New York Metropolitan Museum of Art dedicates show to ground-breaking Harlem Renaissance black art movement

55 years after its disastrous Harlem Renaissance show that featured no art by black artists, the New York Met has another show of the modern art movement’s work

160 pieces depict the realities of daily life in black communities such as Harlem from 1920s to the 1940s, and portray the movement’s great writers and thinkers

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The New York Met’s Harlem Renaissance exhibition features 160 artworks by black artists showing the realities of daily life between the 1920s and the 1940s. Above: detail from Blues (1929), Archibald J. Motley Jnr. Photo: courtesy of The Met

Published: 6:15pm, 12 May 2024

The first time the Metropolitan Museum of Art staged an exhibition on the Harlem Renaissance, it was a disaster.

“Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900 – 1968”, which opened at the New York institution in 1969, did not feature any art by black artists, and was more of an ethnographic study about the community.

The show was roundly criticised and a group of black artists called The Black Emergency Cultural Coalition picketed the Met.

Fifty-five years later, the Met is again having a show on the Harlem Renaissance, an important modern artistic movement that marked a watershed moment for race identity and black pride.

Is the new show a form of atonement? As The New York Times pointed out, “The museum isn’t framing the show as an institutional correction, though how can it be viewed otherwise”?

The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism exhibition at The Met in New York explains the historical context of the modern art movement, which emerged from the African-American community. Photo: Anna-Marie Kellen

“The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” show certainly has a lot of art by black artists: 160 items of painting, sculpture, photography, film, and ephemera illustrate daily life in Harlem, one of the “new black cities” of America, in the 1920s to 1940s.