New Addison Exhibition Explores Art Inspired and Shaped by Harlem

Harlem: In Situ examines nearly 100 years of art created in Harlem, exploring the neighborhood’s enduring influence on American culture from the Great Migration and Harlem Renaissance to the present day, capturing periods of community growth, ownership, pride, and new styles, as well as redevelopment and encroaching gentrification. On view March 30–July 31, 2019 at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Harlem: In Situ brings into dialogue works from 20th century masters including Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Aaron Douglas, William H. Johnson, and Jacob Lawrence with groundbreaking artists Dawoud Bey, Jordan Casteel, Lorraine O’Grady, and Sherrill Roland in an effort to understand the myriad creative processes born of sustained engagement with this distinctive place.

“One of the great centers of cultural production in the United States, Harlem’s incredible past and present make this neighborhood a wonderful subject for the Addison’s ongoing engagement with the theme of place,” said Judith F. Dolkart, The Mary Stripp & R. Crosby Kemper Director of the Addison Gallery of American Art. “Through an examination of the work inspired by Harlem for over a century, this show aims to provide new insights on Harlem as an iconic American place and to shed new light on the role of place in defining the trajectory of American art.”

“One cannot fully appreciate the history of American art without understanding the vast influence of Harlem on artists of all races who have found themselves in New York during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,” said Stephanie Sparling Williams, Assistant Curator at the Addison Gallery of American Art. “The title of the exhibition in situ refers to an object in its original context, and this exhibition extends this anthropological modus operandi to artists, for whom working in situ is equally critical to the interpretation of a given place, subject, or culture.”

Harlem: In Situ brings together works from the Addison’s expansive holdings, ongoing and new works by contemporary artists, and significant loans to reveal the common threads that have made Harlem a touchstone for artists over generations. Highlights of the exhibition include:

• A never-before-exhibited painting from the Subway Series of large-scale portraits by Denver-born, Harlem-based artist Jordan Casteel (b. 1989).
• Two bodies of photography created 40 years apart by former Addison Edward E. Elson Artist
in Residence Dawoud Bey–Harlem, USA, a chronicle of the vibrant neighborhood captured
between 1975–79, and Harlem Redux, a series created in 2015 to document the effects of
rapid gentrification on Harlem’s physical landscape and sense of community.
• A monumental painting by Kehinde Wiley that borrows from the vocabulary of Old Master
portraiture to depict contemporary subjects the artist cast from the streets in Harlem,
provoking questions around race, class, and power in art and history-making.
• Major prints by pioneering mid-century artists including Romare Bearden, fusing avant-garde abstraction with socially-conscious subject matter, and Elizabeth Catlett, expressing her point of view as a Black woman working artist using multiple visual languages drawn from African and Mexican art traditions.
• A 1948 painting by Jacob Lawrence in his signature style, employing flattened and abstracted treatment of realistic subject matter to depict themes of contemporary African American life and community.
• Decades of photographs examining the changing landscape of Harlem through time including 1920s–1950s (Harlem) by Lucien Aigner, Harlem Document (1935) by Aaron Siskind, Harlem Heroes (1930–1960) by Carl van Vechten, and The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1984) by Roy DeCarava.

Harlem: In Situ grows out of the Addison’s ongoing pursuit of the question What is America?, an investigation of the interconnected aesthetic, political, racial, social, scientific, economic, and technological histories of the United States.

Devoted exclusively to American art, the Addison, which opened in 1931, holds one of the most important collections of American art in the country. Its holdings include more than 19,000 works by prominent artists such as John Singleton Copley, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, George Bellows, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Lorna Simpson, Kara Walker, and Mark Bradford, as well as photographers Eadweard Muybridge, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Cindy Sherman, Dawoud Bey, and many others. The Addison Gallery, located in a stand-alone building on the campus of Phillips Academy—a residential school of grades nine through 12 in Andover, Massachusetts—offers a continually rotating series of exhibitions and programs, all of which are free and open to the public.

Phillips Academy welcomes visitors to its beautiful, walkable campus year-round.
The Addison Gallery of American Art is open to the public from Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m., and Sunday 1:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. The museum is closed on Mondays, national holidays, December 24, and the month of August. Admission to all exhibitions and events is free. The Addison Gallery also offers free education programs for teachers and groups. For more information, call 978-749-4015, or visit the website at www.addisongallery.org.