This essay was adapted from a keynote address delivered by the author in May 1998 at a symposium organized in conjunction with the installation of Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

1. Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance opened at the Hayward Gallery in London in June 1997 and traveled to Bristol and Warwick before touring the United States, where it was seen at the M. H. de Young Museum in San Francisco, The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. The catalog was jointly published by the Hayward Gallery, the Institute of International Visual Arts, and the University of California Press. The project also spawned excellent electronic resources, including an informative website and a lively Online Forum moderated by PBS (www.pbs.org/newshour/forum/february98/harlem).

2. Some of the observations made here on Rhapsodies in Black appear in my review essay, “Modernism, Visual Culture and the Harlem Renaissance,” originally published in Paideuma, reprinted in Ezra Pound and African American Modernism, ed. Coyle, Michael (Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 2001)Google Scholar.This essay compares four recent books on visual art and African American modernism: Cassidy, Donna M., Painting the Musical City: Jazz and Cultural Identity in American Art, 1910–1940 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Johnson, Eloise E., Rediscovering the Harlem Renaissance: The Politics of Exclusion (New York: Garland, 1997)Google Scholar; Lemke, Sieglinde, Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; and Powell, Richard J. et al. , Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance (London: Hayward Gallery, Institute of International Visual Arts; and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

3. This vision of black cultural subjectivity as nomadic, as rooted in transcultural exchange rather than geography, also characterizes curator Powell, Richard's recent book Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997)Google Scholar. The range of creativity and the reality of circumstance for many artists within the black diaspora in the early 20th century suggest the need for such a revision. As Powell has explained, we are nearing the end of a century that has born witness to an unprecedented redefinition of black cultural identity. While socially produced, this identity has not simply been “shaped” by race and place; it has remained mutable, always responsive to varying cultural patterns and the interactions of peoples (18).

4. It is worth noting here that the Corcoran Gallery of Art exhibition of 1990, Facing History: The Black Image in American Art, curated by the late Guy McElroy, set a significant precedent for this show by including the works of African American and European American artists together in its survey of the representation of black subjects across history. See McElroy, Guy C., Facing History: The Black Image in American Art 1710–1940 (San Francisco: Bedford Arts; and Washington, D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1990)Google Scholar.

5. Stewart, Jeffrey C., “Paul Robeson and the Problem of Modernism,” in Powell, et al. , Rhapsodies in Black, 90–101Google Scholar; and Hutchinson, George, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1995)Google Scholar. See also Stewart, et al. , Paul Robeson: Artist and Citizen (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press and the Paul Robeson Cultural Center, 1998)Google Scholar.

6. Isaac Julien's 1989 film Looking for Langston, which utilizes contemporary filmmaking as a vehicle to explore gay culture in the Harlem Renaissance, was also included. Scholarly research on this long-overlooked aspect of the Harlem Renaissance has grown in recent years. See Smalls, James, “Public Face, Private Thoughts: Fetish, Interracialism and Homoeroticism — Some Photographs by Carl Van Vechten,” Genders 25 (1997): 144–93Google Scholar; and McBreen, Ellen, “Biblical Gender Bending in Harlem: The Queer Performance of Nugent's Salome,” Art Journal 57, no. 3 (1998): 22–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. Powell, Richard, “Re/Birth of a Nation,” in Powell, et al. , Rhapsodies in Black, 17Google Scholar.

8. Even a cursory review of the Dissertation Abstracts confirms that this momentum shows no signs of abating. For further consideration of the current popularity of Harlem Renaissance studies and their potential expansion, especially in literature, see Hutchinson, George and Dunn, Allen, guest editors' notes, “The Future of the Harlem Renaissance,” Soundings 8, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 445–54Google Scholar.

9. Leininger-Miller, Theresa, New Negro Artists in Paris: African American Painters and Sculptors in the City of Light, 1922–1934 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001)Google Scholar. See also Stovall, Tyler E., Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996)Google Scholar; and Mullen, Edward J., ed., Langston Hughes in the Hispanic World and Haiti (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1977)Google Scholar.

10. Shannon, Helen M., “African Art, 1914: The Roots of Modern Art,” in Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2001), 169–83Google Scholar. See also Shannon, , “From ‘African Savages’ to ‘Ancestral Legacy’: Race and Cultural Nationalism in the American Modernist Reception of African Art” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1999)Google Scholar.

