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–1940s 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. Featured artists include Charles Alston, Aaron Douglas, Meta Warrick Fuller, William H. Johnson, Archibald Motley, Winold Reiss, Augusta Savage, James Van Der Zee and Laura Wheeler Waring. These artists will be shown in direct juxtapostion with portrayals of international African diasporan subjects by European counterparts ranging from Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch and Pablo Picasso to Germaine Casse, Jacob Epstein and Ronald Moody.
New York, USA
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Opened 25 Feb 2024
Until 28 Jul 2024
Washington DC, USA
National Gallery of Art
Opening 8 Sep 2024
Until 20 Jan 2025