Speculative Light

Over the course of a thirty-eight-year friendship, painter Beauford Delaney and writer James Baldwin shared their private lives and shaped one another’s artistic values. This book brings together scholars, critics, and artists who examine how this friendship fundamentally shaped the pair's ideas about art and life.

“This is a vibrant, timely, and vital collection of essays that illuminate how we can read James Baldwin through Beauford Delaney’s paintings and see Delaney’s paintings through Baldwin’s writing. Placing the lives and works of these two close friends side by side tells us much about kinship, intimacy, and craft, not only in relation to Delaney and Baldwin but in African American culture more broadly.” - Douglas Field, author of (Walking in the Dark: James Baldwin, My Father, and Me) “James Baldwin was most moving when recalling the aesthetic education he received from Beauford Delaney-who taught him both how to listen, ‘to hear [in Black music] what I had never dared or been able to hear,’ and how to see ‘and . . . trust what I saw.’ Speculative Light bears extraordinary witness to the lives of two men, devoted to their craft, moving always in the direction of wonder and uncertainty, buoyed by that loving and shared sense of attunement.” - Stephen Best, author of (None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life) "This book peers into an intimate relationship between two Black, queer men who grappled with the harsh lens of shame and found solace in their art and one another; two friends, platonic lovers, mentor and mentee, who knew each other in ways their voracious public could not. We owe much of Baldwin’s oeuvre to Delaney, and we owe it to Delaney to look again." - Jasmine Weber (Hyperallergic)

Amy J. Elias is Chancellor’s Professor and Director of the Denbo Center for Humanities and the Arts at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the author of Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction and coeditor of Time: A Vocabulary of the Present and The Planetary Turn .