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Augusta Savage: Renaissance Woman

SavageGamin1929

In February 2024, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present the groundbreaking exhibition The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism. Through some 160 works, it will explore the comprehensive and far-reaching ways in which Black artists portrayed everyday modern life in the new Black cities that took shape in the 1920s–40s in New York City’s Harlem and Chicago’s South Side and nationwide in the early decades of the Great Migration when millions of African Americans began to move away from the segregated rural South. The first survey of the subject in New York City since 1987, the exhibition will establish the Harlem Renaissance as the first African American–led movement of international modern art and will situate Black artists and their radically new portrayals of the modern Black subject as central to our understanding of international modern art and modern life.

Augusta Savage is one of the artists in this exhibition
Gamin, 1929
This article is first published July 19, 2019

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James Barnor. A Retrospective

James Barnor, Pearly King, Petticoat Lane Market, London, 1960s, Courtesy Galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière

James Barnor’s work is remarkable but not just for the lifespan of years recording culture around the world. In Barnor’s work you can feel the richness of life behind the portraits.

Christabel Johanson on British-Ghanaian photographer James Barnor
Pearly King Petticoat Lane Market, London 1960s, Courtesy Galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière.
First published: October 6, 2021

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Jennifer Packer at Serpentine Galleries London

Jennifer6

Packer has previously said she has contemplated the devotion and fixation artists put into the process of creating. As such the show’s name is derived from a scripture in the Bible, “All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing”.

Christabel Johanson writes about the American artist Jennifer Packer.
Jess, 2018. Photo Jason Wyche. Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York
First published: February 6, 2021

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Simone Leigh

Simone5

By working with the energy of this truth in her work rather than historical fact, Leigh reclaims the narrative and space independent from the timeline of colonialisation. In this way she achieves the eponymous state of “sovereignty”.

Christabel Johanson on Simone Leigh
Last Garment, 2022.
First published: November 6, 2022

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Aubrey Williams and the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM)

AubreyWilliamsSun Hieroglyph

As powerful and impactful as Williams’ work was at the time – and as successful as he was as a solo artist – it is in relation to his work and service within the CAM that we can appreciate the movement as an act of political and social change. Through the members own creative talents CAM drove for a better representation of Caribbean life, art and community. Outwardly it reflected the culture of the time; it rebelled against white supremacy in Britain, brought its own flavour from back home and together sought to merge the two – much like the ethos of the Notting Hill Carnival.

Christabel Johanson about Aubrey Williams and the Caribbean Artists Movement
Sun Hieroglyph, 1983, ©Aubrey Williams Estate. Photo: Jonathan Greet
First published: October 6, 2018

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