How do you measure the United States in the 20th century without Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington? You wouldn’t dream of it. The writers, poets, singers and musicians of the movement known as the Harlem Renaissance loom large in the American cultural imagination.
This month, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present the ground-breaking exhibition The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism. Through some 160 works of painting, sculpture, photography, film, and ephemera, it will explore the comprehensive and far-reaching ways in which Black artists portrayed everyday modern life in the new Black cities that took shape in the 1920s–40s in New York City’s Harlem and nationwide in the early decades of the Great Migration when millions of African Americans began to move away from the segregated rural South. The first art museum survey of the subject in New York City since 1987, the exhibition will establish the Harlem Renaissance and its radically new development of the modern Black subject as central to the development of international modern art.
The exhibition runs February 25–July 28, 2024.
Read more in the New York Times article here.
Explore the exhibition with The Metropolitan Museum of Art here.
