“The Harlem Renaissance should be central to how we think about the modernist period. It should be essential to the way we define and articulate not just African-American identity but American identity.” The Met curator Denise Murrell recently shared with me the animating idea behind her new blockbuster exhibition, The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, which brings together an amazingly diverse grouping of some 160 pieces to reveal the true breadth and depth of the work made by Black artists from the 1920s through the 40s. The show’s lofty aspiration is to redefine how we understand the Harlem Renaissance and the modernist art movement.
Murrell’s exhibition is the first major survey of the Harlem Renaissance in New York City since Studio Museum’s Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America in 1987, and it is both welcome and overdue. It casts an extremely wide net, giving a rare, comprehensive look at how Black creators portrayed the texture of Black life in early 20th-century America. From cityscapes to portraiture to jazz-age nightlife, community elders and activism, the show gives Black Americans the agency long denied to them to tell their own stories.
