“Say It Loud”: An Interview with Richard Powell

OLIVER:

Toward the end of our conversation last week, you were talking about your return to the District of Columbia after having been to New York and away on travel and speaking with artists about how they think about themselves, how they challenge an expectation in terms of the type of work they make and the type of conversations they can have with their work. So, let’s talk about the development of The Blues Aesthetic—what led you to develop such an exhibition at that time. What was happening during that time (culturally, socially, and politically) and, how The Blues Aesthetic became your response to the world around you.

POWELL:

Well, first of all, The Blues Aesthetic was the head title of my master’s thesis at Yale University. I arrived at Yale in 1980 and by 1982 I had completed my Master of Arts in African American studies. My master’s thesis was called The Blues Aesthetic: Afro-American Culture as an Instrument of Style in Modern American Painting, and this was my attempt—again, this was 1980-1982—to think broadly about modern and contemporary practices in the art world that reflected black culture. And not just reflected it in an illustrative way, or as figurative work that rendered the black body, but works that were constitutively African American. And I know it’s a stretch to ask, “How does an artist, beyond representing a black body, convey blackness?” That was my goal for the master’s thesis. It took me into the basic literature on African American art, particularly modern African American art. So I read James Porter’s Modern Negro Art, and I looked closely at the writings of Alain Locke and the critical compilations he had done during the Harlem Renaissance. But it was also at this point that I’m working closely with art historian Robert Farris Thompson. And many of the ideas he was exploring became critical for me, in terms of the black Atlantic and the idea of black visual creativity popping up in places like Haiti, Brazil, and the United States, and how there might be a conversation between those works of art that wasn’t explicit but implicit. So this was the environment that produced my master’s thesis.

Flash forward to 1985, and my coming back to Washington, DC, from Copenhagen, Denmark. I’m now working at the Smithsonian Institution and trying to wrap up my PhD dissertation for Yale on the African American artist William Henry Johnson, and I get an opportunity to do some exhibitions at the Washington Projects with the Arts (or the W.P.A.) as a visiting curator. I collaborated with the W.P.A. Director at the time, Jock Reynolds (now the Director of the Yale University Art Gallery), on the James Lesesne Wells retrospective, and that was well received. I then got an invitation from Jock to be the Director of Programs at the W.P.A. I did two big exhibitions there. One was a show that dealt with Washington, DC as a site of contemporary art, and the other was a big project called The Blues Aesthetic, something I had chatted with Jock and some members of the W.P.A. board about, and they all said “Go for it! This is something that might be really exciting to do as an exhibition.” So I was pretty much given the freedom to think about bringing objects together in interesting ways. This is the first time I actually had a substantial budget for an exhibition. [Laughter] My earlier shows for the Studio Museum in Harlem and my previous, little exhibitions hardly had any budgets, so I had relied on the kindness of organizations to realize my visions, but this was the first time I was attentive to the fact one needs money to make major, serious exhibitions happen. I remember the W.P.A.’s Director of Development, John L. Moore, Jock, and myself ventured out and had conversations with potential donors. This was my first experience with being part of...