Harlem Renaissance Overview
Mariah Dillard's political initiative, "The New Harlem Renaissance" is a reference to the period from roughly 1920-1930 known as the Harlem Renaissance, when Harlem was a center for black culture and a flourishing of the arts in the United States. It is also the period in time when jazz captured the imagination of the nation.
Rutgers Libraries contains over 340 books on the subject of the original Harlem Renaissance, as well as access to many scholarly, peer reviewed journal articles through its databases. Below are highlights from the RU Library book collections.
Visual Art
Painting Harlem Modern by
Jacob Lawrence was one of the best-known African American artists of the twentieth century. In Painting Harlem Modern, Patricia Hills renders a vivid assessment of Lawrence's long and productive career. She argues that his complex, cubist-based paintings developed out of a vital connection with a modern Harlem that was filled with artists, writers, musicians, and social activists. She also uniquely positions Lawrence alongside such important African American writers as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. Drawing from a wide range of archival materials and interviews with artists, Hills interprets Lawrence's art as distilled from a life of struggle and perseverance. She brings insightful analysis to his work, beginning with the 1930s street scenes that provided Harlem with its pictorial image, and follows each decade of Lawrence's work, with accounts that include his impressions of Southern Jim Crow segregation and a groundbreaking discussion of Lawrence's symbolic use of masks and masking during the 1950s Cold War era. Painting Harlem Modern is an absorbing book that highlights Lawrence's heroic efforts to meet his many challenges while remaining true to his humanist values and artistic vision.
Call Number: ND237.L29H55 2009ISBN: 0520252411Publication Date: 2010-01-05
Women Artists of the Harlem Renaissance by
Women artists of the Harlem Renaissance dealt with issues that were unique to both their gender and their race. They experienced racial prejudice, which limited their ability to obtain training and to be taken seriously as working artists. They also encountered prevailing sexism, often an even more serious barrier. Including seventy-two black and white illustrations, this book chronicles the challenges of women artists, who are in some cases unknown to the general public, and places their achievements in the artistic and cultural context of early twentieth-century America. Contributors to this first book on the women artists of the Harlem Renaissance proclaim the legacy of Edmonia Lewis, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Augusta Savage, Selma Burke, Elizabeth Prophet, Lois Maillou Jones, Elizabeth Catlett, and many other painters, sculptors, and printmakers. In a time of more rigid gender roles, women artists faced the added struggle of raising families and attempting to gain support and encouragement from their often-reluctant spouses in order to pursue their art. They also confronted the challenge of convincing their fellow male artists that they, too, should be seen as important contributors to the artistic innovation of the era.
Call Number: N6538.N5W66 2014ISBN: 1628460334Publication Date: 2014-08-04
Images of Black Modernism by
Focusing on the years from 1922 to 1938, this book revisits an important moment in black cultural history to explore how visual elements were used in poems, novels, and photography to undermine existing stereotypes. Miriam Thaggert identifies and analyzes an early form of black American modernism characterized by a heightened level of experimentation with visual and verbal techniques for narrating and representing blackness. The work of the writers and artists under discussion reflects the creative tension between the intangibility of some forms of black expression, such as spirituals, and the materiality of the body evoked by other representations of blackness, such as "Negro" dialect. By paying special attention to the contributions of photographers and other visual artists who have not been discussed in previous accounts of black modernism, Thaggert expands the scope of our understanding of the Harlem Renaissance and contributes to a growing recognition of the importance of visual culture as a distinct element within, and not separate from, black literary studies. Thaggert trains her critical eye on the work of James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, George Schuyler, Carl Van Vechten, James Van Der Zee, and Aaron Siskind -- artists who experimented with narrative and photographic techniques in order to alter the perception of black images and to question and reshape how one reads and sees the black body. Examining some of the more problematic authors and artists of black modernism, she challenges entrenched assumptions about black literary and visual representations of the early to mid twentieth century. Thaggert concludes her study with a close look at the ways in which Harlem and the Harlem Renaissance were reimagined and memorialized in two notable texts -- Wallace Thurman's 1932 satire Infants of the Spring and the Metropolitan Museum of Art's controversial 1969 exhibition "Harlem on My Mind: The Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900--1968."
