A stone’s throw from Harlem, on the stately campus of Columbia Journalism School, a two-day conference took place recently celebrating the legacy of hip-hop journalism. With panel discussions, recorded oral histories from former rap magazine editors, and stately portraits shot by Rog and Bee Walker, nuanced writing devoted to hip-hop culture finally got its flowers as a modern-day literary movement of sorts. When the time came for my own interview, I recalled being directly inspired by both the Black Arts Movement and the Harlem Renaissance, hoping the future would look back on us having continued the tradition of documenting the Black creative expressions of our own time.
Those thoughts came up again walking by the 160 paintings, sculptures and collectibles on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s latest exhibit, “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism.” Seeing magazines like Fire!! (published in 1926 by literary luminaries like Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes) and The Crisis in glass display cases made me feel like part of a cultural continuum. Running until late July, the exhibition intends to “explore the comprehensive and far-reaching ways in which Black artists portrayed everyday modern life in…Harlem and nationwide in the early decades of the Great Migration.” Toward that end, Met curators did the thing — it’s a resounding success.
As historical tomes like Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts’s excellent “Harlem Is Nowhere” have explained, New York City landlords originally meant the north Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem as a location for upper-class white residents in the late 19th century. Overdevelopment resulted in their desperation to fill empty buildings as best they could — with Black folks, leading to white flight. By the 1920s, Harlem had swiftly turned into a major Black mecca of the United States, attracting more than its fair share of painters, writers, poets, musicians and…
Read the full article here
