Art Historian Richard Powell Receives National Award
Richard Powell has been honored by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art
Richard J. Powell, the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke, has been awarded the Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History.
Powell received the award Oct. 22 from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. A member of the Duke faculty since 1989, Powell chaired the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies from 1998-2001. Since 2012 he has been an affiliated faculty member with the Ph.D. Lab in Digital. Knowledge.
Powell studied at Morehouse College and Howard University before earning his doctorate at Yale University in 1988. His research and teaching interests are in American art, African American art, and theories of race and representation in the African Diaspora. He is also interested in the media arts and conceptualizations of the "folk" in world art and culture. He has written extensively on topics ranging from primitivism to postmodernism.
Powell’s books include Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson (1991), Jacob Lawrence (1992), and Black Art: A Cultural History (1997 and 2002). His latest book, Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (2008) looks at 19th, 20th, and 21s century portraits of peoples of African descent in paintings, photographs, graphic arts, and cinema.
In 2007 Powell was appointed editor-in-chief of the Art Bulletin for a three-year term. The Art Bulletin is the leading English-language journal of art history, published by the College Art Association of America.