On January 18, 1969, during the height of the Black Arts Movement in America, Thomas P.F. Hoving, then Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and curator Allon Schoener mounted Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900-1968, a three month long multimedia exhibition designed extensively to highlight the history of Harlem throughout the twentieth century.
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But, like so many Americans whose privilege enables them to effortlessly ignore the issue of race, the exhibition largely excluded the work of Black painters and sculptors living and working in Harlem. In response, the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, a group of 75 African American artists including Romare Beadren and Norman Lewis, came together to picket in front of the museum in protest of the show — drawing so much attention to the cause that African American artists finally started receiving their due by the white-owned institution.
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The protests raised awareness and the public turned out, some 75,000 in the opening week, with hundreds of thousands more during its run. Among those who came to see the work was Dawoud Bey, then a 16 year old high school student hailing from Queens, who wanted to see the protests. But things were quiet that day so he headed inside to see the show and was taken with the photographs of James Van Der Zee, one of the few Black photographers to have his own studio in the first half of the twentieth century. Van Der Zee’s records of the Harlem Renaissance were both art and artifact, evidence of a people and a culture that white America knew virtually nothing about.
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