doing – sitting and figuring out what to do for food and a place to sleep.”

Delaney felt an immediate affinity with this “multitude of people of all races – spending every night of their lives in parks and cafes” surviving on next to nothing. Their courage and shared camaraderie inspired him to feel that “somehow, someway there was something I could manage if only with some stronger force of will I could find the courage to surmount the terror and fear of this immense city and accept everything insofar as possible with some calm and determination”.

Members of this disenfranchised community became the subjects of many of Delaney’s greatest New York period paintings. In New York “he painted colourful, engaging canvasses that captured scenes of the urban landscape…his works from that period express, in an American Modernist vein, not only the character of the city, but also his personal vision of equality, love, and respect among all people”.

One of Delaney’s works from this period, Can Fire in the Park (oil on canvas, 1946), where a group of men huddle together for warmth and companionship around an open fire, is described by the Smithsonian American Art Museum as a “disturbingly contemporary vignette [which] conveys a legacy of deprivation linked not only to the Depression years after 1929 but also to the longstanding disenfranchisement of black Americans, portrayed here as social outcasts… Despite its sober subject, the scene crackles with energy, the culmination of Delaney’s sharp pure colors, thickly applied paints, and taught, schematic patterning. Abandoning the precise realism
Realism (visual arts)
Realism in the visual arts is a style that depicts the actuality of what the eyes can see. The term is used in different senses in art history; it may mean the same as illusionism, the representation of subjects with visual mimesis or verisimilitude, or may mean an emphasis on the actuality of...

 of his early academic training, Delaney developed a lyrically expressive style that drew upon his love of musical rhythms and his improvisational use of color.” Works such as Can Fire in the Park “hover between representation and abstraction as that style evolved during the 1940s.”

Delaney would eventually obtain work as a bellhop, and later as a telephone operator, doorman, caretaker, and janitor. He also managed to find “little corners in the world of the Great Depression that would or could be receptive to his work.”

In time, Delaney would establish himself as a well known part of the bohemianism
Bohemianism
Bohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people, with few permanent ties, involving musical, artistic or literary pursuits...

 of the art scene of the period. His friends included the “poet laureate” of the period, Countee Cullen
Countee Cullen
Countee Cullen was an American poet who was popular during the Harlem Renaissance.- Biography :Cullen was an American poet and a leading figure with Langston Hughes in the Harlem Renaissance. This 1920s artistic movement produced the first large body of work in the United States written by African...

, and he would also become the “spiritual father” to the young writer James Baldwin
James Baldwin (writer)
James Arthur Baldwin was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic.Baldwin's essays, for instance "Notes of a Native Son" , explore palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-20th century America,...

, and friends with artist Georgia O’Keeffe, writer Henry Miller
Henry Miller
Henry Valentine Miller was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is...

 and many others.

Despite the friendships and successes of this period, he remained a rather isolated individual. David Leeming, in his 1998 biography Amazing Grace: a life of Beauford Delaney, presents Delaney as having led a very “compartmentalized” life in New York.

In Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village, , , , .in New York often simply called "the Village", is a largely residential neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City. A large majority of the district is home to upper middle class families...

, where his studio was, Delaney became part of a gay bohemian circle of mainly white friends; but he was furtive and rarely comfortable with his sexuality.

When he traveled to Harlem to visit his African-American friends and colleagues, Delaney made efforts to ensure that they knew little of his other social life in Greenwich Village. He feared that many of his Harlem friends would be uncomfortable or repelled by his homosexuality
Homosexuality
Homosexuality is romantic or sexual attraction or behavior between members of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality refers to "an enduring pattern of or disposition to experience sexual, affectional, or romantic attractions" primarily or exclusively to people of the same...

.

He had ‘a third life’ centered around questions concerning the aesthetics
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...

 and development of modernism in Europe and the United States; primarily influenced by the ideas of his friends the photographer Alfred Stieglitz
Alfred Stieglitz
Alfred Stieglitz was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his fifty-year career in making photography an accepted art form...

 and the cubist artist Stuart Davis (painter)
Stuart Davis (painter)
Stuart Davis , was an early American modernist painter. He was well known for his jazz influenced, proto pop art paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, bold, brash, and colorful as well as his ashcan pictures in the early years of the 20th century.-Biography:He was born in Philadelphia to Edward Wyatt...

, and the paintings of the European modernists and their predecessors like Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso and Van Gogh.

The pressures of being “black and gay in a racist and homophobic society” would have been difficult enough – but Delaney’s own Christian
Christian
A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...

 upbringing and ‘disapproval’ of homosexuality, the presence of a family member (his artist brother Joseph) in the New York art scene and the “macho abstract expressionists emerging in lower Manhattan’s art scene” added to this pressure. So he “remained rather isolated as an artist even as he worked in a center of major artistic ferment… A deeply introverted and private person, Delaney formed no lasting romantic relationships.”

