Painter said staff questioned the name MacDowell Colony many times - it's had the same name since 1907 - but the conversation reached a tipping point as Black Lives Matter movements this year called attention to racist symbols and nomenclature persisting across the nation. In her first year as chair, the board voted to drop 'colony' from MacDowell's name. She also directed the African-American Studies program at Princeton University from 1997 to 2000.ĭespite her relatively recent transition into the art world, the board of directors for MacDowell, an artists' residency program in Peterborough, New Hampshire, unanimously elected Painter as chairwoman this year. She had created art as a MacDowell fellow twice in the past decade. Her 2010 book 'The History of White People ,' a New York Times bestseller, delves into the invention of race and the development of Western civilization. Her research on Sojourner Truth culminated in a book, 'Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol,' that won the nonfiction prize from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association in 1997. In her past life as an academic, Painter explored historic Black trailblazers and stories. Generation means that I'm in a different place with my Blackness from the ideas that are circulating now.' 'People who were coming up in a moment of upheaval like 2020 experience it differently from people in my generation, who already lived through this in the '60s and '70s. 'When you think Black and the imagery that comes up, it's young people, and I am not young,' Painter said. But Painter struggles to identify with what she calls 'the current iconography of Blackness.' It chronicled the life of Sojourner Truth, a former slave, who became a spokeswoman. Her research on Sojourner Truth, an abolitionist and women's rights activist, led her to explore art. Author Nell Irvin Painter talked about her book Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol, published by W.W. Painter has explored Blackness as both an artist and a historian. Painter's age comprises a large part of her identity, she said, and she's found that it has conflicted with another part of herself: Blackness.

She followed in the footsteps of her mother, Dona Irvin, who published the book 'I Hope I Look That Good When I'm That Old' about coming to terms with her age in 2002.

Nell painter sojourner truth