The New Yorker:
The video artist Isaac Julien and the cultural theorist Kobena Mercer explore “primitive” sculpture and the queering of the New Negro.
By Julian Lucas
Alain Locke is remembered as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance largely for assembling “The New Negro,” a 1925 anthology that immortalized a small group of young writers—Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Jessie Fauset, and others—as America’s first Black literary movement. But, if things had gone differently, he might have left an even deeper mark in the visual arts. Among his greatest unrealized ambitions was to establish a Harlem Museum of African Art, where the next generation of sculptors, painters, photographers, and printmakers could draw inspiration from the continent as they enacted their own transformation of Black American identity. “We must believe that there still slumbers in the blood something which once stirred will react with peculiar emotional intensity toward it,” he wrote in a special issue of Opportunity devoted to African sculpture. “Nothing is more galvanizing than the sense of a cultural past.”
Grasping this legacy was anything but simple, as Countee Cullen suggested in his poem “Heritage.” Republished in Locke’s anthology alongside photographs of Dogon and Guro statuary, it asked whether a Black American “three centuries removed / From the scenes his fathers loved” could even relate to them beyond an empty longing for jumbled exotica: “Spicy grove and banyan tree, / What is Africa to me?” The art works, too, were victims of alienation. Ripped from African societies by colonizing armies, they’d become cheap curios in European markets—and then, reduced to bare form, aesthetic kindling for a burgeoning modernist movement. The sculptures that accompanied Cullen’s poem were from the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania, where “primitive” statuary was exhibited alongside works by Picasso, Modigliani, and other avant-garde devotees of l’art nègre. Salvaging a New Negro from this distorted chain of transmission would require much more than race pride and nostalgia. To claim African sculpture as their heritage, Black artists of the era had to devise new ways to look.
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