New York, NY, USA - June 20, 2024

New York's famed Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) has unveiled "Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism", a major exhibition dedicated to the first art movement born and led by black American artists.

The exhibition features a total of 160 works of art dating from the 1920s to the 1940s. During this period, iconic black neighbourhoods such as New York's Harlem and Chicago's South Side flourished, thanks to the mass migration of black communities from the rural American South.

For the first time, African-American art is placed centre stage as an integral part of modern art. According to a statement issued by the MET, the exhibition focuses on "black artists and their radically innovative depictions of black subjects that contributed to a new understanding of modern ways of life".

The epicentre of this movement was in New York's popular Harlem neighbourhood and Chicago's South Side, but also in other cities across the country following the Great Migration in the 1920s-1940s of African-Americans fleeing the rural, segregated South in search of freedom in cities of the liberal, open North.

The works featured in the exhibition are diverse, including paintings, sculptures, murals and printed graphic works. These pieces come from various black universities, as well as the Smithsonian Museum in Washington and other research centres focused on black culture.

Images in partnership with LiveWalkingNYC.

SHOTLIST:
1. Various from the exhibition Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism at the MET.