“Into Beauford’s Colors”: James Baldwin, Black Queer Joy and the Art of Friendship –

Wednesday, October 23, 2024

6:00 to 7:30 PM

BTSU 201

Description:

In 1940, a sixteen-year-old James Baldwin knocked on a door in Greenwich Village and stepped into a most unexpected friendship with the modernist painter, Beauford Delaney.  Over the course of nearly forty years, Baldwin and Delaney created art in their own ways – Jimmy through writing, Beauford through painting – and together they created a most masterful fraternal work that reached beyond suffering in search of something more. This talk is a journey into that work, a delving into those quiet spaces of friendship, a dance within the oftentimes fraught but always beautiful intersection where Black meets queer. More intimately, it is an invitation to bear witness to Baldwin’s discovery of himself and his capacity to hold joy.

Bio:

Ernest L. Gibson III, Associate Professor of English and Director of African American & Africana Studies at Auburn University, received his PhD in Afro-American Studies from the University of Massachusetts – Amherst. Prior to his appointment at Auburn, he was the Thurgood Marshall Fellow in African and African American Studies at Dartmouth College and Assistant/Associate Professor of English at Rhodes College. He is the author of the award-winning book, Salvific Manhood: James Baldwin’s Novelization of Male Intimacy. An interdisciplinary scholar by training, his research lies at the intersections of literary, cultural, and queer theories, and often pivots on questions of manhood, masculinity, and vulnerability.  He is presently at work on his second book project – Beyond Suffering: Black Male Joy in the Age of Absurdity.

For information contact Tom Edge