If we close our eyes and recall images of black people from earlier centuries, what is imprinted in our memories?  Do we see elegance, dignity, refinement, beauty, intelligence—all facets of human subjectivity—among those used to tell the story of history and art in the West?

Frederick Douglass in the 19th century, and W.E.B. DuBois in the 20th, grappled with the constructed role of race and the long established visual representation of black people prevalent throughout the culture. They deployed photography in strategies to re-define black humanity in both perception and...

Read more about International Review of African American Art: 'All Too Human, Victorian Swag in Tow'

Art of Jazz: Form/Performance/Notes, a stunning new three-part exhibition at The Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art held in collaboration with the Harvard Art Museums explores the interaction between jazz music and the visual arts. With more than 70 pieces ranging from early jazz age objects to mid- century jazz ephemera to contemporary works by established African American artists, the exhibition explores the beginnings of jazz and traces how it was embraced internationally as an art form, a social movement and musical iconography for Black... Read more about Luhring Augustine: Jason Moran in " Art of Jazz: Form / Performance / Notes

Art of Jazz at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery for African and African American Art: now through May 8, featuring award-winning jazz pianist Jason Moran, collage artist Cullen Washington, conceptual painter Lina Viktor, photographer Ming Smith and installation artist Whitfield Lovell, among others. The exhibition will take place in two locations: part one (“Form”) is at the Harvard Art Museums University Teaching Gallery; parts two and three (“Performance” and “Notes”) are at the Cooper Gallery. Featuring more than 70 pieces, the exhibition ranges from early jazz age objects and mid-century... Read more about Wicked Local Cambridge: 'Five Upcoming Exhibits to Visit in Cambridge'

With more than 70 pieces ranging from early jazz age objects and mid-century jazz ephemera to contemporary works by established African American artists, the exhibition explores the beginnings of jazz and traces how it was embraced internationally as an art form, a social movement and musical iconography for Black expression.

Last night was the public opening reception for "Art of Jazz: Form/Performance/Notes," at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery, Harvard University, featuring the photographs of Hugh Bell. The exhibition is now running through May 8th.

In the front hall of the Cooper Gallery on Mount Auburn Street, what appear to be two bubble-shaped lanterns hang from the ceiling—but instead of beaming down light to illuminate the art, they pipe in music for visitors standing beneath. In the rooms beyond, other sounds beckon: fuzzy radio broadcasts melting into the clean chords from a lone piano.

This spring in Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA, the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art is putting on a show-stopping performance with Art of Jazz: Form/Performance/Notes, an exhibition that delves as deep into jazz and art as it does into questions of jazz and black identity, jazz and myth, or jazz and place. While these juxtapositions exist in concert with each other, the Cooper Gallery offers less of an overriding statement as much as an intriguing series of questions.

Crammed into a corner made by padded walls, hunched under a low tin ceiling, Max Roach smacked and rattled the drums while his feet rapidly tapped the pedals of the kick and hi-hat. A photographer captured the scene, at the Three Deuces, one of many small jazz clubs on New York’s 52nd Street in the 1940s.

A Liberian conceptual painter, Lina Iris Viktor grew up in London. She is known for working with 24-karat gold and using only the colors blue, black and white. Her work consists of simple geometric shapes that repeat throughout the canvas, and in many instances she includes herself in her work. The foundation of her art centers on order, natural law and science. Her work is on view in the exhibition “The Art of Jazz” at the Cooper Gallery at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., through May 8.

When it comes to the Art of Jazz: Form exhibition, on view in the Harvard Art Museums’ University Teaching Gallery, there’s much more than meets the eye. That’s because there are two other components to the show, both on view in the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art at Harvard’s Hutchins Center. The three-part exhibition—collectively titled Art of Jazz: Form/Performance/Notes—is the result of harmonious partnerships between not only the Harvard Art Museums and the Cooper Gallery, but also Harvard art and architecture professor Suzanne... Read more about Harvard Art Museums, INDEX: 'Variations on a Theme'

Jazz is disobedient. Let’s start there. Born in America, long before being considered, "cool", or perhaps “hip”, it was something to be picked up with fingers, to be eaten by hand. Only later it worked its way into the global fabric, leaping across oceans and into concert halls, and finally holding a catalogue and canon all its own. Still, with time to work through questions of its genre and querulous abstractions, controversy and questions abound. It's a language many still can't quite understand. It's a language of liberation, and it's been tested.

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Bursting with compressed energy, Yinka Shonibare’s 2010 sculpture “Food Faerie” is poised to take flight from its perch in the lobby of the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art in Harvard Square. Its child-size, headless brown body is adorned with goose-feather wings and a meticulously crafted dress with matching bloomers. Rooster faces are visible within its folds of Dutch wax printed cotton, a material this British-Nigerian artist often uses as he explores the colonial influence on culture, including the Dutch slave trade and its imprint on “African” fabrics.

The Woven Arc, an exhibition at Harvard University’s Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art, demonstrates the important role that textiles have played in the history of art and continue to play in the contemporary art world. Director Vera Ingrid Grant’s curatorial statement describes the works on display as “an unusual selection of artworks not usually posed in conversation with each other.” What connects these works most compellingly is their engagement with the textile tradition–a tradition with strong roots in African art that extend to the contemporary art of the... Read more about Big Red and Shiny: 'THE WOVEN ARC: Art and Life Converge Through Textiles'