Credit...Archibald Motley Jr., “Black Belt” (1934), inspired by jazz culture, was loaned to the Met by the Hampton University Museum, in Virginia.
"How do you measure the United States in the 20th century without Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington? You wouldn’t dream of it. The writers, poets, singers and musicians of the movement known as the Harlem Renaissance, centering around the New York neighborhood from 1919 to the end of the 1930s, loom large in the American cultural imagination. The period was when 'Harlem became the symbol for the international black city,' as the novelist Ishmael Reed described it. But what about the painters
Laura Wheeler Waring, Charles Henry Alston and
Malvin Gray Johnson? Or the sculptor Richmond Barthé? Hardly household names. And while other visual artists — Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence, Archibald Motley Jr., Augusta Savage — have long been celebrated, their contributions have until recently been too often treated as a byway, separate from the rest of European and American modernism. ..."
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