This talk takes part of its title from a painting by the acclaimed Washington, DC, artist Alma Thomas. The source for this titular and material intensity is celestial and joins the chromatic attractions and inflections that also energized countless other artists. Encapsulating this solar affect in the phrase “fire light and heat for the world,” the poet-playwright Amiri Baraka connected Thomas’s luminous palette and the noun and verb “glow” to a modern Black consciousness, and to allusions to human agency, volition, and life’s radiant possibilities.

This is the third talk of the six-part series “Colorstruck! Painting, Pigment, Affect,” presented by Richard J. Powell of Duke University for the 71st A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts.