In 1969 the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted “Harlem on My Mind,” a collection of photographs, films, and audio recordings that aimed to tell the story of African-Americans in the 20th century, from the Great Migration to the civil rights movement. An outcry accompanied the opening. Critics complained that the show was curated by a white man, Allon Schoener, and designed for white audiences. Twenty-six years later, in an essay titled “Culture and Race: Still on America’s Mind,” the New York Times‘s Michael Kimmelman recalled concerns that the show was “another instance of white voyeurism—the dowager Met slumming at the Cotton Club.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
It was a success all the same, drawing nearly 75,000 visitors in its first nine days. And somewhere along the line it drew 16-year-old Dawoud Bey, who lived in Queens but had family in Harlem. Kimmelman reminds us that 1969 was an especially tense moment in American race relations—Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated only a year before—and in “Harlem on My Mind” Bey saw representations of embattled black Americans displayed, for the first time in his experience, on museum walls.
In “Harlem U.S.A.” Bey established a style he’d adhere to through much of his career: tight portraiture, with subjects looking intently into the camera’s lens. He edited himself heavily. Of all the images he’d created in the four years leading up to “Harlem, U.S.A.,” only 25 made it into the show.
Formally, these series are consistent with “Harlem, U.S.A.“—Bey’s got a style, and he’s sticking to it. Though shot in color, they evoke the same weird timelessness. And yet the details are tellingly different—here a Nike logo, there a shirt that might’ve come from Urban Outfitters—and the characters are more immediately recognizable as our contemporaries. They’re the people you see when you walk out the door.
Through 9/9: daily 10:30 AM-5 PM (Thu till 8), Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan, 312-443-3626, artinstituteofchicago.org, $14-$18 general admission, free on first and second Wednesdays.
Picturing People
Reception Sun 5/13, 4-7 PM. Through 6/24: Tue-Fri 10 AM-5 PM, Sat-Sun noon-5 PM, Renaissance Society, Cobb Hall, 5811 S. Ellis, 773-702-8670, renaissancesociety.org, free.