11. Vlach, John Michael, “‘Keeping on Keeping on’: African American Craft During the Era of Revivals,” Revivals! Diverse Traditions, 1920–1945: The History of Twentieth-Century American Craft, ed. Kardon, Janet (New York: Abrams and the American Craft Museum), 96–106Google Scholar.

12. Eugene Metcalf addresses the intersection of these issues in his 1983 essay “Black Art, Folk Art and Social Control,” Winterthur Portfolio 18 (1983): 271–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Conwill, Kinshasha Holman, “In Search of an ‘Authentic’ Vision: Decoding the Appeal of the Self-Taught African-American Artist,” American Art 5 (Fall 1991): 2–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and West, Cornel, “Horace Pippin's Challenge to Art Criticism,” in Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (New York: Routledge, 1993)Google Scholar.

13. Simon Callow, “Voodoo Macbeth,” 34–43; Andrea D. Barnwell, “Like a Gypsy's Daughter or Beyond the Potency of Josephine Baker's Eroticism,” 82–89; and Gilroy, Paul “Modern Tones,” in Powell, et al. , Rhapsodies in Black, 102–9Google Scholar.

14. Favor, J. Martin, Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999)Google Scholar. Art historian Jacqueline Francis discussed the implications of these questions for African American art historiography in a paper delivered at the College Art Association (CAA) (February 2000), entitled “Writing African-American Art History, 1925–1998.” She further explores them in her Ph.D. dissertation “Modern Art, ‘Racial Art’: The Work of Malvin Gray Johnson and the Challenges of Painting” (Emory University, 2000). I am grateful to Dr. Francis for making a transcript of her CAA talk available to me.

15. The 1987 exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, entitled The Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America, and its catalog exemplify this tendency to deal with Harlem Renaissance visual art as a phenomenon of the interwar decades rather than one contained within the stricter boundaries customarily maintained by literary scholars.

16. See Favor, Authentic Blackness; and Wall, Cheryl A., Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

17. Locke, Alain, Negro Art: Past and Present (Washington, D.C.: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1936)Google Scholar, and The Negro in Art (Washington, D.C.: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1940)Google Scholar; and Porter, James, Modern Negro Art (1943; rept. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

18. Research on African American illustrators has expanded a great deal in the last decade. Caroline Goeser's pioneering dissertation “‘Not White Art Painted Black:’African American Artists and the New Primitive Aesthetic, 1920–1935” (Rutgers State University, 2000) is a major contribution to this area of Harlem Renaissance scholarship. I am grateful to Dr. Goeser for sharing her unpublished dissertation with me. Also, Amy Kirschke's monograph on Aaron Douglas covers his graphic production in some detail, and she is currently at work on a history of the art of the Crisis magazine. See Kirschke, , Aaron Douglas: Art, Race, and the Harlem Renaissance (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995)Google Scholar.

19. Carroll, Anne, “‘Sufficient in Intensity’: Mixed Media and Public Opinion in Opportunity,” Soundings 80, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 607–40Google Scholar. This essay appears in an issue of select proceedings from the conference “The Future of the Harlem Renaissance” organized by George Hutchinson and Allen Dunn in Knoxville, Tennessee.

20. Mott, Christopher M., “The Art of Self-Promotion; or, Which Self to Sell? The Proliferation and Disintegration of the Harlem Renaissance,” in Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonizing, and Rereading, ed. Dettmar, Kevin and Watt, Stephen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 253–74Google Scholar.

21. Meyerowitz, Lisa, “The Negro in Art Week: Defining the ‘New Negro’ Through Art Exhibition,” African American Review 31, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 75–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22. Many of these are discussed in the review essay by Fishkin, Shelly Fisher, “Interrogating ‘Whiteness,’ Complicating ‘Blackness,’ Remapping American Culture,” American Quarterly 47, no. 3 (09 1995): 428–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Although Fishkin deals with an impressive array of sources across disciplines, her coverage of art historical scholarship is disappointing. She makes brief mention of a book on the African influence on patchwork quilting and of several publications that deal with the representation of race in American painting and sculpture. Her characterization of the latter is somewhat misleading, as she refers to them as “seminal volumes exploring the role of African Americans in shaping mainstream ‘white’ American painting” (444). This comment more aptly describes studies such as Powell, Richard's The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism (Washington, D.C.: Washington Project for the Arts, 1989)Google Scholar that consider the widespread adaptation of aesthetic ideals associated with African American culture

