From Drawings to Sculpture: The Harlem Renaissance to Now

February 3, 2024 at 3 pm

National Arts Club

15 Gramercy Park, NYC

Early 20th-century Black artists primarily depicted portraits of people and daily life as they lived it. Fighting against false narratives, artists of this period strove to show their humanity. Their sacrifice pushed modern art in America to include new voices that included themes of social justice and even some futuristic elements. 

Join us for a dynamic conversation with curator Denise Murrell, Merryl H. and James S. Tisch Curator at Large,Metropolitan Museum of Art, to talk about the importance of the Harlem Renaissance and contemporary artists Sanford Biggers, Tschabalala Self and Coby Kennedy on how their expanding perspectives engages new and existing collectors, as well as public interest and support.

Moderated by:

Savona Bailey-McClain, Executive Director and Chief Curator, West Harlem Art Fund

Panelists:

Sanford Biggers, artist
Coby Kennedy, artist
Denise Murrell, Merryl H. and James S. Tisch Curator at Large, The Metropolitan Museum of Art 
Tschabalala Self, artist

This event is organized by The Drawing Foundation and the West Harlem Art Fund association with Master Drawings New York 2024.The Metropolitan Musem of Art is a supporting institution.

Sanford Biggers (b. 1970) was raised in Los Angeles and currently lives and works in New York City. He is the recipient of numerous awards. Most recently, he was appointed the 2021-2022 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professor and Scholar in the MIT Department of Architecture. In February 2021, he received Savannah College of Art & Design’s deFINE Art Award; in 2020, he was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship and appointed Board President at Sculpture Center; in 2019, he was inducted into the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame; in 2018, he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. In 2017, he was presented the 2017 Rome Prize in Visual Arts. 

His museum solo exhibition entitled Codeswitch opened at The Bronx Museum of the Arts from September 9, 2021, to April 5, 2021. This exhibition is a survey of over 50 quilt- based artworks and will travel to The California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA (July 28, 2021 – January 23, 2022). On May 5, 2021, he debuted Oracle, a monumental bronze Chimera sculpture, along with a multimedia public art exhibition throughout Rockefeller Center presented by Art Production Fund and Rockefeller Center in partnership with Marianne Boesky Gallery and will be on view until June 29, 2021. He has had solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2018), the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2016), the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (2012), and the Brooklyn Museum (2011), among others. His work has been shown in several institutional group exhibitions, including at the Menil Collection (2008) and the Tate Modern (2007) and recent exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2017) and the Barnes Foundation (2017). Biggers’ work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Walker Center, Minneapolis; the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington D.C.; the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; and the Legacy Museum, Montgomery, among others. 

Coby Kennedy is known for his powerful depictions of life in America that focus on challenging cultural realities. Born in 1977, his work upends popular stereotypes and archetypical imagery in service of a bold, speculative, Afrofuturist vision. His sculpture, Kalief Browder: The Box was included in the Kindred Arts Monumental Tour. Born and raised in Washington, DC in an arts and academia family, Kennedy has transformed an unflinching confrontation with both history and current events into a set of fantastical scenarios and characters that elevate our most challenging narratives to the level of mythology. With a background in industrial auto design, he embraces multiple materials that graphically embody the content of his works, including metal, fiberglass and bulletproof kevlar. Acknowledging the reality that, “…we (humans) are really good at finding reasons and innovative ways to kill each other,” his works explore everything from gentrification to racist violence to light & dark skin colorism within the Black community. 

Denise Murrell 

Merryl H. and James S. Tisch Curator at Large;
Associate Curator, Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Art 

Denise, who joined The Met in January 2020, received her PhD in art history from Columbia University in 2014. She was previously the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University (2014–2019), where she was the curator of the exhibition Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today (October 2018–February 2019) and a co-curator of its expansion at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Le modèle noir de Gericault à Matisse (March–July 2019). Denise previously received an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and worked in finance and consulting. She has taught art history at Columbia University in New York and in Paris. 

Tschabalala Self (b.1990 Harlem, USA) lives and works in the New York Tri-State. Self is an artist and builds a singular style from the syncretic use of both painting and printmaking to explore ideas surrounding the black body. She constructs depictions of predominantly women using a combination of sewn, printed, and painted materials, traversing different artistic and craft traditions. The formal and conceptual aspects of Self’s work seek to expand her critical inquiry into selfhood and human flourishing. Recent solo exhibitions and performances include Kunstmuseum, St. Gallen (2023); Le Consortium, Dijon (2022); Performa 2021 Biennial, New York City (2021); Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore (2021); ICA, Boston (2020); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Art Omi, Ghent (2019); Frye Art Museum, Seattle (2019) and Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2018). 

Her work has been exhibited at: ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj (2022); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2022); Kunsthalle Duesseldorf, Duesseldorf (2021); Brooklyn Museum, New York (2021); Pinakothek Der Moderne, Munich (2021); Centro Pecci Prato, Prato (2020/21); MOCA Jacksonville, Jacksonville (2020); The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs (2020); Pérez Art Museum, Miami (2020); Kunstverein Hannover, Hannover (2020); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2020); Rubell Museum, Miami (2019); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2019); Philadelphia Art Museum, Philadelphia; Museum of Modern art San Diego (2019); MoMA PS1, New York (2019); Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2019); Jewish Museum, San Francisco (2019); Le Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain OCCITANIE / Pyrénées-Méditerranée, Sète (2018); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville (2018); University Art Museum, Albany State University, Albany (2018); Mana Contemporary, Jersey City (2018); New Museum, New York (2017); Tramway, Glasgow (2017); Parasol Unit.