Kelly-Christina Grant, an art history doctoral candidate at the University of Paris Nanterre, is the 2023/2024 winner of the Bourse Beauford Delaney-Villa Albertine (Beauford Delaney Research Grant).
Supported by the Ford Foundation, this grant funds travel and other expenses related to research projects on African-American art undertaken by France-based academics and scholars.
Grant's project, L’Atlantique noire de Loïs Mailou Jones (The Black Atlantic of Loïs Mailou Jones), examines "the political, social, gender, and racial issues surrounding Jones’ practice of landscape painting."
LinkedIn Photo
This work is also the focus of her Terra Foundation for American Art predoctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Beauford and Jones met during Beauford's Boston years. Jones was a student at the Boston Museum School at the time, and Beauford had established himself in the city with the support of Knoxville artist Lloyd Branson. While it is not clear how well the two knew each other, they both frequented Boston's museums and the Ford Hall Forum on Boyleston Street. Both took classes at the Massachusetts Normal Art School (aka Boston Normal Art School).
Both artists were also masters at landscape painting.
(1945) Oil on canvas
Image by Manu Sasoonian, from Amazing Grace
© Estate of Beauford Delaney
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator
Loïs Mailou Jones
(ca 1948) Oil on canvas
Smithsonian American Art Institute
Grant had the following to say about Beauford and his work:
Like Loïs Mailou Jones, Beauford Delaney was an extraordinary colorist whose art spanned many styles and who captured on canvas the mood of the places who inspired him the most, from New York to Paris. He's a major Modernist painter in the history of American art.
Read Grant's research article entitled "African-American Women Artists in French Public Collections: Acquisitions from the 1970s to the Present Day" by clicking HERE.
