{"id":279683,"date":"2025-11-08T16:59:34","date_gmt":"2025-11-08T16:59:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/279683\/"},"modified":"2025-11-08T16:59:34","modified_gmt":"2025-11-08T16:59:34","slug":"13-masterpieces-to-see-at-the-newly-reopened-studio-museum-in-harlem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/279683\/","title":{"rendered":"13 Masterpieces to See at the Newly Reopened Studio Museum in Harlem"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tAs New York museums go, the Studio Museum in Harlem does not hold the largest collection, or even the widest-reaching one, but this has always been a feature, not a bug. First opened in 1968, the museum is focused specifically on artists of African descent, which means it\u2019s been dedicated to Black artists much longer than most institutions in the city. While others have played catch-up in recent years, the Studio Museum has only made its holdings even richer\u2014acquiring its first Basquiat painting<\/a> in 2023, for example.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe wealth of treasures in the Studio Museum\u2019s possession is obvious based on the collection display currently on view. Following a seven-year closure, the museum has officially unveiled its new home, designed by Adjaye Associates at a cost of $160 million. The beautiful building\u2019s greatest contribution to this elite museum? More galleries, which means more space to show of the institution\u2019s wonderful holdings.<\/p>\n

\n\tHere\u2019s your guide to 13 terrific works to see at the new Studio Museum in Harlem, which officially begins welcoming the public on November 15.<\/p>\n

\tLauren Halsey, yes we\u2019re open and yes we\u2019re black owned, 2021<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Christopher Garcia Valle\/ARTnews\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tText-oriented works about Black ownership of ideas and spaces recur throughout this presentation. \u201cwatering a black garden,\u201d reads one Raymond Saunders painting on hand here. \u201cYes we\u2019re open & yes we\u2019re Black owned,\u201d reads a Lauren Halsey sculpture on view nearby. Cast across all four sides of a cube, Halsey\u2019s text alludes to commercial copy splayed across store facades in South Central, the Los Angeles neighborhood where she is based. Although the Studio Museum is situated on the other side of the US, the piece also serves as a statement of purpose for this venerable New York institution, where Halsey was once an artist-in-residence.<\/p>\n

\tWilliam T. Williams, Trane, 1969<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Christopher Garcia Valle\/ARTnews\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tPerhaps no other artist has been quite so consequential for the Studio Museum as William T. Williams, who famously submitted a proposal for the museum\u2019s now-beloved residency program back in 1968. (The program has since raised multiple generations of Black artists, including quite a few participants in the new building\u2019s inaugural hang.) But Williams was quite a masterful painter, too, and works like Trane exist as proof. The painting features frames of mustard yellow, faded purple, and cadmium red that blast open as multihued wedges are driven through them. The painting\u2019s title is shorthand for John Coltrane, the jazz saxophonist who influenced many Black abstract artists of Williams\u2019s era.<\/p>\n

\tKerry James Marshall, Silence Is Golden, 1986<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Christopher Garcia Valle\/ARTnews\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tThis is a Studio Museum classic, and for good reason: Kerry James Marshall, now recognized as one of the most important painters in the US<\/a>, painted it in 1986, the year he completed his residency at this institution. In it, a Black man nearly recedes into a dark background; all that\u2019s visible are a toothy grin, a pair of crossed eyes, and two fingernails. Marshall began as an abstract painter, then turned to figuration after reading Ralph Ellison\u2019s Invisible Man. The novel\u2019s Black narrator at one point says, \u201cI am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.\u201d The painting accordingly directs the eye away from the figure, toward a cascade of abstractions\u2014one of which features a red cross against a blank background in reference to Kazimir Malevich, a painter who helped define a modernist canon dominated by other white males of his ilk.<\/p>\n

\tMalvin Gray Johnson, Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, 1928\u201329<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Christopher Garcia Valle\/ARTnews\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tMarshall\u2019s painting nicely complements this Malvin Gray Johnson picture that sets its inky black figures against a purplish sky. A leading artist of the Harlem Renaissance, Johnson drew on the language of European modernism, collapsing space to a point where a mountain range in the background only appears as several overlapping triangles, as a Studio Museum collection catalog rightly notes. But Paul C\u00e9zanne, that great French painter of peaks, would never have created an image like this one, whose title is taken from a Black spiritual about all that awaits in a glorious Heaven symbolized here by undulating clouds. Two figures can just barely be seen holding their arms up from the darkness of the earth, toward paradise above.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\tBarkley L. Hendricks, Lawdy Mama, 1969<\/p>\n

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\n\tIf Johnson\u2019s picture flirts with the conventions of Christian art, this portrait takes things a step further. Barkley L.\u00a0Hendricks covered its surface with gold leaf as though the canvas were a religious icon. Its subject is not a matriarch from the Bible but a figure from Hendricks\u2019s own family\u2014Kathy Williams, who sports an afro that rises and rounds her head like a halo. Though it appears to belong to another era, Hendricks\u2019s painting is embedded with references to the work\u2019s present: he drew his title from a popular blues song that was recorded by Buddy Moss in 1934 and later referenced by Nina Simone in her own 1967 tune. The painting\u2019s power has never dimmed, however.<\/p>\n

\tCamille Norment, Untitled (heliotrope), 2025<\/p>\n

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\n\tAlso glowing at the Studio Museum is this new commission, which hums with life\u2014literally. Norment has lined one wall with oversized brass tubes that she\u2019s twined with wire. The Studio Museum informs us that Norment\u2019s piece faces South, in acknowledgement of the \u201cdiasporic migratory patterns from North to South and South to North,\u201d and that the heliotropism of the piece\u2019s title refers to a plant\u2019s growth in the direction of sunlight. Playing from an unseen source are the sounds of many voices calling out, a mass of invisible singers. Whether intentionally or not, those voices recall scholar Saidiya Hartman\u2019s concept of \u201cthe chorus,\u201d which she once described as \u201can assembly sustaining dreams of the otherwise.\u201d Norment\u2019s piece functions similarly.<\/p>\n