ISBN: 9781558498310Publication Date: 2010-11-18
African American Art by
A beautifully illustrated survey of African American art of the twentieth century, including many never-before-seen works by the most important artists of the period. African American Art presents a powerful selection of paintings, sculpture, prints, and photographs by forty-three black artists who explored the African American experience of the twentieth century. Embracing many universal themes and also evoking specific aspects of the African American experience such as the African diaspora, jazz, and the power of religion, the artists worked in styles as varied as documentary realism, abstraction, and postmodern assemblage of found objects. Drawn entirely from the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s rich collection of African American art, the works include paintings by Benny Andrews, Jacob Lawrence, Thornton Dial Sr., Romare Bearden, Alma Thomas, and Lois Mailou Jones, and photographs by Roy DeCarava, Gordon Parks, Roland Freeman, Marilyn Nance, and James Van Der Zee. More than half of the artworks in the exhibition are being shown for the first time. In Richard Powell’s text, his usual keen insights into meaning and metaphor enrich the reader’s understanding of the artworks in their historical setting and contemporary culture.
Call Number: N6538.N5S595 2012ISBN: 9780847838905Publication Date: 2012-05-22
Books Available from RU Libraries
Black Women of the Harlem Renaissance Era by Call Number: PS153.N5B557 2014ISBN: 9780810885424Publication Date: 2014-10-16
The Harlem Reader by
From its humble beginnings as a farming community and a country retreat for the rich, to its incarnation as a Mecca of black art and society, to its current reputation as a crime-ridden slum, symbolising the urban ills of the world, Harlem has been the source of unparalleled inspiration and writing. This anthology collects work from all of Harlem's many seasons, including poems, rap, personal memories and narratives in the unforgettable voices of Malcolm X, Maya Angelo, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, Sidney Poitier and more, to offer a stunning portrait of Harlem.
Call Number: F128.68.H3H33 2003ISBN: 9781400046812Publication Date: 2003-05-13
Word, Image, and the New Negro by
This book focuses on the collaborative illustrated volumes published during the Harlem Renaissance, in which African Americans used written and visual texts to shape ideas about themselves and to redefine African American identity. Anne Elizabeth Carroll argues that these volumes show how participants in the movement engaged in the processes of representation and identity formation in sophisticated and largely successful ways. Though they have received little scholarly attention, these volumes constitute an important aspect of the cultural production of the Harlem Renaissance. Word, Image, and the New Negro marks the beginning of a long-overdue recovery of this legacy and points the way to a greater understanding of the potential of texts to influence social change. University.
Call Number: E185.6.C33 2005ISBN: 0253345839Publication Date: 2005-03-01
Poetry and Literature
An Intimation of Things Distant by
Two novels & three short stories by "the mystery woman" of the Harlem Renaissance along with an incisive introduction by Charles R. Larson & foreword by novelist Marita Golden. A unique anthology.
Call Number: PS3523.A7225A6 1992ISBN: 0385421494Publication Date: 1992-01-07
Harlem Renaissance by
HARLEM RENAISSANCE: Five Novels of the 1920s leads off with Jean Toomer's Cane (1923), a unique fusion of fiction, poetry, and drama rooted in Toomer's experiences as a teacher in Georgia. Toomer's masterpiece was followed within a few years by a cluster of novels exploring black experience and the dilemmas of black identity in a variety of modes and from different angles. Claude McKay's Home to Harlem (1928), whose freewheeling, impressionistic, bawdy kaleidoscope of Jazz Age nightlife made it a best seller, traces the picaresque adventures of Jake, a World War I veteran, within and beyond Harlem. Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928), the poignant, nuanced psychological portrait of a woman caught between the two worlds of her mixed Scandinavian and African American heritage; Jessie Redmon Fauset's Plum Bun (1928), the richly detailed account of a young art student's struggles to advance her career in a society full of obstacles both overt and insidiously concealed; and Wallace Thurman's The Blacker the Berry (1929), with its anguished, provocative look at prejudice and exclusion as it tells of a new arrival in Harlem searching for love, each in its distinct way testifies to the enduring power of the Harlem ferment.
Call Number: PS508.N3Z34 2011ISBN: 1598530992Publication Date: 2011-09-01
My Soul's High Song by
LITERATURE-CLASSICS & CONTEMPORARY
Call Number: PS3505.U287A6 1991ISBN: 0385412959Publication Date: 1990-12-01
Black Women Poets of Harlem Renaissance by
Black Women Poets of Harlem Renaissance presents a critical examination of the creative poetic achievements of five women writers during the Harlem Renaissance.
Call Number: PS310.N4E37 2003ISBN: 0761826173Publication Date: 2003-09-18
