Columbus exhibit celebrates Harlem Renaissance at 100
For Wil Haygood, the title of an upcoming exhibit on the Harlem Renaissance serves as a reminder that the hopes of the 20th century have yet to be fully realized in the 21st.
The author, a Columbus native, is the creative force behind “I, Too, Sing America: The Harlem Renaissance at 100,” which will open Sunday at the Columbus Museum of Art.
Museum officials worked with Haygood to compile about 130 photographs, paintings, sculptures and other material to showcase the creative explosion that emerged from the predominantly African-American neighborhood of New York City in the two decades after World War I.
During a meeting last year at the museum, Haygood and several curators discussed possible names for the exhibit. The gathering took place shortly after the race-related riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, Haygood said, and he was thinking about the poem, “I, Too,” written in 1926 by Langston Hughes, a leading poet to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance.
In the poem, Hughes laments the status of African-Americans as second-class citizens but also confidently predicts that the day will come when blacks are treated as equals.
“This (exhibit) started coming together when there was a rise in racial ugliness in this country,” Haygood said. “We were trying to come up with a title, and I said, ‘I think I have something that pays tribute to one of the (movement’s) writers, yet it also speaks to the collective pain in this country coming from minority groups.
“I said, ‘What everybody wants who is a member of a minority or seen as an outsider is, they want everybody else to know that ‘I, Too, Sing America.’ It spoke to the moment, it spoke to the blood on the streets, the sweat on the streets.”
Fittingly, perhaps, the Harlem Renaissance traces its beginnings to race riots.
African-American soldiers returned from World War I in Europe — where they were largely treated with respect by the French — and chafed against the prejudice and segregation that remained entrenched back home.
Riots sprung up throughout the country in 1919 (the so-called “Red Summer”).
Meanwhile, an estimated 500,000 blacks had moved during the war from the South to Northern cities to fill the factory jobs that beckoned.
In large African-American communities such as Harlem, artists and writers began to emerge, helping to transform the contemporary image of the black experience.
Haygood, 62, has been writing about the Harlem Renaissance since 1983, when he wrote an extensive series about it for The Boston Globe. He also has written biographies of important contemporary figures, including pastor and politician Adam Clayton Powell Jr., performer Sammy Davis Jr. and boxer Sugar Ray Robinson.
In 2015, the Nannette Maciejunes, executive director of the Columbus Museum of Art, came up with the idea of asking Haygood to curate the exhibit. Haygood was enthusiastic, but, as an author who isn’t a museum curator, he said, “I knew what I didn’t know.”
Haygood visited museums throughout the country to seek advice. He also relied on help from Maciejunes and Columbus museum officials Drew Sawyer, Carole Genshaft and Anastasia Kinigopoulo.
The result is an exhibition that reflects Haygood’s background as a nonfiction writer.
“Wil is a storyteller, so he was definitely interested in works about representation and narrative,” said Sawyer, who was head of exhibitions and the associate curator of photography in Columbus before leaving in April to become curator of photography at the Brooklyn Museum.
“There were black artists experimenting with abstractionism and modernism, and some of those works are included in the exhibit. But it’s more heavily focused on portraiture and scenes of everyday life.”
The many photographs in the exhibit draw heavily on the Ralph DeLuca Collection of Vernacular African American Photography.
Much of the artwork also has a documentary feel, such as a Winold Reiss portrait of two young women, “Type Study II, Two Public School Teachers.”
Haygood, with contributions from museum curators, also produced a companion book to the exhibit that helps tie together the major themes of the movement. In it, he writes that the Harlem Renaissance “became the first collective salvo in the history of the Americas to herald the black experience.”
Maciejunes said she knows of no other major exhibit in the nation timed to the centennial of the Harlem Renaissance.
“The goal for me for this show is for people to realize, ‘This is American — this is all of us,’ ” she said. “This is a rich part of the American story that not enough people know about.”