Ruth Leon recommends… The Harlem Renaissance and Trans-Atlantic Modernism
Ruth Leon recommendsThe Harlem Renaissance and Trans-Atlantic Modernism
This is a virtual tour of the ground breaking exhibition – The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism– which is just about to open at the Met, led by the Curator, Dr Denise M Murrell.
The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theatre, politics and scholarship centered
in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s.
Through some 160 works of painting, sculpture, photography, film, and ephemera, the exhibition 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.
Go!
If you can see the show live, it’s worth every minute, it’s packed, both in terms of crowd, but that encourages you to spend more time in front of a piece, and in terms of content, it surpassed all my expectations even after reading the write-up in the NYT, it has a lot of gems, and as the NYT said, it is almost too much, it could easily be 2 exhibitions.
And you come out not only aesthetically enriched but smarter and informed. Then go out and see the blossoms in Central Park.
In fact the exhibition has been open for a while; it runs till July 28 and is worth the visit.