Watercolors Amongst Friends
Online
For years, artist and illustrator Albert Alexander Smith penned letters from his longtime residence in Paris, France to Arturo Schomburg at The New York Public Library's 135th Street Library, Division of Negro Literature, History, and Prints—what we now call the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. During the 1930s, Mr. Smith and Mr. Schomburg regularly communicated about shared research endeavors, one of which resulted in this series of commissioned watercolor renderings of historical figures.
Michael Cummings & A Bygone Era in Art
Online
Artist and quiltmaker Michael A. Cummings collected Black art event postcards from the 1970s to the early 2000s. We've digitized a portion of this ephemeral collection, and layered within each item is a treasure trove of information about Black artists, galleries, gallerists, and curators. Explore our online exhibition Michael Cummings & A Bygone Era in Art.
Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration
May 1, 2023–December 4, 2023
Marking Time explores the impact of the US prison system on contemporary visual art. Curated by Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood, it highlights artists who are or have been incarcerated, alongside artists who have not been incarcerated but whose practices expose aspects of the carceral state. Seen together, their works reveal how punitive governance, predatory policing, surveillance, and mass imprisonment impact millions of people.
Beloved: African American Portraits from the Dawn of Photography
June 1, 2023–September 1, 2023
In this banner exhibition, the we shared images of the oldest photographs in their collection, created between 1840 and 1870. Accompanying this curated installation is a poetic response by Dante Clark. Clark is a writer from the Bronx, NY. A two-time Pushcart nominee, his work has been featured in wildness, Brooklyn Poets’ Poet of the Week, Hooligan Mag, and elsewhere.
The exhibition was curated by Dr. Dalila Scruggs, curator of our Photographs and Print Division. Produced in partnership with Photoville.
Been Seen
Thursday, March 21, 2022–March 11, 2023
Been Seen highlights the work of Harlem-based photographer Austin Hansen (1910–1996) and the experience of Black photographers illuminating the fullness of Black life, constructing a catalog of survival that includes joy, pageantry, and leisure alongside struggles for justice, dignity, and equity. Been Seen places the work of Hansen in conversation with seven contemporary photographers: Dario Calmese, Cheriss May, Flo Ngala, Ricky Day, Gerald Peart, Mark Clennon, and Lola Flash.
Boundless: 10 Years of Seeding Black Comic Futures
January 14, 2022–February 28, 2023
Boundless celebrates the 10th anniversary of the Schomburg Center’s Black Comic Book Festival, through photographs, memorabilia, creator highlights, comic book reading stations, and clips from past festival programs.
Drawn from the Schomburg Center’s archival collections, this exhibition illuminates the long history of Black comics and sequential art creators and their motivations to render humor, justice, irony, and futurism in Black aesthetic and liberatory practices from the Golden Age of comic books (1938-1956) to the present.
Lift Every Voice
The Center’s collections hold over 11 million items of Black history–discover what students in the 2021-22 class of our Juniors Scholars program, a free Saturday academic program, explored with this wealth of knowledge! Their multimedia project, Lift Every Voice, reflected their exploration of African diasporic history, politics, literature, and art.
Student-led projects spanned music, video production, theater, spoken word, and more. Plus, discover how students in the visual arts class incorporated foods, which are part of Black culture, into their artwork and displayed it on the floor of the American Negro Theatre. By engaging the work through a new space, visitors saw the work through an overhead, encompassing perspective as they moved around the room.
Subversion & The Art of Slavery Abolition
March 12, 2021-January 22, 2022
Transatlantic slavery was devastatingly brutal in its utter disregard for human life. Across the Atlantic World, avaricious traders and enslavers ripped apart families and communities, callously murdering millions of people of African descent and legalizing the extraction of labor from the unwitting survivors. The United States was founded on the inalienable principles of equality, liberty, and democracy on the one hand, while the nation’s rise was enormously dependent on slavery speculation on the other. This inherent contradiction set the stage for centuries of political and philosophical conversations and unrest. While slaveholders and vigilantes threatened and attempted to control Black bodily autonomy, enslaved people and their allies artfully countered this malevolence via everyday and more formally coordinated types of resistance.
Traveling While Black: A Century of Pleasure & Pain & Pilgrimage
March 12–December 11, 2021
Since the start of their experience in the Americas, Black people have been defined by travel, displacement, and resistance.
Whether in the horrors of the Middle Passage or the rebellion of Maroon communities made up of escaped slaves, travel has meant much—and something much more—for Africans in the Americas. This exhibition, our first as we celebrate The New York Public Library’s 125th anniversary and the Schomburg Center’s 95th, explores over a century of travel. Moving from the Great Migration of African Americans north and west at the start of the twentieth century to the restrictions and resistances of travel in the Jim Crow South and the Jane Crow North, Traveling While Black examines a history of travel, from those who found themselves exiles within their own country down to the pilgrims and pleasure seekers of our time.
Showing Out: Fashion in Harlem
September 9– September 30, 2021
Showing Out: Fashion in Harlem is a pop-up exhibition in celebration of the 55th anniversary of the Harlem Institute of Fashion. The exhibition is curated and co-presented by Souleo and features archival images, papers, and video from the collections of Queen Bilquis a.k.a. Cynthia Harmon, Tuesday P. Brooks, Beau McCall, Hakim Mutlaq, Cedric Jose Washington, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Schomburg Center. (Photo: Beau McCall)
‘Til We Free
Online
‘Til We Free is a multimedia project from the 2020-21 class of the Schomburg Center Junior Scholars Program. The work reflects their yearlong exploration of African diasporic history, politics, literature, and art. The virtual showcase features youth-led projects in video production, theater, spoken word, visual arts, and playwriting that stretch our imagination towards Black liberation.
Junior Scholars is a free Saturday program that promotes historical literacy through college-style lectures and presentations, group discussions and activities, and project-based learning for students ages 11-18.
Nonlinear Pendulums: Voyage Through Infinite Blackness
Online
Nonlinear Pendulums: Voyage through Infinite Blackness is a cosmic offering organized by the 2019-20 class of the Schomburg Center’s Teen Curators. Students produced a digital exhibition which drew inspiration from the cultural aesthetics of both AfroFuturism and AfroSurrealism.
The Teen Curators program was a Black art history and curatorial program for high school students. It ran from 2015-2020.
By Any Means Necessary Project
Online
The 2019-2020 class of the Schomburg Center’s Junior Scholars Program created the digital project By Any Means Necessary following a yearlong study of Malcolm X. It responds to the materials from the collection of personal and professional papers and memorabilia of Malcolm X held at the Center.
Junior Scholars is a free Saturday program that promotes historical literacy through college-style lectures and presentations, group discussions and activities, and project-based learning for students ages 11-18.