Fraternal Light: On Painting While Black

By Arlene Keizer and Cornelius Eady

Winner of the 2022 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize

Fraternal Light: On Painting While Black is a lyric evocation of the life and work of the great African American artist Beauford Delaney. These poems pay homage to Delaney’s resilience and ingenuity in the face of profound adversity. Although his work never garnered the acclaim it deserves—and is finally receiving—Delaney was well known and highly respected in African American cultural circles, among bohemian writers and artists based in Greenwich Village from the 1930s to the early 1950s, and in Parisian avant-garde and expatriate enclaves from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s.

Drawn to Delaney’s painting and personal history through her emotional response to his work, especially his portraits, Arlene Keizer has crafted a diasporic ceremony of remembrance for this Black, gay male visionary. Fraternal Light offers back an answering complexity to Delaney’s life and work. One form of art calls out; another answers.

Keizer’s poems make the contours and challenges of Delaney’s life visible, which is especially urgent in a world still frequently hostile or indifferent to Black creative brilliance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Release date: Aug 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9781631015311

Book preview

FOREWORD

One art calls out; another art answers.

—Preface to Fraternal Light

Arlene Keizer’s rich and powerful new book on the art and life of African American painter Beauford Delaney, Fraternal Light: On Painting While Black, gives us much to consider; the art, the artist, the locations, the longings, the struggles, the journey of becoming. Most of all, I greatly admire how she handles light in these lines; regathered, translated anew, passionately relit in both the subjects and the readers’ minds. Delaney’s work and life story is in very good hands, and unlike his canvas, Keizer’s poems give us not only the end result of an original eye and the stroke of a brush but the context and heat of the world and time that triggered it. We read and are arrested by the double beauty. Delaney’s art calls; Arlene Keizer’s poetry answers. We leave her book with eyes