After the Renaissance: Art and Harlem in the 1960s
type: CreativeWork
description: For almost a century, Harlem has carried a symbolic weight that transcends the physical confines of upper Manhattan. In 1925, the philosopher and critic Alain Locke dubbed Harlem a “mecca,” a spiritual home that attracted people of African descent from around the world. Locke dubbed the cultural movement he chronicled in Harlem a “renaissance”—a term that describes both the “rebirth” of Black people as modern subjects and the resulting artistic effluence. In so doing, he cemented the neighborhood’s indelible connection to racial progress and artistic experimentation. Even as Harlem’s reputation has oscillated between the twined discourses of “mecca” and “ghetto,” art has been central to its singular importance within the United States and the larger African diaspora. This dissertation, the first art historical study of Harlem after the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, considers this relationship within a drastically different historical context: the social and artistic revolutions of the 1960s. Organized as a series of case studies—on exhibitions, abstract painting and sculpture, photography, and printmaking—it examines how and why the decade’s struggles for racial justice prompted African American and Puerto Rican artists to engage Harlem in their work. For artists like Romare Bearden, William T. Williams, Melvin Edwards, Gordon Parks, and members of the printshop Taller Boricua, the Harlem Renaissance offered a compelling historical model for framing art as a racial project. But their work engaged issues of poverty, urban renewal, segregation, and decolonial struggle that were thoroughly contemporary. As these artists negotiated these investments, they reconfigured the formal contours their artistic mediums, engaging with many of the most pressing issues at the center of artistic practice in the post war period, including the format and function of exhibitions, the place of the body in modernist painting and sculpture, the politics of documentary photogr…
abstract: For almost a century, Harlem has carried a symbolic weight that transcends the physical confines of upper Manhattan. In 1925, the philosopher and critic Alain Locke dubbed Harlem a “mecca,” a spiritual home that attracted people of African descent from around the world. Locke dubbed the cultural movement he chronicled in Harlem a “renaissance”—a term that describes both the “rebirth” of Black people as modern subjects and the resulting artistic effluence. In so doing, he cemented the neighborhood’s indelible connection to racial progress and artistic experimentation. Even as Harlem’s reputation has oscillated between the twined discourses of “mecca” and “ghetto,” art has been central to its singular importance within the United States and the larger African diaspora. This dissertation, the first art historical study of Harlem after the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, considers this relationship within a drastically different historical context: the social and artistic revolutions of the 1960s. Organized as a series of case studies—on exhibitions, abstract painting and sculpture, photography, and printmaking—it examines how and why the decade’s struggles for racial justice prompted African American and Puerto Rican artists to engage Harlem in their work. For artists like Romare Bearden, William T. Williams, Melvin Edwards, Gordon Parks, and members of the printshop Taller Boricua, the Harlem Renaissance offered a compelling historical model for framing art as a racial project. But their work engaged issues of poverty, urban renewal, segregation, and decolonial struggle that were thoroughly contemporary. As these artists negotiated these investments, they reconfigured the formal contours their artistic mediums, engaging with many of the most pressing issues at the center of artistic practice in the post war period, including the format and function of exhibitions, the place of the body in modernist painting and sculpture, the politics of documentary photogr…
author: Harakawa, Maya
keywords: African American Studies, History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology, Harlem, Art History, Exhibitions, Painting, Sculpture, Photography, Printmaking
date published: 2022-06-01T07:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:59:14Z
provider: City University of New York - Graduate Center
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: The Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York