By Jolene Butts Freeman
Clark Atlanta University Art Museum is among several HBCU museums and galleries to have artwork featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s upcoming exhibition, “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism.” The exhibition is scheduled to run from February 25 through July 28, 2024.
“Through some 160 works, it will explore the comprehensive and far-reaching ways in which Black artists portrayed everyday modern life in the new Black cities that took shape in the 1920s–40s in New York City’s Harlem and Chicago’s South Side and Nationwide in the early decades of the Great Migration when millions of African Americans began to move away from the segregated rural South.
The first survey of the subject in New York City since 1987, the exhibition will establish the Harlem Renaissance as the first African American–led movement of international modern art and will situate Black artists and their radically new portrayals of the modern Black subject as central to our understanding of international modern art and modern life.” The MET News Release
CAU Art Museum’s Woman in Blue, a painting by William H. Johnson, is the signature image for all media and banners for the exhibition. The portrait is of a Black woman in a vibrant blue dress, staring straight ahead but facing forward, seated sideways on a wooden chair.
“The colors are striking,” said Danille K. Taylor, director of the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, in an article appearing in the New York Times announcing the exhibition. “It’s the angle that she looks at you. The colors and texture give it a three-dimensional quality.”
The CAU Art Museum loaned the MET four additional paintings: Woman with Kerchief by William Artis, Mr. and Mrs. Barton by John N. Robinson Jr., Friends by Margaret Taylor Goss, and Pickets by Roy DeCarava. Denise Murrell, the Merryl H. & James S. Tisch Curator at Large at the MET, researched and traveled to several HBCUs over a two-year period identifying pieces for the exhibition. The MET provided funding for conservation of Woman in Blue. Fisk University Galleries, Hampton University Art Museum, and Howard University Gallery of Art Howard, Fisk also loaned pieces to the exhibition.