Richard J. Powell is John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art & Art History at Duke University, where he has taught since 1989.  He studied at Morehouse College and Howard University before earning his doctorate in art history at Yale University.  Along with teaching courses in American art, the arts of the African Diaspora, and contemporary visual studies, he has written extensively on topics ranging from primitivism to postmodernism, including such titles as Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson (1991), Black Art: A Cultural History (1997 & 2002), and Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (2008).[1]

Powell has helped organize several art exhibitions, most notably: The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism (1989); Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance (1997); To Conserve A Legacy: American Art at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (1999); Beauford Delaney: The Color Yellow (2002); Circle Dance: The Art of John T. Scott (2005); Back to Black: Art, Cinema, & the Racial Imaginary (2005); and Conjuring Bearden (2006). These and other exhibitions curated by Powell have appeared in major museums and galleries both nationally and internationally, and include such institutions as the Studio Museum in Harlem, Whitney Museum of American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery, and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.[2]

Richard Powell is a past recipient of two Ford Foundation Fellowships, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, numerous Smithsonian Institution Fellowships and Grants, and a Fulbright Grant for Graduate Study Abroad, among other fellowships and grants. He has been a Fellow-in-Residence at the National Humanities Center, the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University, as well as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in Museum Education at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and an Ednah Root Visiting Curator in American Art at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, California.[2]

Sources:

[1] https://aahvs.duke.edu/people/profile/richard-j-powell

[2]https://www.richardjpowell.com/bio.html

[3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/129305.Rhapsodies_in_Black link for Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance book

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