The first time the Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted an exhibition to the vibrant history of Harlem was in 1969. “The show was meant to signal the institution’s commitment to civil rights and the Black political struggle and to bring Black and white audiences together in the celebratory space of the museum,” Rachel Hunter Himes writes in April’s Books & the Arts, “but something was missing”: “Not a single painting, sketch, or sculpture was on view….No fine art by Black artists—no fine artwork of any kind, in fact—appeared.” In response to the exhibition, artists formed the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and picketed the show, carrying signs that read “Harlem on Whose Mind?” and “Whose Image of Whom?” Reviewing a new Met show, “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism,” curated by Denise Murrel, Himes argues this exhibition is part of this lineage of activism: “The show is an open-ended exploration of the era’s art, gathering paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, and photographs by well-known and relatively unknown artists into a vibrant and searching collage that offers us a wide range of views on the Harlem Renaissance’s origins and meanings and the ways the movement found artistic expression.” Including art that goes beyond the bounds of New York, the exhibition does something else than just correct the record: It “showcases the artistic variety and vicissitudes of the Harlem Renaissance” and reminds us “that ‘Harlem’ was more an ethos than a geography; the movement’s ‘transatlantic modernism’ extended far beyond New York and even North America.” Read “The Cosmopolitan Modernism of the Harlem Renaissance”
“Politics,” Jonathan Blitzer writes in his new book, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, “is a form of selective amnesia,” but “the people who survive it are our insurance against forgetting.” Composed of profiles of immigrants, alongside a history of how our border crisis developed, Blitzer’s book is a “study of migration moving in two directions.” As Gaby Del Valle points out in her essay on the book, “While thousands of Salvadorans living in the United States…are forced onto deportation flights…thousands of others in El Salvador find themselves pushed out of their homes and forced to leave the country as a result of increasing gang violence and the fallout of decades of US-backed Cold War counterinsurgency programs.” What “we often think of as a unidirectional cross-border movement of people from Central to North America actually flows both ways as do the consequences of the human-rights crises that the United States has helped create.” Read “The Brutal Cycle of US Immigration Policy”
The Kristen Stewart–helmed erotic thriller Love Lies Bleeding filters a study of sex, violence, and the limits of human will through a romance that begins in a New Mexico gym.