While he worked to incorporate African-American influences, such as the “Negro
Negro
The word Negro is used in the English-speaking world to refer to a person of black ancestry or appearance, whether of African descent or not...

” idiom of jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...

, into his own artwork, he often preferred to visit one of the clubs when he was in Harlem rather than join in the serious socio-political discussions or “Negro art” questions that were taking place at the 306 Group or the Harlem Artists Guild. Though he resisted thinking of himself as a Negro artist, Beauford had tremendous pride in black achievement. He was also pleased to participate in a number of black artists exhibitions with fellow artists like Jacob Lawrence
Jacob Lawrence
Jacob Lawrence was an American painter; he was married to fellow artist Gwendolyn Knight. Lawrence referred to his style as "dynamic cubism", though by his own account the primary influence was not so much French art as the shapes and colors of Harlem.Lawrence is among the best-known twentieth...

, Romare Bearden
Romare Bearden
Romare Bearden was an African American artist and writer. He worked in several media including cartoons, oils, and collage.-Education:...

, Hale Woodruff
Hale Woodruff
Hale Aspacio Woodruff was an African American artist known for his murals, paintings, and prints. One example of his work, the three-panel Amistad Mutiny murals , can be found at Talladega College in Talladega County, Alabama...

, Selma Burke
Selma Burke
Selma Hortense Burke was an American sculptor.Born in Mooresville, North Carolina to a farming family, she demonstrated an early interest in art. Her parents insisted she study a more marketable profession, and she graduated from the St. Agnes Training School for Nurses in Raleigh in 1924...

, Richmond Barthe
Richmond Barthé
James Richmond Barthé was an African American sculptor known for his many public works, including the Toussaint L’Ouverture Monument in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and a sculpture of Rose McClendon for Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater House.Barthe once said that “all my life I have be interested in...

, Norman Lewis
Norman Lewis (artist)
Norman W. Lewis was an African-American painter, scholar, and teacher. He is associated with Abstract Expressionism. Lewis was African-American, of Caribbean descent.-Early life and career:...

 and his brother Joseph Delaney.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum notes that "neither early success nor gracious spirit spared Delaney from the obscurity and poverty" that plagued most of his adult life. Brooks Atkinson
Brooks Atkinson
Justin Brooks Atkinson was an American theatre critic. He worked for The New York Times from 1925 to 1960...

 wrote in his 1951 book Once Around the Sun, "No one knows exactly how Beauford lives. Pegging away at a style of painting that few people understand or appreciate, he has disciplined himself, not only physically but spiritually, to live with a kind of personal magnetism in a barren world."

Delaney’s paintings seem to say, "I may be suffering, but what an experience this is". Delaney’s work "is never depressing, though Beauford was often depressed; he could say yes to life in spite of the fact that life was kicking him in the ass."

Paris

In 1953, at the age of 52, and just as the centre of the art world was shifting to New York, Delaney left New York for Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

. Europe had already attracted many other African-American artists and writers who had found a greater sense of freedom there. Writers Richard Wright
Richard Wright (author)
Richard Nathaniel Wright was an African-American author of sometimes controversial novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerns racial themes, especially those involving the plight of African-Americans during the late 19th to mid 20th centuries...

, James Baldwin
James Baldwin (writer)
James Arthur Baldwin was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic.Baldwin's essays, for instance "Notes of a Native Son" , explore palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-20th century America,...

, Chester Himes
Chester Himes
Chester Bomar Himes was an American writer. His works include If He Hollers Let Him Go and a series of Harlem Detective novels...

, Ralph Ellison
Ralph Ellison
Ralph Waldo Ellison was an American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer. He was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Ellison is best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953...

, William Gardner Smith
William Gardner Smith
William Gardner Smith was an American journalist, novelist, and editor. Smith is linked to the black social protest novel tradition of the 1940s and the 1950s, a movement that became synonymous with writers such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Willard Motley, and Ann Petry...

 and Richard Gibson
Richard Gibson
Richard Gibson is an English actor, probably best known for his role as the archetypal Gestapo Officer Herr Otto Flick in the BBC hit sitcom series, Allo 'Allo!.-Career:...

, and artists Harold Cousins, Herbert Gentry
Herbert Gentry
Herbert Gentry was an African American Expressionist painter lived and worked in Paris, France, , Copenhagen, Denmark , In the Swedish cities of Gothenburg , Stockholm , and Malmo , and in New York City as a permanent resident of the Hotel Chelsea.-The art of Herbert Gentry:Gentry’s...

 and Ed Clark
Edward Clark (artist)
Edward Clark also known as Ed Clark is an African American abstract expressionist painter and one of the early experimenters with shaped canvas in the 1950s.Edward Clark stated:-Biography:...

 had all preceded him in journeying to Europe. In his journal, Richard Wright described Paris as "a place where one could claim one's soul."

