David Byrne - award-winning musician, writer, visual artist, and filmmaker - performed his David Byrne - Who Is The Sky? concert yesterday at the Big Ears Festival in Beauford's home town of Knoxville, TN.
Photo credit: Shervin Lainez
Byrne is featuring Beauford in his upcoming book, Sleeping Beauties, which is all about brilliant ideas that got overlooked or forgotten but can be / are being revived.
He found Beauford’s renaissance over the last 10 years to be a "sleeping beauty," and he reached out to Les Amis to set up a fact checking call for the chapter he is writing about Beauford's rediscovery.
Byrne experienced Beauford's work for the first time when he visited the Be Your Wonderful Self: The Portraits of Beauford Delaney exhibition at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in NYC. He told me that he and his wife went to the show because it had "gotten a nice review in the Times."
Catalog cover
Artwork © Estate of Beauford Delaney,
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator
Courtesy of the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York, NY
The magnificence of Beauford's paintings notwithstanding, Byrne and his wife were greatly impressed with his writing, which they discovered in a display of correspondence that had been included in the show. (One of the vitrines was filled with handwritten letters to Larry Calcagno, Al Hirshfeld, Palmer and Miriam Hayden, and other friends and acquaintances.)
Be Your Wonderful Self: The Portraits of Beauford Delaney
(September 8–December 23, 2021)
at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, NY
Artworks © Estate of Beauford Delaney,
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator,
Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY
Be Your Wonderful Self: The Portraits of Beauford Delaney
(September 8–December 23, 2021)
at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, NY
Artworks © Estate of Beauford Delaney,
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator,
Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY
Be Your Wonderful Self: The Portraits of Beauford Delaney
(September 8–December 23, 2021)
at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, NY
Artworks © Estate of Beauford Delaney,
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator,
Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY
They subsequently saw Be Your Wonderful Self at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. Byrne told me, "By then we realized - oh, he's back."
During a second call, I spoke to Byrne at length about Beauford and Sleeping Beauties. He reiterated how impressed he and his wife were by Beauford's writing, saying that many visual artists are challenged when it comes to expressing themselves in writing. He said that after visiting the exhibition at Ogden, he began seeing more references about Beauford.
I mentioned that one of the essays in the catalog for the Resonance of Form and Vibration of Color exhibition that the Wells International Foundation organized in Paris in 2016 is all about Beauford's writing and noted that this exhibition is credited as being the beginning of Beauford's renaissance.
Our conversation turned to the reason Byrne is including Beauford in Sleeping Beauties. He said that after seeing Beauford's work at Ogden, he asked himself "How in the world did this go missing?" and "How did it get rediscovered?" His search for the response to that question brought him to Les Amis and to me.
Byrne talked about how the people of Knoxville had known so little about Beauford before Resonance of Form, and I told him about the "Knoxville 11," the eleven people from Knoxville who came to Paris to see the show. I also told him that the September 2016 article the NYTimes published about Beauford was a direct result of the Paris exhibition.
Sleeping Beauties is a work in progress, and Byrne said that he may reach out for additional information as he finishes up his writing.
As soon as the book is published, Les Amis will read the chapter about Beauford and post a review!
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