Born in Knoxville, TN Beauford Delaney (1901-79) first studied with local teacher and artist Lloyd Branson. Branson encouraged Delaney to continue his studies in the North where he would come into contact with more artists and influences. Delaney moved to Boston in 1923 and then in 1929 to New York where he emerged as an artist at the end of the Harlem Renaissance. In New York he became known for his portraiture and patterned paintings of New York's urban environment. In 1953 he left for Paris and stayed there until the end of his life. Paris offered freedoms and lack of prejudice that were unavailable, he felt, to him in the United States. Upon his move to
Paris, he also began to work in a more abstract style. Like many artists, he was influenced by America’s Abstract Expressionism.

The exhibition will demonstrate Delaney’s relationship to some of the icons of American Modernism, such as Stuart Davis, John Marin, and Arthur Dove, all of whom he knew and admired. The influence of France, in the work of Vincent Van Gogh, Henri Matisse, and Claude Monet will also be examined in this exhibition.

Delaney’s work has remained obscure in the history of art, the exhibition will bring to the forefront the accomplishments of this American artist.