Interpretive Resource

Audio Lecture: Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture

Combining previously unpublished images with scrupulous archival research, this lecture illuminates the ideological nature of the genre and the centrality of race and cultural identity in understanding modern and contemporary portraiture. Powell forcefully supports this argument with evidence drawn from a survey of nineteenth-century portraits, in-depth case studies of the postwar fashion model Donyale Luna and the contemporary portraitist Barkley L. Hendricks, and insightful analyses of images created since the late 1970s.