Download Beinecke exhibit at Yale turns back clock to the Harlem Renaissance

Beinecke exhibit at Yale turns back clock to
the Harlem Renaissance
Curator Melissa Barton talks to a visitor in the Beinecke lobby near the stacks tower and an image of Cab Calloway.
Joe Amarante — Register
By Joe Amarante, New Haven Register
The book “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes.
Photo courtesy of Beinecke Library
Posted: 01/13/17, 1:54 PM EST | Updated: 2 weeks, 4 days ago
NEW HAVEN >> As the first African-American president prepares to leave office after eight
busy (if contentious) years, Yale’s Beinecke Library is the place to explore another proud era —
the Harlem Renaissance.
No, this exhibit preview is not a case of déjà vu, although just two months ago we told you about
the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters at the
Yale rare book and manuscript library.
As librarian/curator Melissa Barton put it during a press preview Thursday, there was indeed a
smaller show on the life of Johnson in the fall (after renovations and reopening) that touched on
some of the same early-20th-century themes and people, but it excluded the Johnson collection’s
“core strength, which is really the Harlem Renaissance period. The collection was founded at
kind of the sunset of this period, in ’41, and they (Carl Van Vechten and others) set about
immediately collecting material from many of the most prominent figures in that period,
including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Bennett. ... It really is recognized
worldwide as one of Beinecke Library’s greatest strengths ... our holdings from this period.”
The 300 chosen artifacts of “Gather Out of Star-Dust: The Harlem Renaissance & The Beinecke
Library” are on view through April 17 at the library (121 Wall St.).
Photos of this vibrant era (1910-1940), which visitors will first notice in photos on the lower
glass walls of the central “stacks” of rare books, can tend to make the period look idyllic, but
these are arts and literary people, often short on support but particularly so in an era of
segregation and discrimination.
Still, the Harlem Renaissance was when “African American cultural and intellectual endeavor
surged into the American mainstream,” writes Barton in a companion volume coming out from
Yale University Press.
“When you’re thinking about who the audience was in a lot of the cabarets,” said Barton, “it was
a lot of people from downtown coming uptown — in the same way that a lot of times we find our
entertainment in areas that are a little bit more liberal with the law because they are more
impoverished and more ignored by social structures.”
As you may glean from the exhibit, the Prohibition Era crowd of young African-American artists
and writers drew the interest of publishers and sponsors and a stream of white visitors and
celebrities to venues such as The Cotton Club. But it sometimes left blacks shut out of decent
seats at their own clubs. Says Hughes in his autobiography:
“It was a period when every season there was at least one hit play on Broadway acted by a Negro
cast. And when books by Negro authors were being published with much greater frequency and
much more publicity than ever before or since in history. It was a period when white writers
wrote about Negroes more successfully (commercially speaking) than Negroes did about
themselves. It was the period (God help us!) when Ethel Barrymore appeared in blackface in
Scarlet Sister Mary! It was the period when the Negro was in vogue.”
Michael Morand, Beinecke public relations and communication official, said that since the
reopening in September, 54,000 people have come through the revolving doors of the Beinecke,
and he’s hoping to bring in more for this “epic” exhibit of black culture that reflects the
contributions of folks such as Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. Du Bois, Bessie
Smith and others. It’s been 75-plus years since the writer, theater critic and photographer Van
Vechten established the Yale-based collection with Grace Nail Johnson as a memorial to her
husband.
The show is laid out in a few long, large glass cases plus several individual cases, a couple of
touch-screen kiosks and images on the glass tower of the “stacks” where Van Vechten’s portraits
of Harlem Renaissance and cultural leaders are displayed with original artwork of E. Simms
Campbell’s 1932 map of Harlem nightclubs.
The sections at street level and on the public mezzanine are divided into: chronology (including a
Saturday Evening Post article on “The World’s Largest Negro City of Harlem); the making of a
renaissance (including literary examples and debates about proper subject matter for black
writers); visual arts (due to be installed for opening day Friday with sculptures and works on
paper); performing arts (Josephine Baker, Robinson dance photos, Paul Robeson), a somewhatrelated exhibit of Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias and his oft-critical portraits of New Yorkers
called “Caricature Assassination”; and on collecting itself (the smaller cabinets with collections
that include risque French postcards of Baker and Langston Hughes’s collection of house rent
party cards.
What was that last one? Well, apparently in Harlem when you were in danger of being short on
your rent, you threw a party and gave out printed cards, some with a line of poetry on them, and
then you sold booze and made a little money for rent.
“I think that the period really placed a strong emphasis on the idea of collecting, the collective,
the creation of collection, the gathering of materials...” said curator Barton of a time period when
the first anthology of African-American poetry was published, the collection of AfricanAmerican folklore became popular, the Howard University Library’s collection grew and when
Carter Woodson founded the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.
E.C. Schroeder, director of the Beinecke, in a release, said the exhibition appropriately celebrates
the complementary acts of both creativity and collecting. “The Harlem Renaissance was a key
moment in the development of archives of African American writers, artists, and activists.”
Beinecke exhibitions are free and open to the public: Monday, 10 a.m.-7 p.m.; TuesdayThursday, 9 a.m.-7 p.m.; Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.; and Saturday, noon-5 p.m.
The library does a lecture program called “Mondays at the Beinecke,” and on Jan. 23 at 4 p.m.
will present Emily Bernard, author of a book on Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance.