ABSTRACT
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first effort to put on display images of and by African Americans was also its first major exhibition of photography. This confluence generated the Met’s largest audience to that point—450,000 between January and April 1969—and considerable controversy. According to the many critics of Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968, the Met went terribly wrong in privileging photography to tell a story about African American life. They specifically objected to curator Allon Schoener’s decision to display over two thousand unframed reproductions of unattributed and resized photographs, mostly images from the popular press that fell outside period notions of art (Figure 9.1). By showcasing photographs as social documents rather than forms of creative expression, Schoener hoped to evade art’s associations with subjectivity, bias, and exclusivity, and thereby present a more truthful vision of Harlem in the twentieth century. But for black painters and sculptors—among them Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, and Benny Andrews—that vision was impossible to construct in a leading American art museum without incorporating their points of view as culture makers. They saw filling the Met’s galleries with photographic documents, in other words, as a bizarre and impertinent choice, one that seemed to deny the existence of African American art. 1 1930–1939: Depression and Hard Times, gallery installation view from <italic>Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968</italic>, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, January 18–April 6, 1969. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-u.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781351045193/084af8ac-cbf0-4200-b985-a4b4331aa8e7/content/fig9_1_B.jpg"/> source: Art Resource, NY.
