When spring arrives in New York, it can be absolutely stunning - and I was lucky today ... Largely I was in the Met, visiting the Harlem Renaissance show, which is every bit as good as everyone says (go, if you haven't already, and you can ...). This is from one of my very favorite pictures there, Palmer Hayden's The Janitor Who Paints, from c. 1937 - indeed, Hayden was something of a revelation to me.
Five rooms, maybe, later, a woman turned to another behind me - but ever so much so that I could hear - "This lady's only taking fotos of cats." (this is from William Johnson's Mom and Dad). Well .... er ... not quite guilty as charged:
... there was a wonderful flash photographer in Jacob Lawrence's The Photographer (1942) - how have I missed that before? unlike so many of the paintings here, it's actually owned by the Met.
So very many good things - I'll just add Horace Pippin's The Artist's Wife (1936).
Then downstairs, this collaboratively constructed and curated Afro-Futurist room, Before Yesterday We Could Fly, building on the history, excavations, and imagined futurity of Seneca Village [that largely Black (with some Irish) community that was "cleared" when Central Park was constructed...this opened just after my last visit to the Met, and I can't wait to share this with my students next week, since we discussed Seneca Village earlier in the semester in the context of Central Park.
And of course, having been talking about Jerome Thompson's painting, I went to say hello to it (and photographed a few details so that I have some even clear images than I currently do of details),
and - this is real research! 😀 - found a dandelion that was new to me, in Bierstadt's Lander's Peak - since that's an invented mountain, it's almost certainly an imagined plant, too ...
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