At the turn of the last century, African Americans from across the country flooded New York City's Harlem neighborhood, leading to a cultural explosion of books, poetry, music and art that is now collectively known as the Harlem Renaissance.
As special correspondent Jared Bowen from WGBH in Boston reports, a photography exhibit now traces the evolution of one of the nation's most recognized neighborhoods as it continues to evolve today.
The 19-teens saw the start of the Great Migration, when millions of African Americans moved away from the South, many to the North, and to Harlem, which became an oasis from oppression, especially for artists.
The art was important then in creating a new visual lexicon for African Americans against histories of dehumanizing and degrading stereotypes and imagery in the American popular imagination.
At the Addison Gallery of American Art, we find representation of nearly 100 years of life in Harlem, mostly in photographs from the museum's collection. The show takes us from the 1930s, just after the Harlem Renaissance, to today.
I see vibrance. I see a people who have been through so much and were given so little and have made this out of it, this miraculous — this place. A lot of people describe Harlem as a cultural mecca.
This is where a lot of the socializing happened, was out on street corners or in front of shops.
The Harlem of the 1930s was a place reeling from the Great Depression. And Williams sees in the work of both black and white photographers a place of fortune and despair.
You see a tension between Harlem's working class, the unemployed, and then also Harlem's upper and middle class citizens, stuck within Harlem, but all trying to pick up the pieces.
By the 1960s, Harlem had become a hotbed of protest in America, fueled in large part by its community of artists, says Judith Dolkart, the Addison's director.
I always see artists as active agents in the culture. So artists have the ability to change the culture as much as anyone else. They have a point of view, and they are putting that point of view out there.
it tells you everthange you need to know in here
