Asheville Art Museum Exhibition Featuring Paintings by Beauford Delaney

Featuring more than 40 paintings and works on paper, Beauford Delaney’s Metamorphosis into Freedom examines the career evolution of modern painter Beauford Delaney (Knoxville, TN 1901–1979 Paris, France) within the context of his 38-year friendship with writer James Baldwin (New York 1924-1987 Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France). The exhibition will be on view in the Asheville Art Museum’s Explore Asheville Exhibition Hall April 2 through June 21, 2021.

The works in this exhibition bring into special focus Delaney’s experiments with abstraction sparked by the artist’s 1955 move to the Paris suburb of Clamart, as well as the ways that the artist and Baldwin’s ongoing intellectual exchange shaped one another’s creative output and worldview from their first meeting in 1940 until Delaney’s death in 1979.