The Met’s new exhibit celebrates impact and legacy of The Harlem Renaissance

Jeffrey Brown:

Murrell is curator of The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, an exhibition of 160 paintings, sculptures and photographs, many of those by James Van Der Zee from the 1920s to 1940s, that capture the range and transformation of Black life in urban centers amid the Great Migration of millions from the South.

There are well-known figures like Aaron Douglas and Jacob Lawrence, and others such as Laura Wheeler Waring receiving overdue attention. Schoolchildren, elders, some who’d been born into slavery, queer life brought to the fore, a burgeoning middle and upper class, police brutality and protests, artists looking to both African traditions and to Europe’s past and present.