23. The conference Hutchinson organized in 1997, called the “The Future of the Harlem Renaissance,” appears to have addressed quite deliberately some of the criticism leveled at the book by reviewers. For substantive discussion of The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, see reviews by Tate, Claudia, African American Review 31, no. 3 (1997): 517–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and American Literature 69, no. 3 (09 1997): 636–38Google Scholar; Byerman, Keith E., Journal of American History 83, no. 4 (03 1997): 1449–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Berg, Allison, “The New ‘New Negro’: Recasting the Harlem Renaissance,” College Literature 25, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 172–80Google Scholar; Padget, Martin, Journal of American Studies 311 (1997): 456–57Google Scholar; McLauren, Joseph, Research in African Literatures 31, no. 3 (2000): 195–98Google Scholar; and Scruggs, Charles, Modern Fiction Studies 43, no.2 (1997): 459–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24. Hutchinson's book, often coupled with North, Michael's The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language and Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar, has been at the center of several extended critiques of this new criticism published since Fishkin's essay. See especially Rhodes, Chip, “Removing the Veil: Race, Modernism, and Cultural Pluralism in Four Recent Studies of Twenties U.S. Culture,” Modern Fiction Studies 43, no. 2 (1997): 432–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Maxwell, William J., “Black and White, Unite and Write: New Integrationist Criticism of U.S. Literary Modernism,” Minnesota Review no. 47 (Fall 1996): 205–15Google Scholar. For a discussion of interracial literary collaboration in the context of leftist politics, informed in part by Hutchinson's perspective on the Harlem Renaissance, see Wixson, Douglas, “‘Black Writers and White!’ Jack Conroy, Arna Bontemps and Interracial Collaboration in the 1930s,” Prospects 23: 401–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25. In her essay “Modernism, Postmodernism and the Problem of the Visual in Afro-American Culture,” Michelle Wallace makes an important distinction between the economic variables involved in the promotion and circulation of visual art versus literature: “It appears that the only reason black artists aren't as widely accepted as black writers (and this is far from widely enough) is because shifts in art historical judgment result in extraordinary economic contingencies … If black writers had had to rely on the kinds of people and developments that determine the value of art, if writing had to be accepted into rich white people's homes and into their investment portfolios in the manner of a prized art object, I suspect that none of us would have ever heard of Langston Hughes.” See Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 41Google Scholar.

26. While Hutchinson's general ideas may prove potentially useful to art historians, he has very little to say about visual artists aside from some discussion of Aaron Douglas, largely in the context of the artist's friendships with Albert Barnes and Winold Reiss. This is explainable by the focus of his research and perhaps also by the lack of adequate resources on African American artists, but it is a tendency that has been repeated in subsequent publications. For example, in a recent coffee-table book on the Harlem Renaissance, among the seventeen so-called stylemakers and rule breakers of the period there are no visual artists and the illustrators active during the period, such as Nugent, Reiss, Corvarubias, and Douglas, are mentioned only in passing. Marks, Carole and Edkins, Diana, The Power of Pride: Stylemakers and Rulebreakers of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Crown, 1999)Google Scholar. With a few notable exceptions, visual artists don't fare much better in the broad cultural histories of the 1920s.

27. Huggins, Nathan Irvin, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971)Google Scholar.

28. Cassidy, Painting the Musical City; Platt, Susan Noyes, Art and Politics in the 1930's: Modernism, Marxism, Americanism (New York: MidmarchArts, 1999)Google Scholar; and Hills, Patricia, ed., Modern in the USA: Issues and Controversies of the 20th Century (Upper Saddle, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 2001)Google Scholar. For a discussion of the origins of this tendency in early-20th-century American art criticism, see Calo, Mary Ann, “African American Art and Critical Discourse Between World Wars,” American Quarterly 51, no. 3 (09 1999): 580–621CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29. Scott, William B. and Rutkoff, Peter M., New York Modern: The Arts and the City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)Google Scholar. While Wanda Corn's recent book on early American modern art and national identify is an extraordinary achievement, it is also a missed opportunity in that it fails to account for the many corresponding interests within the African American artistic community during the years that comprise the focus of her study (Corn, , The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999]Google Scholar). This is certainly in large part a question of available resources. One wonders, for example, how Corn's discussion of transatlantic modernism might have been altered by the information contained in Leininger-Miller's book on black artists in Paris, which came out a year later.

