Earnestine Jenkins– My new book, Black Artists in America: from the Great Depression to Civil Rights, (which accompanies an exhibition of the same name that was on view at the Dixon Galleries and Gardens in Memphis, Tennessee from October 17, 2021 until January 2, 2022) explores the work of African
Abigail Zitin— I remember it being at eye level; else how would it have caught my eye? I had gone to see Mastry, an exhibition of works by the African-American painter Kerry James Marshall, at the Met Breuer in January 2017. The painting in question, like most of Marshall’s, is large: six feet
Ruma Chopra— Maroons were tiny communities of escaped slaves who held an in-between status in many New World slave societies, somewhere between freedom and captivity. They avoided the brutality of slavery but confronted the abuses that came from being black in a white society. During the 1790s, a community of
Emily Bernard starts her biography, “This book is a portrait of a once controversial figure, Carl Van Vechten, a white man with a passion for blackness.” And while today more people can recognize Carl Van Vechten as a patron and leader of the black arts and Harlem Renaissance movement, in
Read an excerpt from Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance Carl Van Vechten, the controversial patron of the Harlem Renaissance, was indeed a Renaissance man: art critic, novelist, adviser, social host and man-about-town. Yet in his role as a letter writer we see him as a passionate epistolary friend.
In her second piece for “Eminent Biography” Emily Bernard, author of Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White, explores the relationships of Carl Van Vechten and the many women who circled through his interracial and inter-artistic world of the Harlem Renaissance. After all, it is
The friendships that formed the conversations of the Harlem Renaissance and the complex ideas of the relationships between art and race were the vein of black literary life of the early twentieth century. As editor of the volume of letters, Remember Me to Harlem: The Correspondence of Langston Hughes and
Although Pearl Primus was born in Trinidad and grew up in New York City, she identified strongly with her African heritage from a young age. When, in 1948, she was awarded a fellowship to pay for a trip, she wrote, “My soul hopped out of my body, swung on the
Earlier this week, Melissa Harris-Perry, author of the forthcoming Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America, was on her way into New Haven to meet with YUP about her book, tweeting as she made the journey; her visit even hit the blogosphere at Now Rise Books blog. In
What if this were a Leap Year? Anyone with a birthday on February 29 would tell you that it hangs in there somewhere every year, even without a date on the calendar. Black History Month would have an extra day and Women’s History Month would have to wait. Instead, we’ll