Music and Culture
Artists of the Harlem Renaissance often created art about the music and other cultural activities, such as dance and literature, that defined their cultural landscape. Take a close look at these works by Sargent Johnson and Miguel Covarrubias.
1) How do each of these works represent music visually? Think not just about what's depicted, but how it's depicted. How do the works represent the structure and experience of music visually? Put another way, what kind of musicality do you find in the works?
2) Take a long look at Sargent Johnson's Lenox Avenue. This piece could be described as a collage of cultural activities. What instruments of culture do you see in the image?
3) Lenox Avenue is the main thoroughfare in Harlem? What does that title suggest about what Sargent Johnson wanted to communicate with this piece?
4) How does his artwork relate to the cultural politics of the New Negro and the Black is Beautiful movement?
Sargent Johnson remarked about his artwork: "It is the pure American Negro I am concerned with, aiming to show the natural beauty and dignity in that characteristic lip and that characteristic hair, bearing and manner; and I wish to show that beauty not so much to the white man as to the Negro himself."
5) Listen to Duke Ellington's Drop Me Off at Harlem (1933). Put the song and the Johnson artwork in dialogue with one another for a few sentences. This is an open question with no right answers. Does listening to the song bring up any new observations about the artwork? Does looking at the artwork while listening to the song bring up any thoughts?
6) In addition to being a visual artist, Miguel Covarrubias was a costume and set designer who among other projects worked on Josephine Baker's La Revue Negre tour in Europe. Read about Covarrubias. How does he represent the transnationalism of this movement?
7) How does his artwork visually represent music and dance? If we didn't have the title, what kind of music would the image conjure for you?
8) When you look at the image, whom do you get the impression the dancers and musicians are performing for? What does it look like their motivation for performing might be?
This video demonstrates some of the Afro-Cuban folk music and dance that later influenced the formation of Afro-Cuban jazz.
Click here to hear an example of the Afro-Cuban jazz that was immensely popular in the late 30s and 40s.
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People and Place
Artists also used their work to spotlight the people and the place of Harlem, specifically showing viewers the prosperity, community, and family life that people made for themselves there.
Look at these works by Jacob Lawrence and James Van der Zee.
9) What does each of them show the viewer about life in Harlem?
10) How did a work like van der Zee's photo and Lawrence's The Builders defy stereotypes?
11) Look closely at the representation of race, class, and gender in The Builders. The more one looks, the more it appears that Lawrence has something complex to say. What speculations do you have about these factors in this work? It might provide some focus to consider the depictions of the children, the parents, and their interaction with the surroundings.
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African-American Modernism and Afro-Futurism
Compare Romare Bearden's depiction of Salome with the head of John the Baptist to that of Andrea Solari, a 16th-century that is broadly representative of the way this biblical scene was represented in Europe for centuries.
12) How could we describe Bearden's depiction as an instance of African-American modernism? What visual elements and traditions did he draw upon to make this depiction?
13) How does Bearden's recasting of the past and of religious tradition into a new form of visuality connect to the project of Afro-futurism? How does a work that looks at the past like Salome envision a new kind of future?
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