‘O, WRITE MY NAME’ AMERICAN PORTRAITS- HARLEM HEROES

Seton Hall University Libraries
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Walsh Library Gallery

In celebration of National Black History Month, Seton Hall University’s Walsh Library Gallery and The Graduate Program for Museum Professions present the exhibition, ‘O, Write My Name’ American Portraits - Harlem Heroes. This exhibit will be on view from January 19 through February 28, 1999, at the Walsh Library Gallery, Monday – Friday, 10:30a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and by special arrangement. A gallery reception will be held Friday, February 5, 1999 from 4:30 to 7:30pm at the Walsh Library Gallery. The evening event features live music by Grammy ballot nominee Jason "Malletman" Taylor and selections by The Seton Hall University Gospel Choir. There will also be a screening preview of the new six hour Henry Hampton/Blackside documentary I’ll Make Me A World. The exhibit and reception are free and open to the public.

‘O, Write My Name’ American Portraits- Harlem Heroes, now a traveling exhibition, was organized by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library. It is sponsored by the Walsh Library Gallery at Seton Hall University; the project curators of the exhibit are Tanya Riggs and Kaia Black, students in the Graduate Program for Museum Studies. The exhibition and related events have been supported by the Office of Alumni Relations, Department for Community Development, the Student Activities Board, the Office of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, the National Council for Negro Women-Imani Section, Project2000, and Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Inc.

Richard Wright
Photo courtesy of the Schomburg Center

The extraordinary collection exhibited consists of fifty photogravures photographed by Carl Van Vechten depicting the Harlem community from the mid 1920’s through the 1960’s. Carl Van Vechten was a novelist, essayist, poet, and has documented one of the most prodigious and progressive periods in American History. The Harlem Renaissance highlights African American contributions and creativity in literature, music, theater, and fine arts. The exhibit presents photos of artists in many fields, representing the artistic zeal and the black experience during this epoch. Some of the artists represented include Marion Anderson, Langston Hughes, Bessie Smith, Mahalia Jackson, Paul Robeson, Zora Neale Hurston, Jacob Lawrence, Horace Pipin and Richard Wright.

In conjunction with this exhibition, the Walsh Library Gallery is pleased to have become part of a nation-wide partnership previewing a new Henry Hampton/ Blackside production, I’ll Make Me A World: A Century of African American Arts, Artists and Communities. The six hour documentary will be nationally televised February 1-3, 1999, on PBS. Part of the series will be aired at the February 5^th reception and as a component of the educational programming offered in conjunction with the exhibit. For further information please call Jo Ann Cotz (973) 275-2033.

African American artists of the written word, visual image, and expressive rhythms and melodies have long been the custodians of black America’s cultural heritage and the most recognizable advocates of their self-worth in a society historically slow to accept them as equals. African American artists burst upon the national scene, with heretofore unseen prominence in the 1920s, as black writers found national publishers in New York City, Broadway discovered black themes and actors, and a newly created black musical art form, jazz, became popular across America. The music, novels, poetry, plays, and visual arts became the first racially "cross-over" art. Harlem, located in America’s cultural center of New York City, became the capital of this muti-faceted black arts movement as artists from all points in the United States and the Caribbean flocked to Harlem to participate in the expanding cultural opportunities and imbibe the creative dynamism. It was said that a cultural "renaissance" was developing across Afro-America, albeit, a "Harlem Renaissance".

African Americans were in vogue in the season of the 1920s and many were convinced that black creativity would usher in a new era of racial progress after so many artistic and entertainment "firsts" for blacks. The lovely Florence Mills entertained downtown audiences in Dixie to Broadway. Charles Gilpin received rave reviews in Eugene O’Neil’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings. Paul Robeson, Rutgers University Phi Kappa Beta scholar and all-American football player, was beginning his theatrical career in New York. The white owned Cotton Club packed in downtown white patrons to listen to future music legends, "Duke" Ellington and Lena Horne. Young migrants to New York City like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, and painter Aaron Douglas began the literary journal, Fire. Howard University philosophy professor, Alain Locke edited a volume, The New Negro, which proclaimed the demise of the old stereotypic image and birth of a "New Negro", one assertive of his rights and proud of his African heritage. Locke observed the possibilities: "In Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chance for group expression and self-determination."

Carl Van Vechten, drama and music critic, novelist, and photographic chronicler of the Harlem Renaissance became one of the leading popularizers of the African American culture to white America. Iowa born and University of Chicago educated, Van Vechten made his way to New York City as a cultural critic for the New York Times and other publications. His attraction to African American culture brought him into contact with many of the black writers, musicians, and artists that were the foundation of the Harlem Renaissance like James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Claude McKay among others. Van Vechten not only provided a visual biography of Harlem from the 1920s through the 1960s, he was involved in the dynamics of the Harlem Renaissance itself having developed friendships with many Harlem writers, musicians, and artists which he introduced to white artists, patrons, and publishers. While not known as a novelist, Van Vechten published a controversial novel about urban black life during the Renaissance years in which he was both praised and criticized by black critics. Close friend and executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, James Weldon Johnson, noted Van Vechten was one of the most "vital forces in bringing about the artistic emergence of the Negro in America."

Van Vechten’s photographs cover almost a half-century in the history of Harlem and black artistic life in America. In the 1920s when those first black notable Harlemites sat before his camera, central Harlem was a community in transition from two-thirds white to two-thirds black by the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s. Jamaican born Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association had held a massive convention at Madison Square Garden and splendid parades through Harlem in the 1920s calling for the independence of Africa and repatriation of African Americans. Harlem was a community containing the common folks, literati, bourgeoisie, and a large foreign-born black population from the Caribbean. Harlem was both multicultural and multi-class in its composition. The Renaissance gradually dissipated with the onset of the Great Depression and some came to conclude that it did not fulfill its promise. But the legacy of the Renaissance is seen in subsequent generations of writers like Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, and Alice Walker who have acknowledged the influence of the Harlem Renaissance writers upon their own consciousness and that of black America.

James Weldon Johnson, author of the African American national anthem, "Lift Every Voice and Sing," noted the Renaissance artists and their descendents placed African Americans "in an entirely new light before the American people. Indeed, they placed the Negro in a new light before himself."

Presented by Walsh Library Gallery and the Graduate Program for Museum Professions

50 Photogravures from original negatives by Carl Van Vechten.A traveling exhibition mounted by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library. Co-curated by Tanya Riggs and Kaia Black, graduate students in the Museum Studies Program ; Jo Ann Cotz , Gallery Director.

The exhibit will include a video component featuring a pilot of I’ll Make Me a World part of a six-hour PBS documentary. The television series, " which will bring to life the complex and exciting history of 20^th-century African-American artists…", has been produced by the late Henry Hampton / Blackside, Inc. and will be aired nationally February 1-3, 1999.

The exhibit is supported by the Office of Alumni Relations, The Department for Community Development, the Student Activities Board, the National Council for Negro Women-Imani Section, the Office of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Project 2000, Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Inc..

Opening Reception – An evening event featuring live music by Grammy ballot nominee Jason "Malletman" Taylor, and selections by SHU Gospel Choir. Invited guest, Gil Noble, noted journalist and host of ABC television show Like It Is. Refreshments served.

"Harlem Renaissance Roundtables" – Weekly discussions led by university professors, focusing on the featured disciplines of the Harlem Renaissance (art, music, literature, history.)

An Afternoon with Ed Roberson, award winning poet and with the Royal Hartigan Jazz Quartet. Reading and performance at 7:45 p.m. Part of the Poetry in the Round Series. Kozlowski Hall.