Europe would be Delaney’s home for the remainder of his life. About his new life and possibilities, Beauford entreated himself to "Keep the faith and trust in so far as possible. Love humility and don’t mind the insinuations that cause sorrow…and loneliness and limitations. We learn self-reliance and to hear the voice of God, too…and how to…not break but bend gently. Learning to love is learning to suffer deeply and with quietness."

His years in Paris would lead to a dramatic stylistic shift from the "figurative compositions of New York life to abstract expressionist studies of color and light."

“Delaney's relationship with abstraction predated the notorious Abstract Expressionist movement, positioning him as a forerunner of one of the most important ideological and stylistic developments in twentieth-century American art. Although he chose not to identify himself with the movement, as the Abstract Expressionists began to gain notoriety in the late 1940s, Delaney's abstract work increasingly gained attention.”

Though abstract expressionist work predominated during this period, Delaney still produced figurative
Figurative art
Figurative art, sometimes written as figurativism, describes artwork—particularly paintings and sculptures—which are clearly derived from real object sources, and are therefore by definition representational.-Definition:...

 compositions. His portrait of James Baldwin (1963, pastel on paper) is described by the US National Portrait Gallery as “heated and confrontational, its harsh colors roughly applied” and glowing with “the vibrant, Van Gogh-inspired yellow the artist often used after he moved to Paris." The portrait “is both a likeness based on memory and a study in light.”

Mental deterioration

By 1961, heavy drinking had begun to impair Delaney's often fragile mental and physical health. Periods of lucidity were interrupted by days and sometimes weeks of madness. This pattern would continue for the remainder of his life.

Continued poverty, hunger and alcohol abuse fueled his deterioration. ”He has been starving and working all of his life – in Tennessee, in Boston, in New York, and now in Paris. He has been menaced more than any other man I know by his social circumstances and also by all the emotional and psychological stratagems he has been forced to use to survive; and, more than any other man I know, he has transcended both the inner and outer darkness.”

He returned briefly to the United States in 1969, to see his family, dogged by mental illness. He believed malicious people would come to him at night “and speak unpleasant and vulgar language and threaten malicious treatment…interfering with my health and urgent work…the constant, continuous creation.”

He returned to his work in Paris in January 1970. In the early 1970s it became clear that he could no longer cope with daily life. In the autumn of 1973 his friend, Charley Boggs, wrote to James Baldwin, “Our blessed Beauford is rapidly losing mental control.” His friends tried to care for him but, in 1975, he was hospitalized and then committed to St Anne’s Hospital for the Insane. Beauford Delaney died in Paris, at St Anne’s, on March 26, 1979.

In his Introduction to the Exhibition of Beauford Delaney opening December 4, 1964 at the Gallery Lambert, James Baldwin wrote, “the darkness of Beauford's beginnings, in Tennessee, many years ago, was a black-blue midnight indeed, opaque and full of sorrow. And I do not know, nor will any of us ever really know, what kind of strength it was that enabled him to make so dogged and splendid a journey."

Since his death

Following his death, he was praised as a great and neglected painter but, with a few notable exceptions, the neglect continued.

A retrospective of his work at the Studio Museum in Harlem, a year before his death, did little to revive interest in his work. It was not until the 1988 exhibition Beauford Delaney: From Tennessee to Paris, curated by the French art dealer Philippe Briet, at the Philippe Briet Gallery, that Delaney's work was again exhibited in New York, followed by two retrospectives in the gallery: "Beauford Delaney: A Retrospective [50 Years of Light]" in 1991, and "Beauford Delaney: The New York Years [1929-1953]" in 1994.

"Whatever Happened to Beauford Delaney?," an article by Eleanor Heartney appeared in Art in America
Art in America
Art in America is an illustrated monthly, international magazine concentrating on the contemporary art world, including profiles of artists and genres, updates about art movements, show reviews and event schedules. It is designed for collectors, artists, dealers, art professionals and other...

in response to the 1994 exhibition asking why this once well regarded "artist's artist" was now virtually unknown to the American art public? “What happened? Is this another case of an over-inflated reputation returning to its true level? Or was Delaney undone by changing fashions which rendered his work unpalatable to succeeding generations? Why did Beauford Delaney so completely disappear from American art history?” The author believed that Delaney's disappearance from the consciousness of the New York art world was linked to “his move to Paris at a crucial moment in the consolidation of New York's position as the world's cultural capital and his work's irrelevance to the history of American art as it was being written by critics” at the time. The article concludes, “Today [1994] as those histories unravel and are replaced by narratives with a more varied and colorful weave, artists like Delaney can be seen in a new light.”

