Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Harlem And Abroad: Notes To An International 'Renaissance', Joshua I. Cohen

Publications and Research

Like other intractable figures of the Harlem Renaissance, the movement’s visual artists sometimes exceeded their expected parameters, and thus their anticipated representativeness of a locality. Their images, in other words, did not automatically disclose Harlem-bound or even US-bound concerns. Now familiar through continual reproduction in exhibition catalogues, scholarly monographs and literary compendia, certain artworks from the period – such as Archibald J. Motley’s Blues (1929; Figure 1) and Aaron Douglas’s Congo (c. 1928; Figure 2) – subverted any definition of the Harlem Renaissance that would hinge on a narrowly delimited urban geography or national imaginary. Motley, who painted ‘Blues’ during …

Photography And Modernisms, Ellen Handy

Open Educational Resources

Today we live in a post-modern era, but for most of the 20th century, modernism was the dominant perspective in the arts and culture at large. And photography was the perfect modern medium. It literally provided artists and audiences with a new vision, using the technology of the camera to frame modern experience. As a recently invented medium with ties to mass media, photography departed from many fine art traditions. The drastic multiplicity of avant garde movements within which photography operated produced a constellation of loosely linked modernisms, rather than single avant garde program.

Almost all of the many avant …