art

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The Harlem of Imagination and the Harlem of Memory

 

What does imaginative or fictive work do versus nonfiction?

I think that both fiction and nonfiction works (and pictures) can provide us with great insights into the times and the places that they are depicting, and they both offer us unique ways of interpreting the information being given to us. One of the main differences between the two genres (besides the obvious difference that fiction is a story that comes from somebody’s mind and nonfiction is just presenting information) is the fact that works of fiction offer us the perspective of the narrator, protagonist, or some combination of the characters present in a story. We, as the readers of fictitious writings, get to experience and perceive the world through the lens of the characters, and we can allow ourselves to kind of default to see the world the way that they do. In many ways, the characters in a fiction work are probably more informed about their own world than we are about it, especially if we are reading a story about a long-ago time like the Harlem Renaissance. They are informing us of their own experience and making the relevant observations that inform us of the attitudes and everyday life experiences of the times.

Conversely, nonfiction works provide us with information, and often give us some kinds of historical backgrounds with hopes of providing the reader some necessary context, but the interpretations are often left up to us. Nonfiction does an excellent job of telling us what a place may look like, what was happening in the time and what the names of the significant historical characters were, but it doesn’t always tell us what the times felt like the way fiction does (autobiographies and opinion pieces being exceptions). This is not to say, however, that nonfiction doesn’t have its merits. The picture I included above is from the chapter article “The Making of Harlem” by James Weldon Johnson in Survey Graphic. This nonfiction article is informative about the history of the Harlem Renaissance and daily life at the time of publication. The picture shows the scene outside of a subway station at 135th and Lenox, and we can get an idea of what the area looked like at the time and what people would have been doing at rush hour on a normal weekday in the neighborhood. So, while the article and the picture did not inform us how it would feel to be there at the time, we can still use our own sense of perception to try and get an idea.

In the same way that the photograph gives us a sense of what Harlem looked like at the time, which I liken to a work of nonfiction, so too can works of art give us a visual representation of a fictive version of how a time and a place felt. When we look at Jacob Lawrence’s classic painting This Is Harlem (above), we get a different sense of what the neighborhood was like than we do from the photograph of 135th and Lenox. The boldly painted advertisements for a beauty shop, dance studio, bar and funeral home, and the central placement of the church in the painting give us an idea into the institutions of the neighborhood at the time, and the people walking in all different directions give life to Lawrence’s picture. Both the photo from Survey Graphic and This is Harlem use their genres, nonfiction and fictional, respectively, to give us a snapshot of what Harlem looked and felt like around the time of the Renaissance.

#ThisIsHarlem

 

Works Cited

  • Survey Associates. (1925). Harlem, Mecca of the new negro. Yale University Library. Retrieved February 17, 2022, from https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/17368696
  • Magazine, S. (2017, September 5). Why the works of visionary artist Jacob Lawrence still resonate a century after his birth. Smithsonian.com. Retrieved February 22, 2022, from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/why-works-visionary-artist-jacob-lawrence-still-resonate-century-after-his-birth-180964706/
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Creativity of the Harlem Renaissance

 

When looking through the archived Opportunity magazine, one of the things that jumped out to me was an image that we have seen in another reading that we have been looking at. At the end of Alain Locke’s essay “Enter the New Negro” in Survey Graphic, there is a drawn portrait of a boy titled “Young Africa”. Framed by handwriting on the page, I did not notice the attribution given for the art until I saw the drawing again in Opportunity. This portrait, along with another on the cover of Survey Graphic of a man who appears to be a bit older, were both drawn by German-born white artists. I found it surprising that, considering the reputation that Survey Graphic has as being the intellectual launching pad of the Harlem Renaissance, the artwork in the journal (at least those two drawings) was not done by black artists.

When looking at the portrait of the man on the cover of Survey Graphic (who was a famous tenor and composer named Roland Hayes), one of the most striking features of the page are the bold blue patterned columns edging the page framing the man’s face. While there is no direct attribution given for the artist who created the pattern, many of the artworks featured in Survey Graphic were done by Aaron Douglas, whose illustrations also featured prominently in later works like Opportunity magazine and Fire!! When looking at these works chronologically, we can see how the artwork shifts as the Harlem Renaissance advances as a movement: Survey Graphic is highlighting the artwork of black and white artists, whereas eventually Fire!! is solely focusing on shining a spotlight on the work of black artists.

It cannot be understated how important the incorporation of artwork was in making the Harlem Renaissance the cultural revolution that it was, and magazines and periodicals like the ones previously mentioned helped not just to give voice to the writer, but vision to the artist. The importance of the artwork and the stories that accompanied them was recognized not only by the artists themselves, but also by their literary contemporaries, as noted by one of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, poet and writer Langston Hughes:

“We younger artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We are beautiful. And ugly, too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.”

What Hughes is expressing here is the kind of sense of self-determination that existed among the key figures of the Harlem Renaissance, a determination that was necessary to achieve the goals of the movement. We can see this determination manifested in the aforementioned evolution of the Renaissance, with Du Bois using the white-owned magazine Survey Graphic to highlight black artists and writers, to Aaron Douglas’ subsequent use of the all black publication of Fire!! for the same purpose. What Douglas did with Fire!! would probably not have been possible without the groundwork that Du Bois laid in Survey Graphic, and Douglas built upon that foundation and helped to create Hughes’ temples for tomorrow.

When we think of the Harlem Renaissance, we need to think of it as not just a literary and intellectual movement, but also as an artistic movement. Up until the Renaissance, there was not a national spotlight on the arts of African Americans; in fact, I have found it hard to even find examples of African American artists who predate the Renaissance. But along with the literary and scholarly blossoming of black culture in Harlem, a spotlight was finally shown on black creativity expressed through art. Painters like Aaron Douglas and Jacob Lawrence, sculptors like Augusta Savage, and photographers like James van der Zee emerged from this time, helping to establish the artistic legacy of not only the Harlem Renaissance but also establishing black artists as worthy and respected creatives.

“Were it not for this movement, other art movements may not even have sprung up. The Harlem Renaissance gave women, gave impoverished people all over this country a hint of just what you can do if you want to put your art on the line, because all they really wanted was to show America that, if you give us a fair chance, we will produce greatness. From that movement they have stitched, the black American, forevermore, into the artistic fabric of this country.”

-Wil Haygood in Artland magazine

#ThisIsHarlem

Works Cited