In 1985 James Baldwin described the impact of Delaney on his life, saying he was "the first living proof, for me, that a black man could be an artist. In a warmer time, a less blasphemous place, he would have been recognised as my Master and I as his Pupil. He became, for me, an example of courage and integrity, humility and passion. An absolute integrity: I saw him shaken many times and I lived to see him broken but I never saw him bow." He further wrote, "Perhaps I should not say, flatly, what I believe – that he is a great painter – among the very greatest; but I do know that great art can only be created out of love, and that no greater lover has ever held a brush."

Delaney’s work has now been exhibited by, among others, the Philadelphia Museum of Art
Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is among the largest art museums in the United States. It is located at the west end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park. The Museum was established in 1876 in conjunction with the Centennial Exposition of the same year...

, Harvard University Art Museums, Art Institute of Chicago
Art Institute of Chicago
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago is one of America's largest accredited independent schools of art and design, located in the Loop in Chicago, Illinois. It is associated with the museum of the same name, and "The Art Institute of Chicago" or "Chicago Art Institute" often refers to either...

, Knoxville Museum of Art
Knoxville Museum of Art
The Knoxville Museum of Art is a contemporary art museum located at 1050 World's Fair Park in Knoxville, Tennessee. The KMA is committed to developing exhibitions by emerging artists of national and international reputation.- History :...

, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The Newark Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum
Smithsonian American Art Museum
The Smithsonian American Art Museum is a museum in Washington, D.C. with an extensive collection of American art.Part of the Smithsonian Institution, the museum has a broad variety of American art that covers all regions and art movements found in the United States...

.

The Beauford Delaney Burial Site

In 2009, freelance writer Monique Y. Wells was researching an article on African-American gravesites in Paris when she learned that Delaney was buried in an unmarked grave at the Parisian Cemetery of Thiais. She discovered that Delaney’s remains would be exhumed before the end of the year if the “concession” (the equivalent of a lease) on his grave was not renewed. Friends of Delaney gathered the sum required, and Wells paid the fee to the cemetery to preserve Delaney’s resting place.

The same friends who contributed the funds to renew the concession expressed a fervent desire to place a marker at Delaney’s gravesite, and Wells was inspired to found a French non-profit association to facilitate fundraising for a tombstone. Called Les Amis de Beauford Delaney, the association was created in November 2009. Fundraising began in February 2010, and the association collected sufficient funds to proceed with ordering and installing the stone by June 2010. The installation was complete by August 2010.
The inscription on the tombstone reads:

Beauford Delaney

Peintre • Painter

30 December 1901 - 26 March 1979

Born: Knoxville, Tennessee USA

Died: Paris, France

"I am home"

A small photo of Delaney is affixed to the stone.

Les Amis de Beauford Delaney organized a commemorative ceremony to inaugurate the tombstone, which took place on October 14, 2010. Several friends and admirers of Delaney gathered at Thiais Cemetery under blue skies and brilliant sunlight to honor him. Wells presided over the ceremony as president of the organization. The Reverend Doctor Scott Herr from the American Church in Paris read Delaney’ favorite scriptures and personal friends of Delaney – Velma Bury, Colin Gravois, and Richard Gibson – gave tributes to him. Singer ferritia-fatia sang “Come Sunday,” accompanied by flautist Sabine Boyer. Wells gave her own tribute to Delaney, and laid an arrangement of yellow roses on the tombstone. Reverend Herr closed the ceremony by reading Richard A. Long’s poem “Ascending,” and saying a final prayer.

After the gravesite ceremony, the group returned to Paris for a reception that was co-hosted by Les Amis de Beauford Delaney and the U.S. Embassy’s Department of Public Affairs. Approximately fifty persons gathered at the George C. Marshall Center in the Hotel Talleyrand that evening to continue the celebration of Delaney’s life and art. Cultural Attaché Rafik Mansour spoke about Delaney to open the evening. Ammon Hall-Moore sang “God Bless the Child,” followed by personal tributes from Velma Bury and Richard Gibson. ferricia-fatia (vocals) and Sabine Boyer (flute) then performed a moving rendition of “Freedom Day.”

To end the evening, Wells presented a slide show entitled “Beauford Delaney: From Paris to Beyond” – giving an overview of Beauford’s life that concentrated on his favorite haunts and his studios in Paris, and providing an introduction to his art. She then described the events leading up to the installation of Delaney’s tombstone, and briefly discussed what projects Les Amis de Beauford Delaney might undertake in the future.

External links

Works:
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