HARLEM RENAISSANCE

In my deepening I'd like to present the cultural movement of the roaring twenties named
Harlem Renaissance.

The Harlem Renaissance was a period of rich cross-disciplinary artistic and cultural
activity among African Americans between the end of World War I (1917) and the onset
of the Great Depression and lead up to World War II (the 1930s). Artists associated with
the movement, asserted pride in black life and identity, a rising consciousness of
inequality and discrimination, and interest in the rapidly changing modern world—many
experiencing a freedom of expression through the arts for the first time.

While the Harlem Renaissance may be best known for its literary and performing arts—
pioneering figures such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, and
Ma Rainey may be familiar—sculptors, painters, and printmakers were key contributors
to the first modern Afrocentric cultural movement and formed a black avant-garde in the
visual arts.

The formation of new African American creative communities was engendered in part by
the Great Migration—the largest resettlement of Americans in the history of the
continental United States, mainly from rural Southern regions to more populous urban
centers in the North. Pursuit of jobs, better education, and housing—as well as escape
from Jim Crow laws and a life constrained by institutionalized racism—drove black
Americans to relocate.

The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 deflated the artistic energy of the period as
many people became unemployed and focused on meeting basic needs. Yet the Harlem
Renaissance planted artistic seeds that would germinate for decades. Many of the visual
artists associated with the Harlem Renaissance came to participate in the Federal Art
Project (1935–1943), an employment program for artists sponsored by President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration. Further, a key legacy of the
Harlem Renaissance was the creation of the Harlem Community Art Center (HCAC) in
1937, part of a cross-country network of arts centers. The HCAC offered hands-on art
making, led by professional artists and maintained a printmaking workshop. The HCAC
was critical in providing black artists continued support and training that helped sustain
the next generation of artists to emerge after the war. In subsequent decades, the
Harlem Renaissance inspired new waves of artists and laid critical groundwork for the
civil rights movement and the Black Arts Movement.

As a final note, women artists were also part of the Harlem Renaissance and
participated especially as singers, actors, dancers, and writers. Less well-known are the
women visual artists of the period. Gaining access to the visual arts scene was more
difficult than entry into the performing arts, as the practice of painting and sculpture in
particular were not considered gender-appropriate or “feminine.” Two sculptors, Meta
Vaux Warrick Fuller (1877–1968) and Augusta Savage (1892–1962), the latter an
activist, artist, and director of the HCAC, made their mark during the period, but their
work has been largely overlooked and is only coming into full assessment by art
historians today.