NY Times: The Met comes back to Harlem
The museum catches up to the vital lessons of the social and cultural ‘atmospheric condition’ of the Harlem Renaissance
By Holland Cotter | The New York Times
Notoriously, in the winter of 1969 the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its first exhibition devoted to African American culture, but with a show devoid of art. Called “Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968,” it was a photomural-with-texts affair of a kind found in ethnology museums.
As a student in town on a visit, I wandered into the galleries, and even with scant knowledge of Black history, I knew something was off. I soon learned I wasn’t alone. The show was being slammed by pushback.
A cohort of Black contemporary artists, some living and working in Harlem, calling themselves the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, had been picketing the museum, and directing their protest to other museums, lighting a fuse that would eventually detonate in the multicultural wave of the 1980s, with its demands for inclusion, and its affirmation of cultural identity, in art as in life, as a force. …
[M]ore than half a century on, the Met opens its second survey of Black art, this one called “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism,” and it’s a whole other thing. It’s all art: more than 160 paintings, sculptures and photographs, many quite fabulous. The museum isn’t framing the show as an institutional correction, though how can it be viewed otherwise? At the same time, it’s more than just that. It’s the start — or could be — in moving a still-neglected art history out of the wings and onto the main stage. …
Read more of Holland Cotter’s appraisal at The New York Times
