The Metropolitan Museum of Art will be hosting New York’s first art museum survey of the Harlem Renaissance art movement since 1987. The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism will encompass 160 works of art across a range of mediums. Spanning paintings, sculpture, and on-paper works, the pieces included in the forthcoming exhibit work together to explore the comprehensive ways in which Black artists depicted everyday life in the 1920s through the 1940s in the new Black cities that arose in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood as well as Chicago’s South Side and nationwide in the early decades of the Great Migration.
Opening on February 25 2024 at The Met, the exhibit is slated to feature works from Charles Alston, Aaron Douglas, Meta Warrick Fuller, William H. Johnson, Archibald Motley, Winold Reiss, Augusta Savage, James Van Der Zee, and Laura Wheeler Waring. The works of the aforementioned artists will be showcased against the contrasting portrayals of international African diasporan subjects by European artists including Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, Germaine Casse, Jacob Epstein and Ronald Moody. The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism is currently scheduled to run through July 28, 2024.
As indicated in the above Instagram post, a majority of the works on display are sanctioned from the archives of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), including Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Fisk University Galleries, Hampton University Art Museum and Howard University Gallery of Art. The oil on burlap work showcased above, entitled “Woman in Blue, is by William H. Johnson and dates back to 1943.
Access to the exhibition is included with museum admission. For full ticketing details, visit The Met’s website.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
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Elsewhere in the art space, check out SOLDIER’s “Passport” Series, which sets the immigration system straight.
