Uploaded June 2022 | Updated September 2026, 4 hours ago

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Richard J. Powell (John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University and former Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor at the National Gallery of Art) discusses Archibald J. Motley Jr.’s painting Portrait of My Grandmother (1922). Powell describes the arresting power of the artist’s loving portrayal of Emily Simms Motley, a woman born in slavery and hardworking all her long life, asserting its place among the other Jazz Age paintings for which the artist is well known.

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