\tFaith Ringgold, Echoes of Harlem, 1980<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Christopher Garcia Valle\/ARTnews\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tFaith Ringgold, one of Harlem\u2019s finest observers, paid homage to her neighborhood with this quilt featuring painted portraits of its residents. Lipstick-wearing women and mustachioed men are placed side by side; some face one way, some look the other, and still others gaze toward the center, where there\u2019s a grid of 12 Harlemites. The piece signified both the beginning of one chapter in Ringgold\u2019s career and the end of another in her personal life. It\u2019s billed here as the first story quilt she ever created and the last piece she produced collaboratively with her mother, who died the year after Ringgold produced Echoes of Harlem. All that explains why this quilt feels both celebratory and elegiac.<\/p>\n

\tHowardena Pindell, Autobiography: Scapegoat, 1990<\/p>\n

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\n\tFollowing a 1979 car accident, Howardena Pindell turned her practice inward<\/a>, making paintings that meditated on personal experiences that were not necessarily always at the forefront of the abstractions produced beforehand. This one meditates on the fraught dynamics Pindell experienced as Black woman in an art world dominated by white men. (One can imagine many of those men uttering the painting\u2019s textual phrases: \u201cSERVE US,\u201d reads one of them.) As a personification of the power imbalance, Pindell directs her attention toward Jasper Johns, a commercially successful painter whose work featured targets like the one represented here. The hash marks, too, recall Johns\u2019s crosshatched works, though Pindell has notably described them in other terms, variously calling them the \u201csounds of a mantra\u201d and \u201csymbolic of African ritual scarification.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tRanti Bam, Ifa 3, 2024<\/p>\n

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\n\tWhile much of the Studio Museum\u2019s efforts have focused on African Americans, the institution has always paid mind to artists of African descent outside the US as well. The current collection installation plays up the internationalism of the museum\u2019s holdings and includes such artists as the Nigerian-born Ranti Bam, who is now based between Lagos and London. She makes her gorgeous clay vessels by embracing her objects before firing them, hence this piece\u2019s title, which translates from the Yoruba to \u201cdivination\u201d or \u201cto pull close,\u201d according to the Studio Museum. Left behind is a vessel resembling a flabby human torso\u2014a corporeal presence produced with the help of the artist\u2019s own body.<\/p>\n

\tCarrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Black Love), 1999\/2001<\/p>\n

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\n\tWith her photographs and installations, Carrie Mae Weems has perceptively considered the narratives we append to still images, which may not always bear out the stories we imagine for them. In this triptych, she offers what appears to be a seduction: a smoking woman eyes a man, then embraces him. In isolation, each of these noirish pictures may communicate something very different, something more tensile and disturbing\u2014especially because Weems shot them at a distance, as though she were a sneaky voyeur. Seen beside one another, however, the pictures convey warmth and romanticism. The images belong together, just like these lovers.<\/p>\n

\tGeorges Liautaud, Maitre au Bois, n.d.<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Christopher Garcia Valle\/ARTnews\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tThe big revelation of the Studio Museum\u2019s current hang is Georges Liautaud. This Haitian metal sculptor worked as a blacksmith and gained some degree of international fame in the 1950s, appearing in vaunted biennials in Pittsburgh and S\u00e3o Paulo before being largely forgotten in the US in the intervening decades. (He doesn\u2019t even have an English-language Wikipedia page.) The Studio Museum, which has impressively owned his work since the \u201980s, is showing two of his sculptors, including this one representing a Caribbean folkloric figure who protects the forest. Liautaud contorts his mouth into an angular smile and shows him holding a staff.<\/p>\n

\tMaren Hassinger, In a Quiet Place, 1985<\/p>\n

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\n\tDownstairs, near a basement-level space for live events, there\u2019s this wonderful Maren Hassinger installation, which exerts a quiet presence in keeping with its title. Like other works Hassinger produced during the \u201980s, this one features ropes whose wires Hassinger pulled apart. Planted in concrete masses on the ground, the bits of rope look like giant, frayed threads or \u201cliving, moving, growing things,\u201d as the artist herself once put it. Yet another way of looking at the piece is as a forest of leafless trees, one that could be guarded by Liautaud\u2019s Maitre au Bois.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\tTony Cokes, Evil.13.5 (4 OE), 2022<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Christopher Garcia Valle\/ARTnews\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tWords with the power to shape the world have long been the subject of Tony Cokes\u2019s videos, many of which lift phrases from others\u2019 texts and set them to pop music. The \u201cOE\u201d of this one\u2019s title is Okwui Enwezor, the late curator whose exhibitions and books made space for artists from Africa, Asia, and Latin America in a Eurocentric canon. Drawn from a 2015 interview with Enwezor that was led by curator Amelie Klein, the text here takes up the notion of \u201crecycling\u201d among African designers, an act that Cokes, an American, makes literal by reusing and remaking Enwezor\u2019s words. \u201cSo we have to really rethink all these different concepts,\u201d reads the screen at one point. An accompanying soundtrack by DJ Hank makes heavy use of an Amerie sample in which the singer breathily intones the phrase: \u201cI\u2019m ready.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As New York museums go, the Studio Museum in Harlem does not hold the largest collection, or even…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":279684,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,229,88,52927],"class_list":{"0":"post-279683","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-studio-museum-in-harlem"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279683"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279683\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/279684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}