“Inventur—Art in Germany, 1943–55” at the Harvard Art Museums and “Nine Moments for Now” at the Cooper Gallery were both among Hyperallergic’s top 20 exhibitions across the United States this year.
Dell Marie Hamilton curates this examination of art’s intersection with politics. The show is part of For Freedoms, a nationwide campaign exploring Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s four tenets of human rights, famously depicted by Norman Rockwell.
Finally, there is the Ligon — a canvas that reminds one of nothing so much as a monolith tipped on its side, set grayly against a wall that barely abides it. That the 20-foot long painting is the terminus of Harlem: Found Ways, a recent presentation at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art at Harvard’s Hutchins Center, gives Glenn Ligon’s work a precarious claim to the guiding logic of the exhibition and, in more ways than one, the last word, as well.
With the exhibition Harlem: Found Ways, the Cooper Gallery presents artistic visions and engagements specific to Harlem, New York City, in the last decades. Each artwork employs a distinct set of inquiries and innovative strategies to explore the Harlem community’s visual heritage as it grapples with the challenges of gentrification.
For its inaugural summer exhibition, the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art presents THE WOVEN ARC, curated by Gallery Director Vera Ingrid Grant, with a special installation of legacy textiles and hats by David Adjaye.
The revolution will not be televised, nor is it over. This is the premise of Grant’s Woven Arc exhibition, an intriguing mix of historic African textile-pieces and decorative arts, juxtaposed with 18 works of contemporary African and African-American art. (And, in the spirit of inclusiveness, there are also several pieces by white artists who make work about the struggle for justice.)
A thousand words are cool and all, but the creators behind a new exhibit at Harvard University’s Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African-American Art in Cambridge, Mass., are hoping that visitors walk away with even more to ruminate on.
This fall, Black Chronicles II, an exhibition showcasing never-before-seen portraits of 19th and early 20th century Black British citizens, makes its U.S. premiere at Harvard's The Ethelbert Cooper Gallery for African & African-American Art. The show is curated by London-based arts charity Autograph ABP and produced in collaboration with the Hulton Archive’s London Stereoscopic Company, a division of Getty Images and one of the oldest and largest archives in the world.
“We are not what we seem.” When the iconic novelist Richard Wright wrote those words, in 1940, he was describing the African-American experience. As a stunning new exhibit at Harvard University’s Ethelbert Cooper Gallery shows, the complexity of seeing and identity took its own twists on the other side of the Atlantic when the relatively new art of photography began producing images of people of color in Victorian England.
It was only three years ago that Mariane Lenhardt opened her first art gallery, on Second Avenue in Seattle, called M.I.A. Gallery—and today, she's the co-curator of the big inaugural exhibition at the first African and African American art center at a major university anywhere in America.
Launched to consider the roles of art and culture in establishing the narratives of people of color, the conference was inspired by a course taught by Sarah Lewis ’97, assistant professor of history of art and architecture and African and African American studies, who also moderated parts of the event.
Kasseem Dean, known in the music world as Swizz Beats, was used to seeing Gordon Parks’ photographs in meetings with business partners and at the homes of friends who were not African American. It was far more unusual to see the artwork in front of the people Parks represented.
"In terms of representation and volume, we have to work on both fronts," says Henry Louis Gates, Jr., director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University and board member of the Whitney Museum of Art. "The Whitney is never going to have only black art in it or the Met. For American culture to be represented, it must be integrated."
The Cooper Gallery’s spring 2018 exhibition “ReSignifications” links classical and popular representations of African bodies in European art, culture and history as it interprets and interrogates the “Blackamoor” trope in Western culture that emerged at the intersection of cross-cultural encounters shaped by centuries of migration, exchange, conquest, servitude and exile.
