The year is 1927, and Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes are feverish with youth, gin, and artistic ambition. They are riding high on the achievements of the Harlem Renaissance-the most dynamic and shocking literary movement in American history. To make their mark on the world, they decide to write an authentic African American opera rooted in the folktales and songs of the South. Despite these lofty ambitions, the messiness of everyday life and the pressures of patronage get in the way. The blues opera Hughes and Hurston work so hard on never materializes. At first it's simply reduced to a play. Then its very ownership is brought into dispute. Eventually Hughes and Hurston's friendship comes to a final and irreparable end. Through all their arguments, love affairs, discussions and diversions, the characters work to create a new modernism that is both accessible and relevant to contemporary Black life, and to the generations of readers and writers, artists and poets, both Black and white, to follow. Harlem Mosaics is a fictional reimagining of true events. In lyrical prose that evokes the heady 1920's, it tells a story that reads as a cautionary tale, a love story, and a social novel, reintroducing us to these brilliant and important artists. The novel includes an introduction by Marc Primus, of the Afro-American Folkloric Troupe, who knew and produced the works of both Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.

With its rich cultural history and many landmark buildings, Harlem is not just one of New York’s most distinctive neighborhoods; it’s also one of the most walkable. This illustrated guide takes readers on five separate walking tours of Harlem, covering ninety-one different historical sites. Alongside major tourist destinations like the Apollo Theater and the Abyssinian Baptist Church, longtime Harlem resident Karen Taborn includes little-known local secrets like Jazz Age speakeasies, literati, political and arts community locales. Drawing from rare historical archives, she also provides plenty of interesting background information on each location. This guide was designed with the needs of walkers in mind. Each tour consists of eight to twenty-nine nearby sites, and at the start of each section, readers will find detailed maps of the tour sites, as well as an estimated time for each walk. In case individuals would like to take a more leisurely tour, it provides recommendations for restaurants and cafes where they can stop along the way. Walking Harlem gives readers all the tools they need to thoroughly explore over a century’s worth of this vital neighborhood’s cultural, political, religious, and artistic heritage. With its informative text and nearly seventy stunning photographs, this is the most comprehensive, engaging, and educational walking tour guidebook on one of New York’s historic neighborhoods.

This book examines necropolitics and performance art, with a particular focus on the black body and the African diaspora. In this book, Myron M. Beasley situates artists as cultural workers and theorists who illuminate the political linkages between their own and others’ specific locales. The focus is an interrogation of the political systems that dictate and determine the value of lives (and decide which lives matter) through a lens of performance and art. Beasley highlights how the performances of rupture, which are of artistic, and historical significance, reveal both strategies of survival and promises of possibility. Artists and curators examined include Jelili Atiku, Giscard Bouchotte, Nona Faustine, Vanessa German, Simone Leigh, Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, Ebony G. Patterson, and Dianne Smith. The volume is an ideal research and reference book for students and scholars of Contemporary Art, African Studies, and Performance Theory.

Published here for the first time is Bruce Nugent's short novel, Half High, a story about a mysterious young artist named Aeon, whose mixed racial heritage alienates him from both the Black and white worlds of 1920s New York and beyond. A stand-alone novella that nonetheless further engages with the characters in Nugent's full-length novel Gentleman Jigger, this important work deepens our understanding of the Harlem Renaissance, Black modernism, and Black modernism's relationship to the modernist work white authors were producing at the time as well. Presented here with a short introduction by Whit Frazier, including a brief discussion of how this work came to be published.

Curating Art provides insight into some of the most socially and politically impactful curating of historical and contemporary art since the late 1990s. It offers up a museological framework for understanding watershed developments of curating in art museums. Representing the plurality of theory and practice around the expanded field of relational curating, the book focuses on curating that prioritises the quality of relationships between people and objects, between institutions and people and among people. It has wide international breadth, with particularly strong representation in East and Southeast Asia, including four papers never before translated into English. This Asian cluster illuminates the globalisation of the field and challenges dichotomies of East and West while acknowledging distinctions within specific, but often transnational, cultural spheres. The compelling philosophical perspectives and case studies included within Curating Art will be of interest to students and researchers studying curating, exhibition development and art museums. The book will also inspire current and emerging curators to pose challenging but important questions about their own practice and the relationships that this work sustains.

Contains articles on fashion and style, household workers, images of women, jazz and blues, maternity homes, Native American women, Phillis Wheatley, homes, picture brides, single women, and teaching.