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  • “… whatever she saw go on in that barn”
  • Nell Painter (bio)

After many years as an academic historian, I undertook formal art study, earning a BFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts of Rutgers University in 2009 and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2011, both in painting. More recently I’ve been combining my old and new lives into artwork with significant subject matter as well as visual meaning.

I just now reread Toni Morrison’s tough, magnificent novel Beloved for the first time in about a quarter century. It left me devastated by the sheer cruelty of slavery and the way it distorted humanity, even though as a historian, I was well acquainted with the institution’s awfulness. I also saw in new ways Morrison’s visual imagination, notably her insistence on the importance of color. Because this publication precludes the reproduction of my pieces in color, grisaille will have to represent the meaning of Morrison’s investment in color, though I have reproduced some of the work’s haunting lines of text. [End Page 183]


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[End Page 184]

Nell Painter

Nell Painter (the artist formerly known as the historian Nell Irvin Painter)

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