Collectively, the works of Hutchinson and Corn offer fresh scholarly paradigms for reconceiving the relationship between the Harlem Renaissance and early American modern art. The task of the next generation of scholars will be to combine them effectively in light of new information so as to secure the presence of visual art in the Harlem Renaissance and to increase the visibility of African American artists in histories of early-20th-century American art.

30. Reynolds, Gary A. and Wright, Beryl J., Against the Odds: African-American Artists and the Harmon Foundation (Newark, N.J.: Newark Museum, 1989)Google Scholar was the first critical study of the Harmon Foundation. See also Calo, “African American Art and Critical Discourse Between World Wars.”

31. For example, Keith Morrison has charted the intricate and complex connections between the art scene in Washington, D.C., and the exhibition and art programs at Howard University. Also, recent work on the place of the visual arts in historically black colleges has contributed much to our understanding of the crucial role played by these institutions in the development of black artists and critics. See Morrison, , Art in Washington and Its Afro-American Presence: 1940–1970 (Washington, D.C.: Washington Federation for the Arts, 1985)Google Scholar; Coleman, Floyd, “Black Colleges and the Development of an African American Visual Arts Tradition,” International Review of African American Art 11 (1994): 31–38Google Scholar; Powell, Richard J. et al. , To Conserve a Legacy: American Art from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (Andover, Mass.: Addison Gallery of American Art; and New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 1999)Google Scholar.

32. Bearden, Romare and Henderson, Harry include extensive documentation of African American artists active during the 1930s in A History of African-American Artists (New York: Pantheon, 1993)Google Scholar. See also Powell, Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century; Patton, Sharon F., African-American Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; and Driskell, David, Two Centuries of Black American Art (Los Angeles: LA County Museum of Art; and New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1976)Google Scholar. On Augusta Savage, see Biddy, Deirdre L., Augusta Savage and the Art Schools of Harlem (New York: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 1988)Google Scholar.

33. Harris, Jonathan, Federal Art and National Culture: The Politics of Identity in New Deal American (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 51Google Scholar. See also Calo, “African American Art and Critical Discourse Between World Wars.”

34. For example, see Marling, Karal Ann, Wall-to-Wall: A Cultural History of Post-Office Murals in the Great Depression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Langa, Helen, “Egalitarian Vision, Gendered Experience: Women Printmakers and the WPA/FAP Graphic Arts Project,” in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, ed. Broude, Norma and Garrard, Mary (New York: Harper Collins, 1992)Google Scholar; and Melosh, Barbara, Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Art and Theater (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

35. There is yet no equivalent, for example, in the study of the visual arts for the rich selection of resources provided by Wintz, Cary's multivolume The Harlem Renaissance, 1920–1940, vols. 1–7 (New York: Garland, 1996)Google Scholar, although the series itself contains a great deal of material of crucial import to historians of Harlem Renaissance visual art.

36. See essays by Kinshasha Holman Conwill and Jock Reynolds in Powell et al., To Conserve a Legacy.

37. For extensive consideration of these observations and other issues within African American art historiography, see Smalls, James, “A Ghost of a Chance: Invisibility and Elision in African American Art Historical Practice,” Art Documentation 13 (Spring 1994): 3–8Google Scholar; and Pinder, Kymberly N., “Black Representation and Western Survey Textbooks,” Art Bulletin 81 (09 1999): 533–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38. Littlejohn, David, “The Gallery: The Harlem Renaissance Reborn,” Wall Street Journal, 03 3, 1998, p. A16Google Scholar.

39. Powell, , “Re/Birth of a Nation,” 32Google Scholar.

40. In a recent textbook on Italian Renaissance art, for example, coverage of the period is not restricted to activity in Florence and Rome but, rather, stresses parallel artistic developments in different regional urban centers across the Italian peninsula (Paoletti, John T. and Radke, Gary M., Art in Renaissance Italy [Upper Saddle, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1997]Google Scholar).