Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.If white people are pleased we are glad.If they are not, it doesn't matter.We know we are beautiful…We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves." 1 1Though oft quoted, poet Langston Hughes provides a critical framework for understanding the recent The Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition, The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism.Succinctly, Hughes calls upon a younger generation to counter a history of racist representation intent on oppression and to build new possibilities, asserting a new self-consciousness and collective freedom.As if responding to the charge, the exhibition offered a remarkable opportunity to see this process unfold.It makes visible the connections, concerns and the contradictions of artists working from the 1920s well into the 1940s on both sides of the Atlantic and in the Caribbean.This span demonstrates a broad consideration of modernism in both aesthetic and approach but focuses on visualizing Black experiences, histories and subjects.Curated by Denise Murrell, the exhibition brought 133 international works of art into a dialogue on the construct of the New Negro, seeing the Harlem Renaissance as a cross-cultural phenomenon of consciousness and agency rather than a movement limited to a particular geography.2 This does not mean, however, that New York's Harlem is not referenced by the artists, rather, for many the jazz clubs, cultural institutions and commercial enterprises provided deep inspiration, even if only experienced through the literature of the era.Indeed, it is the writing Harlem Renaissance that has perhaps been the most celebrated, yet even Alain Locke's germinal anthology, The New Negro (1925), included the work of artists such as Winold Reiss and Aaron Douglas.Certainly, the interplay between the verbal and visual influenced the selection of many of the works in the exhibition, "A Most Resonant Ode" Critique d'art, 63 | Automne/hiver 2024
Source: Critique d’art
DOI: 10.4000/12xbw
Author: Amy M. Mooney
Language: French
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4405351534