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 Blues (1943), named for W. C. Handy’s ambling send-up of Memphis’s storied artery of Black music and culture. James Van Der Zee met this challenge differently, offering an antidote to dehumanizing representations of Black life with precise photographs of bourgeois interiors. These approaches felt conversant, not contrasted. Nearly everything here did. The only thing that chafed was the penultimate “Artist as Activist” room, in which the foundational histories of Garveyism and Black communism were siloed from the otherwise densely interconnective exhibition.
The individual meets the multitude in Augusta Savage’s gorgeous, Hydra-headed sculpture The Harp (1939), a physical realization of writer and civil rights leader James Weldon Johnson’s towering anthem “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Depicting Black children emerging from anonymity in the instrument’s clustered strings, the forearm-length bronze survives its sixteen-foot-high plaster prototype, commissioned for the 1939 World’s Fair and destroyed just after. Webbed with its surroundings, it stood in for what is not and can’t be present. Instead of completion, a clue.