Past Exhibitions and Multimedia Projects at the Schomburg Center

February 1–July 8, 2024

The Ways of Langston Hughes offers new insight into one of the Harlem Renaissance's most celebrated poets. Explore our photographic look at Hughes as an important catalyst for Black creativity and development. The long-standing friendship between him and internationally recognized pioneer photographer, filmmaker, and U.S. Foreign Service Officer Griffith J. Davis (1923–1993) acts as a guide to how Hughes built community. Davis's photography is complemented by archival material from our collections and letters reflecting decades of personal correspondence. 

June 3–July 6, 2024

The Pleasure of Rebellion gathers the work of Black lesbian and feminist writers Alexis De Veaux and Cheryl Clarke and attends to their aesthetic, artistic, and political contributions to Black Studies. It maps Clarke and De Veaux's intellectual odysseys to demonstrate how these Black queer theorists provide a critical lens to scrutinize the contours of eroticism and freedom. In our Media Gallery, the multimedia exhibition includes original writings and correspondence, as well as digital items on touch display screens and a clip on the life and work of gay rights icon and performer Stormé DeLarverie.

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.

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. 

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. 

October 14, 2023–May 1, 2024

FUNDI: A Legacy of Learning & Liberation celebrates the artistic contributions of the Schomburg Center's Junior Scholars Program. The exhibition includes contemporary and archival images that represent the Black experience, including photographs from the Schomburg Center collections, and artwork created by young artists (ages 11 - 18) of the Junior Scholars Program.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

June 4–September 23, 2022

In the 19th century, African Americans harnessed the power of photography to claim a self-possessed identity in line with middle class values and in contrast to racist notions of Black inferiority. Cabinet cards played a significant role in this process of African American self-fashioning and self-representation. See those images from our collections on display as part of Photoville's annual banner exhibition.

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.