Today, the legacy of “Harlem on My Mind” lies in the organizing that its failures prompted. In response to the exhibition, artists formed the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and picketed the show, carrying signs that read “Harlem on Whose Mind?” and “Whose Image of Whom?” The BECC, which remained active through the 1970s, would go on to demand that the Met and other art institutions hire Black curators and administrators and display work by Black artists. It would not be an overstatement to suggest that the new Met show “TheHarlemRenaissanceandTransatlanticModernism,” curated by Denise Murrell, is a descendant of this activism. The show is an open-ended exploration of the era’s art, gathering paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, and photographs by well-known and relatively unknown artists into a vibrant and searching collage that offers us a wide range of views on the Harlem Renaissance’s origins and meanings and the ways the movement found artistic expression. Rather than merely concluding the Met’s Harlem saga by showcasing the artistic variety and vicissitudes of the Harlem Renaissance, this exhibition points us in a thousand new directions for engaging with the art of the period and paves the way for future exhibitions too.
One of the strongest impressions left by “TheHarlemRenaissance andTransatlanticModernism” is the story it weaves about Black sociality in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. The social spaces that the exhibitionmakes visible are many and varied—and, noticeably, not all of them are situated in New York City. Black people gather in city streets and in their homes, in bars and dance halls, in jazz clubs and pool halls and beauty salons, at lawn parties and luncheons and formal dinners, and through a variety of associations, professional, fraternal, and sororal. The scenes on view belie any notion of a homogeneous Harlem Renaissance. Instead, we see the movement through a prism, glimpsing the gradations of Black experience and even seeing social groups at odds with one another.