CategoriesStyles and Movements
Harlem Renaissance
The flowering of African American art, writing and music centred on Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, and its search for a modern Black identity.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Harlem Renaissance are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
After the First World War the Great Migration brought hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the rural South to northern cities, and Harlem, in upper Manhattan, became the symbolic capital of a new cultural confidence. Writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, musicians such as Duke Ellington, and the philosopher Alain Locke, whose anthology The New Negro (1925) served as a manifesto, called for art rooted in Black experience and African heritage.
Aaron Douglas answered with silhouetted figures and concentric bands of muted colour, as in his murals Aspects of Negro Life (1934). Archibald J. Motley Jr. painted lively Chicago street and club scenes, the sculptor Augusta Savage taught a generation in her Harlem studio, and James Van Der Zee photographed the neighbourhood's weddings, clubs and families. Richmond Barthé modelled graceful bronzes. The younger Jacob Lawrence trained in Harlem's community workshops before painting The Migration Series (1940–41).
Related artists
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