NEW YORK.- The Studio Museum in Harlem proudly presents Challenge of the Modern: African-American Artists 1925-1945, an examination of the modernist concepts engaged by black artists in the United States and the Caribbean. Drawing on cultural references germane to their experiences as individuals of African decent, these artists confronted vantage tendencies in the larger art world and created a ‘modernism’ that is, in the words of art historian Helen Shannon, “not always congruent with canonical histories of European and American modernism.” More than 100 works, including paintings, sculptures and photographs, fill the museum’s galleries.
According to Lowery Stokes Sims, SMH Executive Director and Challenge of the Modern curator: “This exhibition demonstrates how artists captured the changes that occurred as populations of African Americans moved from rural to urban areas in the United States and the Caribbean in the 1920s, 30s and 40s and embraced modern life. Focusing specifically on more vanguard tendencies during a period that has been well-trodden by exhibitions on the Harlem Renaissance, Challenge of the Modern demonstrates how modernism in the visual arts allowed African Americans to embrace their ancestral cultures and transform how they positioned themselves in the American mainstream and on the world stage. It is no coincidence, therefore, that as black culture was lionized outside its original communities, the ‘New Negro’ identity emerged and was manifested in Pan-African alliances that sowed the seeds of independence movements in Africa, the Caribbean, and the civil rights movements in the United States in the 1950s and 60s.”
In the context of more recent revisionist views of modernism, Challenge of the Modern contributes to the presentation of modernism as a multifaceted process rather than as a singular stylistic phenomenon, revealing the diversity of aesthetic options available to all artists in the first half of the twentieth century. It also distinguishes conventional views of this period in African-American art history from those framed around the concept of the Harlem Renaissance.
Challenge of the Modern focuses on elements of modernity that produce more vanguard stylistic and conceptual themes: the engagement of African art, the production of the image of the “New Negro,” performance, sexuality and the black body, migration/immigration and the urban experience, elements of design and decoration, as well as spirituality.
Modernism is examined through the work of artists such as Aaron Douglas, Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Sargent Johnson, William H. Johnson, Lois Mailou Jones, Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis and Bruce Nugent working in the United States; Teodoro Ramos Blanco and Wifredo Lam working in Cuba and Edna Manley in Jamaica. The exhibition includes photographic work from Robert McNeil, Morgan and Marvin Smith, and James VanDerZee. Also included are works by Euro-Americans, including Winold Weiss, to provide a contextual counterpoint to the elements addressed by the exhibition.
This project is supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The curatorial team for Challenge of the Modern, directed by Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims, includes Dr. Helen Shannon, Director of the Jersey State Museum and a specialist on the reception of African art in the United States; and Dr. Leslie King-Hammond, Dean of Graduate Studies, The Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore) and one of the most prominent scholars of African American and Caribbean art. Also involved are younger scholars, including Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, Associate Curator at the Jersey City Art Museum, who recently completed her dissertation on primitivism in the “New World,” and its role in constructing modern identities in New York and Havana; and LeRonn Brooks, an art history graduate student at the City University of New York, who is currently conducting significant research on representations of the black male body. Rashida Bumbray, SMH Curatorial Assistant, has worked closely with Dr. Sims on this landmark exhibition.