Thronged by museumgoing masses at the Met’s The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, I felt pulled between auratic portraits of the movement’s dramatis personae and vibrant renditions of communal life. Presided over by the likenesses of Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, and Zora Neale Hurston, the show prioritized joy, coalition, and surprise. William H. Johnson’s at once intimate and alien Triple Self-Portrait (1944), painted in the wake of his wife’s death, enmeshed with the Du Boisian double consciousness of Samuel Joseph Brown Jr.’s cool-toned watercolor Self-Portrait (ca. 1941). Elsewhere, Richard Bruce Nugent’s impertinent, sapphic Salomes smoldered in goldenrod, azure, and licks of labial pink.
For its artists, Harlem’s famous crowdedness was a creative wellspring and a problem for thought. Should one embrace the individual—advancing a subjectivity white racism had long denied or nurture the solidaristic possibilities of a vivid Black collectivity? We can glimpse the latter in the brassy cacophony of Palmer Hayden’s Beale Street Bl…