[Rick Mullin]

I really enjoyed The Harlem Renaissance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's expansive and beautifully curated, including paintings by many artists whose work I love, notably William H. Johnson. His paintings of Jitterbugs and portraits are likely familiar, even if his name isn't. One of his early paintings hangs in the exhibit next to a landscape in the Met's collection by Chaim Soutine, a painter Johnson emulated when he lived in Europe early in his career. He was one of the first expatriate Black artists in Paris. There is also a small gouache by Ernest Chrichlow, whose night class I attended at the Art Student's League of New York in the 1990s. I was delighted to see him represented, along with other underrepresented painters. This painting by Palmer Hayden is tremendous: The Janitor Who Paints. There was no huge crowd trying to get in when I went on a Monday afternoon, which is rare for a major special exhibit at the Met. If you're in or near NYC, you are no doubt planning to visit. You will probably go more than once.

[Jim Moonan]

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This is great. Lots to look through. Thanks for the links. We're in NYC the last week in May so I'll check to see if it's still there.

(Just checked and see it's running through the end of July, so we go)

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[Julie Steiner]

Thanks for highlighting this exhibition and your impressions of it, Rick, and for your well-chosen links.

It's good to see it demonstrated that the work of early 20th-century Black American artists was definitely in conversation with what else was going on in modernism, often using the same visual vocabulary as their artistic contemporaries and recent predecessors in Europe.

Too often the celebration of Black artists is so narrowly focused on trying to represent the underrepresented that it overcompensates, and ends up making their work look parochial, isolated, and uninformed, when it wasn't.

[Rick Mullin]

You'll love it Jim.

Good point, Julie. One thing that I find strange, having been through the exhibit five times or so, is that there is no huge crowd, which you would get for a major exhibit of this size at the met. Usually you have to check in and wait in a huge crowd until you get a text saying you are in the next group of 150 art lovers that will be admitted. It's nice not having to crawl between people's legs to see the pictures. But one wonders.

[Jim Moonan]

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We were in NYC for the week and got to see the exhibit — Powerful, rich, bold work in a genre I have not had much exposure to — so thanks for steering me to it. Overall, it had a primitive, almost muscular feel to it. The colors were strong. It came off two-dimensional in a good way.

We breezed by the long line waiting to get into the Sleeping Beauty fashion exhibit. It was comfortablly uncrowded but well-attended nonetheless. After I’d viewed the art work I sat and watched some great footage of Cab Calloway performances and some great jitterbug/jazz dancers.

As for why the interest in the exhibit is less than the mainstream art that is popular in museums, my take is that, as a country, we are rooted in slavery as much as freedom. There is tension in it. Prejudices are passed on from generation to generation and even though education works to irradicate prejudice it is deeply rooted still. It will take many generations to come before we see oursleves as one people — both here in the US and hopefully ultimately globally. We forget that as a country/culture we are young yet and don’t know what we’re missing. Culture resists evolution. Someday, somewhere, somehow…

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[Rick Mullin]

I went again this week. No line. There hasn't been a line to get in since the exhibit opened. Right next door is a fashion exhibit. The line stretched halfway across the second floor of the museum. Well, it was more enjoyable being in the much less crowded galleries.