Two Duke faculty in the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences have been appointed National Humanities Center (NHC) fellows for the 2023-2024 academic year. Richard Jaffe, professor of Religious Studies, will lovingly craft 15-plus years of research into a comprehensive biography honoring a name many are familiar with: Suzuki.
From the Union Institute Academy, to Trinity College, to what we now call Duke University, the history of Duke lives within its buildings and the names that they carry.
ALTHOUGH the more-than-a-half-century career of abstract painter Sam Gilliam was universally recognized and expansive in its reach, his studio and home were in Washington, D.C., which the art world was late to recognize as a place for innovative art and shape-shifting artists. Despite the history surrounding the genesis and development of the Washington Color School chronicles that include such luminaries as critic Clement Greenberg and painters Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland the reputation of the nation’s capital for nurturing leading-edge visual artists pales in comparison to cities like New
Richard J. Powell, a leading scholar in African American art history and the John Spencer Bassett Distinguished Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University, is currently delivering the seventy-first A. W. Mellon Lectures, the storied public series hosted by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Titled “Colorstruck! Painting, Pigment, Affect,” the six-part lecture spans social history, personal experience, color theory, music, art, and design. Taking a thematic rather than specifically historical approach, Powell engages art historical questions from a somewhat heterodox vantage,