The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present the groundbreaking exhibition The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism

Through some 160 works, it will explore the comprehensive and far-reaching ways in which Black artists portrayed everyday modern life in the new Black cities that took shape in the 1920s–40s in New York City’s Harlem and Chicago’s South Side and nationwide in the early decades of the Great Migration when millions of African Americans began to move away from the segregated rural South. The first survey of the subject in New York City since 1987, the exhibition will establish the Harlem Renaissance as the first African American–led movement of international modern art and will situate Black artists and their radically new portrayals of the modern Black subject as central to our understanding of international modern art and modern life. 

Curator Denise Murrell, said the term “Harlem Renaissance” generally refers to a cohort of artists who were “committed to the idea of portraying the modern Black subject in a modern way,” reflecting the changing cultural reality and vibrancy of places like Harlem. She described the style as one that combines African aesthetics with more experimental and expressionistic forms of European modernism.

The Harlem Renaissance, she added, “is, in many ways, a retrospective term.” During the moment itself, it was referred to as the “New Negro Movement” — a term derived from the title of a book published in 1925 by author Alain Locke, a professor at Howard University. —Tiffany Hanssen writing for the Gothamist