Collection: Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was the African American cultural movement that flourished in the Harlem neighbourhood of New York between roughly 1918 and the mid 1930s, with its zenith from 1924 to 1929. The visual programme ran in parallel to the better known literary and musical wings, building an explicit cultural infrastructure for Black modernity in the period after the Great Migration. The journals The Crisis, edited by W. E. B. Du Bois for the NAACP, and Opportunity, published by the National Urban League, served as the movement's principal organs, alongside Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro, published in 1925.

Aaron Douglas (1899–1979) was the central painter. His Aspects of Negro Life mural cycle for the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library, completed in 1934, and his illustrations for The New Negro fixed a distinctive idiom combining Art Deco geometry with silhouetted figures and motifs drawn from West African sculpture and Egyptian relief. Archibald Motley Jr. (1891–1981) developed a parallel programme in Chicago, painting Bronzeville nightlife in saturated colour. Palmer Hayden (1890–1973), Lois Mailou Jones (1905–1998), William H. Johnson (1901–1970), Hale Woodruff, Charles Alston, and Beauford Delaney extended the project. Augusta Savage (1892–1962) anchored the sculptural wing, and James Van Der Zee (1886–1983) recorded the period's portraiture and civic life from his Harlem studio. Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000) emerged at the close of the movement.