Considering Community in Black Art: Sustaining Harlem

Sustaining Harlem: Art, Community Activism and Black Women’s Leadership will be a panel presented by Pat Cruz, Thelma Golden, Virginia Johnson, and Sade Lythcott during the 41st annual Scholar & Feminist Conference this Saturday, February 27. This panel is presented by the Harlem Semester, a new public humanities initiative of the Barnard Center for Research on Women and the Department of Africana Studies at Barnard College in partnership with Harlem’s historic cultural institutions, including the Studio Museum, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Harlem Stage, and others.

Girl Pointing, 1983/2009

The Harlem Semester grapples with and explores questions of Black art, politics, and culture by viewing Harlem “not as an inert site or abstract object, but instead as an intensively ‘peopled place’ of complex interaction”. With this layered and complex understanding of Harlem, I have approached sites such as the Studio Museum for deep engagements with art and knowledge that are mobilized within communal contexts of resistance and futuristic claims to survival.

Such art is produced within the precarious context of national politics and cultural representation, where it must endeavor to account for and recover undermined narratives, offering itself as an insurgent force against practices of erasure and domination.

For me, the Studio Museum in Harlem is evoked when thinking of art, activism and Black women’s leadership. As a cultural epicenter for the display of art driven by the concepts of activism and community, the Studio Museum is a crucial site for the sustenance and vitality of Harlem.

Lorraine O’Grady’s installation, Art Is…, on display at the Studio Museum in Harlem, is a collection of images captured during her performance at the 1983 African-American Day Parade. As part of O’Grady’s performance, attendees were invited to pose in gilded photo frames to complete their portraits, resulting in a series of joyful photographs depicting community and celebration. These portraits are part of ongoing image-making, storytelling, and archiving traditions as they pertain to the legibility of Black livelihood.

They enact the impulse of capturing communal joy and beauty as mundane articulations of resistance and survival.

Girlfriends Times Two, 1983/2009

Art that is created or displayed within Harlem must contend with rich and complex histories of Black resistance, survival, and transformation. 

In considering the present role of Harlem in our academic imaginations and political investments, art is useful for contemplating material and cultural conditions, past and present, of Harlem as a community. Such considerations of community and survival, as they are undertaken in Lorraine O’Grady’s performance, will be crucial during Scholar & Feminist 41: Sustainabilities.

© 2015 Lorraine O’Grady/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York

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