The Metropolitan Museum of Art has announced a 2024 exhibition that is being billed as New York City”™s first major presentation in nearly 40 years of the Harlem Renaissance”™s artistic output.
“The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” will open on Feb. 25 and run through July 28. The exhibition, which was first reported in the New York Times, will include a wealth of paintings from historically Black colleges and universities that have rarely been seen outside of the schools”™ art collections.
The exhibition will feature paintings and sculptures, along with photography by James Van Der Zee, a leading photographer of the Harlem Renaissance. Some of the artists who will be featured in this presentation are William H. Johnson Jr., Augusta Savage, Laura Wheeling Waring and Samuel Joseph Brown Jr.
The Harlem Renaissance spanned the years following World War I through the early 1930s. Centered in the Harlem section of New York City, it offered Black artists and intellectuals the opportunity to explore new avenues in the creative and performing arts, literature, music, theater, cinema, fashion, politics and scholarship.
“Becoming painters of modern life within their own communities was key to what the Harlem artists were attempting,” said Denise Murrell, the exhibition”™s curator. “It was an act of radical modernity, for example, to make portraits of an elder Black woman who would have been born into enslavement. And to make them in such a dignified way ”” those images simply did not exist in previous periods.”
Photo: “Woman in Blue,” by William H. Johnson, courtesy of the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum.
