Organized by Denise Murrell, who, as the Met’s first curator at large, oversees projects that cross geographical and chronological boundaries, this exhibition has a lot on its to-do list. It wants to remind us of Harlem’s role as a cultural catalyst in the early 20th century, while showing that those creative energies extended far beyond the familiar reading list of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, beyond literature and music, beyond the prewar decades, and beyond Upper Manhattan. It wants us to understand that Black American artists were learning from European modernists, and that European modernists were aware of Black contributions to world culture.
The exhibit showcases an abundance of mostly Black, mostly American painters and sculptors, as well as pictures of Black subjects by white Europeans, documentary photographs, film clips of nightclub acts, and objects by artists of the African diaspora working in locations from the Caribbean to the United Kingdom. Like an exploding party streamer, it unfurls in multiple directions from a starting point small enough to hold in your hand—in this case, the March 1925 special issue of the social-work journal Survey Graphic, its cover emblazoned with “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro,” heralding a new cultural phenomenon.
That issue, edited by the philosopher Alain Locke, contained sociological and historical articles by Black academics along with poetry by the likes of Hughes and Jean Toomer. James Weldon Johnson, the executive secretary of the NAACP, offered an essay on the real-estate machinations that had made Harlem Black, and W. E. B. Du Bois contributed a parable highlighting the Black origins of American achievements in domains including the arts and engineering. The German-immigrant artist Winold Reiss provided eloquent portraits of celebrities such as the singer and activist Paul Robeson, along with those of various Harlem residents identified by social role in the manner of August Sander photographs—a pair of young, earnest Public School Teachers with Phi Beta Kappa keys dangling around their necks, a somber-faced Woman Lawyer, a dapper College Lad. All of this made manifest the galvanizing assumption that what Black Americans possessed was not a culture that had failed to be white, but one rich with its own inheritances and inventions; its own brilliance, flaws, and challenges. And Harlem was its city on a hill.