Go uptown to Harlem, tell ‘em that I sent ya: Harlem & The Met

Woman With Kerchief, 1939. William Artis. 

Due to having the same name as a well-known author and socialist, people often ask (I hope jokingly) if I am the same Michael Harrington who wrote The Other America, the 1962 book about poverty in the United States. If I were that same Harrington, I would have certainly been around to see the Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900-1968 (HOMM) show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which opened in 1969 (Cotter, 2015). Maybe, like fellow photographer Dawoud Bey, I would have gone to see what all the fuss was about and why Black artists were protesting it (Bey, 2019). 

Since I am much too young, even though many of my family members embody big Black don’t crack energy (meditation and moisturizer can only do so much), I can only understand the show through the eyes, sounds, and images of others who were around to attend. When I go to exhibits, I like to take my time, read everything, take photos, etc. Robbed of this process, I relied on writings and videos about HOMM. I used those inherited experiences to answer the question: “How does The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism (HRTM) adequately address the questions and controversies of HOMM?” 

What I understand about HOMM and what I feel about HRTM after seeing it gave me the same impression, which may be said or just reality; I can let you decide. Before going, I read the 2015 Holland Cotter NYT article about the exhibit, and I was struck by the naivete of the college-aged ( and self-styled person who was “into politics (Cotter, 2019)”)Cotter versus the clear understanding of the political context of the exhibition from the teenaged Bey. This brings me back to my point that both exhibitions display “a separate culture, another nation, with its own way of life” (Harrington, 2012, p.14), as the new foreword in my namesake’s The Other America states. That book is a sociological study of American poverty, which affected about 40 million people in the US at its time of publication. While this exhibition isn’t about poverty, it is about another 40 or so million Americans, and like the book, they showcase Other Americas, paradoxically separate yet bound together. 

Cotter described his experience of HOMM as life-changing, but also that it seemed like a “science museum display” (Cotter, 2015). Because there were only photographs (at the time, photography may not have been seen as a legitimate art form) in the exhibit, Cotter (and probably many others) just saw images of many Black American people but nothing else created by Black people. On the other hand, Bey saw inspiration and affirmation in the photos, most strongly in the photos of James Van Der Zee, one of the “few African-American photographers whose work was featured in HOMM " (Bey, 2019, p.18).” Van der Zee’s work is well represented in HRTM, with small images of his scattered amongst the other works of art. 

It is interesting that Cotter and others may have seen the exhibit as more sociological than artistic. I remember seeing exhibits of people indigenous to the Americas in exhibitions, often where you could see Neanderthals and animals on display. I have heard about, (hopefully) before my time, exhibits in museums of “pygmies” and other types of people that were on display. When I was younger, I wondered why people were on display at a museum, and usually, if any, white people. Where Bey saw art through the lens of people who looked like him, Cotter may have been seeing “oddities,” peculiarities, people that he may not have encountered regularly and in such capacity to see them as similar to him. The vast majority - 79%- of American museum viewers are white people  (Levitt, P., 2015). About 90% of white people in the US have only white friends, so it would make sense that a white writer who is writing from his white experience to other white readers could see a room that was full of depictions of black people as foreign. Again, this goes back to the other Americas. We have become so conditioned to seeing white as the norm that even I never questioned why I did not see or know a lot of Americans who were descended from the indigenous peoples of this continent. 

On the Left: “Aspirations” (1936) by Aaron Douglas. On the Right: “Coal” from America Today (1930 - 1931) by Thomas Hart Benton

One half of the image above is a sliver of Aaron Douglas’s Aspirations, which is on display at HRTM, next to some of his other works, such as Building More Stately Mansions and Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery Through Reconstruction, 1934. All of these monumental (with the latter taking the cake in size) modern compositions embody a depiction of America’s creation story that provides rich contexts through biblical allegory and inspiration from Egyptian tomb reliefs. According to the in-exhibit description of his work, he was acclaimed as “the period’s foremost history painter” (written under the title “Cultural Philosophy and History Painting”). I do not remember learning too much about Douglas, but for some reason, I know the mural America Today on permanent display at the Met. Thomas Hart Benton’s painting was also about the story of America, but it is a different America than the one I could intimately feel through the paintings of Douglas. 

Even though Douglas’ paintings are pretty abstract in terms of details and color, as opposed to the gangly, detailed, Mannerist style of Benton (Metropolitan Museum of Art, n.d.), I can more immediately relate to the striving figures in Aspects of Negro Life than I can to the regional vignettes of America in Benton’s panels. Benton’s painting seems like something I would only see at a remove, like something I watched on TV or read in a book. In this way, I can see how Cotter may have viewed an exhibit of people who did not seem familiar to him. I grew up in an all-Black neighborhood but still had to interact with white people daily, either in person or represented in almost all corners of culture. The museum was no different for me, but I think that also speaks to the different Americas that Bey and Cotter arrived at the Met from, despite using, I assume, the same roads and doors to access HOMM. It is much like China Meiville’s The City & The City, where people inhabit the same geographical space but live in different countries. They can only interact in “crosshatched” spaces; otherwise, they do not see each other; in fact, it is taboo to notice each other, and recognition of the other is punishable by law. That reminds me of the many stories I have heard of Black adults in the South having to look down in the presence of a white person lest they incur the wrath of the state. 

Video exhibit at HRTM. 

I enjoyed seeing the representations of art within multiple subgenres of the Black experience (it is interesting that I also see my race as the defining characteristic that people see me as). There were some sculptures, paintings, and drawings that I appreciated. Besides one video installation, there were mostly “traditional” art pieces, some made by Europeans or Black people, but mostly art produced by Black artists. I noticed in the exhibit that brought the two Americas together that the only other direct exchange outside of North America came from Europe. A section of the exhibit delved into the experiences of Black artists going to Europe, using many European techniques, all while giving and taking inspiration from there. I am pretty sure that Black creatives in the period of the Harlem Renaissance visited other parts of the world and created art inspired by those locales, but that was mostly absent. 

However, I am not surprised that an American exhibition would have a strong European influence; America has a strong European influence, from our laws to many of our customs to the English and Spanish languages that many of us speak. HOMM speaks to an absence of the voices of Black Americans, while HRTM is full of representations of us by us but is still somewhat contained within certain parameters of whiteness. Even in a corrective of sorts, curated and populated by the works of Black people, white people still find a way into our business. That is the America I know and the feeling I got from both exhibits. 

References:

Bey, D. (2019). Dawoud Bey on Photographing People and Communities. Aperture.

Cotter, H. (2015, August 19). What I Learned From a Disgraced Art Show on Harlem. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/20/arts/design/what-i-learned-from-a-disgraced-art-show-on-harlem.html 

Harrington, M. (2012). The Other America: Poverty in the United States. Scribner. 

Levitt, P. (2015, November 9). Museums Must Attract Diverse Visitors or Risk Irrelevance. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/museums-must-attract-diverse-visitors-or-risk-irrelevance/433347/ 

Metropolitan Museum of Art. (n.d.). Thomas Hart Benton: America today. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/499559 

PRRI. (2022, May 24). PRRI Survey: Friendship Networks of White Americans Continue to be 90% White. [press release]. https://www.prri.org/press-release/prri-survey-friendship-networks-of-white-americans-continue-to-be-90-white/