Colorstruck!

Painting, Pigment, Affect

How Black painters use color to create meaning, provoke remembrance, stir emotion, and uplift the spirit

Color does more than capture a viewers attention. It assaults ones equilibrium physically and psychologically. In this stunning book, Richard Powell draws on the concept of colorstruck, a twentieth-century slang term describing prejudice toward people with darker skin complexions, to provide a new history of Black American art.

Powell charts the dynamics of paint and pigment in the works of artists such as Jacob Lawrence, Alma Thomas, Raymond Saunders, Sam Gilliam, Herv Tlmaque, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Nina Chanel Abney, and Henry Taylor. Using blue, green, yellow, orange, black, red, brown, and their combinations, he considers the historical and cultural contexts in which these colors unleash their visual magic and shows how the artists vibrant palettes collide wi