Museums Are Reframing the Legacy of Black Art in 2024—Starting with the Harlem Renaissance | Artsy (2024)

Mar 1, 2024 3:42PM

Between 1915 and 1970, in the wake of racial violence and pervasive inequalities, nearly half of the United States’s African American population left their homes in the rural South. Many migrated to cities like Chicago, Detroit, New York, Los Angeles, and Houston, creating vibrant art communities in the process. The Metropolitan Museum of Art explores the enduring cultural and aesthetic impressions in U.S. cities following the Great Migration in “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism,” which opened last week. Curated by preeminent art historian Denise Murrell, the exhibition features around 160 sculptures, paintings, and drawings by Black artists including Aaron Douglas, Palmer Hayden, Laura Wheeler Waring, and Archibald Motley Jr., among others.

This exhibition is just one in a year full of expansive group and solo shows focused on the historical legacy of Black artists creating significant work at the same time as their already institutionally heralded white counterparts. By placing these artists in context with known movements and genres, museums are able to reframe the legacy of these Black artists for a diverse viewership.

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This year in particular, major American museums seem to have homed in on the power and importance of showing the work of hidden figures: Black artists who slipped through the cracks of institutional exhibition, collection, and validation during the peak of their creative careers. For example, 2024 will see the first major surveys of artists Nancy Elizabeth Prophet at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, and Sargent Claude Johnson at the Huntington, both of whom are receiving overdue attention for their historical work.

Meanwhile, Stanley Whitney is the subject of a long-overdue retrospective at the Buffalo AKG, placing the artist in the historical lineage of abstraction; while later this month, the Baltimore Museum of Art will put on a 50-year retrospective of the sculptures and beadwork of artist Joyce J. Scott. All of these exhibitions position Black art and artists as a vital, formative part of our historical understanding of contemporary art.

However, this more nuanced approach to exhibiting Black artists has not always been the case. The first exhibition of African American–centered work in the U.S. took place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1969. That show, “Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968,” surveyed archival photographic and video work depicting Black life in Harlem. A 1967 press release announced the ambition to present Harlem’s “achievements and contribution into American life and to the City.” Yet very early on, committee members who had been assembled to advise on the show withdrew public support for the exhibition, critiquing the absence of art from Black artists. Despite significant warnings from these Black cultural leaders and artists, the opening went ahead, leading to protests organized by a group of artists including Romare Bearden, Henri Ghent, Norman Lewis, and Ed Taylor, under the name the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC). Several of their signs read, “Harlem on Whose Mind?”

One of several institutional responses to the Civil Rights Movement, this exhibition resulted in a deeply necessary recognition of the lack of diversity in American art institutions. Soon after, in 1971, 15 Black artists canceled their involvement in the exhibition “Contemporary Black Artists in America” at the Whitney Museum, citing the museum’s failure to include any Black art advisors, curators, or specialists in the curation of the exhibition. These artists called for a boycott of the Whitney show, and continued to put pressure on American art institutions to make systemic changes to their exhibiting and collecting habits, rather than ill-advised, Band-Aid solutions, such as poorly curated shows of Black art.

Sadly, such changes were slow to arrive: For much of the 20th century, museums continued to curate Black art from a predominantly white perspective. As recently as 2015, a Mellon Foundation survey found that 84% of American museum curators and leadership are white. Meanwhile, a 2022 Burns Halperin report found that only 2.2% of acquisitions and 6.3% of exhibitions at 31 U.S. museums between 2008 and 2020 were of work by Black American artists. In 2017, the American Alliance of Museums conducted research showing that nearly half of all U.S. museum boards were 100% white.

Following the May 2020 murder of George Floyd, American museums had a significant wake-up call. Celebrated institutions—such as the Guggenheim Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art—were publicly called out for alleged racist working environments and practices. In response, many Black curators and artists were invited to the table to create change from the inside out. After such seismic political forces, it’s a pleasure to see so many U.S. museums finally taking stock of the true history of Black art.

Since its ineffectual attempt at a Harlem-centric exhibition in the 1960s, the Met has made significant strides in improving its curatorial and collecting strategies in the way of African American art. Notably, in 2021, the museum established the James Van Der Zee Archive in partnership with the Studio Museum in Harlem, and has since collected the works of such artists as Aaron Douglas and Elizabeth Catlett.

This institutional effort is clearly reflected in its current exhibition, which features a bold selection of African American artists who speak powerfully to the Black experience of the early 20th century. Featuring more than 160 artists working in painting, sculpture, film, and photography, the exhibition amplifies the complexity of Black life from the 1920s through ’40s. Rather than focusing on already well-known artists, the show uplifts lesser-known names, like Laura Wheeler Waring, whose lush paintings carefully portray prominent African American luminaries as well as impressionistic rural landscapes; or little-known artist Suzanna Ogunjami, who crafted dignified, highly textured portraits of prominent Harlem Renaissance and West African figures as well as contemplative still lifes.

The show also places the Harlem Renaissance within the context of international art at the time, emphasizing these artists’ significance. “The exhibition underscores the essential role of the Harlem Renaissance and its radically new modes of portraying the modern Black subject as central to the development of transatlantic modern art,” said Denise Murrell, the show’s curator, in a statement. It’s worth noting that Murrell, who joined the Met in 2020, has curated other well-received shows re-examining Black subjectivity in 20th century art (notably “Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today” at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery in 2018).