An exhibit currently up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the first major exhibit in New York City since 1987 to look at the Harlem Renaissance, and the first at the Met itself in over half a century. During its 100th anniversary celebration back in 1969, the museum hosted an exhibit called “Harlem on my Mind: The Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968.” It turned into the biggest controversy ever to engulf the institution, and maybe one of the biggest at any American museum at all, ever.
It sounds incredible to say now, but the exhibit featured no art by black artists. It really had no work traditionally defined as art at all. Instead of being a collection of paintings or sculpture, it was instead an attempt to convey the sensation of being in an environment. 700 photographs (many life-size and larger), 500 projected images, television clips, recordings of music and of voices, all together made up what today we might call an “immersive experience.” But back in 1969, that isn’t what critics called it. It seemed to be something straight out of the radical counterculture. Plus, since art exhibits at museums traditionally meant artwork, the public expected there to be ample representation from Harlem’s artists, which there wasn’t.
Those who worked in the museum, on the other hand, knew what to expect. Before the exhibit opened, Thomas Hoving, the Met’s Director, said that the show would have “nothing to do with art in the narrow sense—but everything to do with this museum, its evolving role and purpose, what we hope is its emerging position as a positive, relevant, and regenerative force in modern society.” That wasn’t a description that set well with traditional museumgoers who believed they knew perfectly well what the purpose of an art museum was. “Speaking for this museum,” Hoving continued in remarks that were published in the museum’s in-house monthly bulletin, “we have by and large been unresponsive to social and political events.” But the Harlem exhibit, he said, was going to be “the turning point.”
When the exhibit opened controversy exploded. There were protest marches, emphatic and loud boycotts, and picketers around the museum day and night seven days a week. The Mayor, the state’s Commissioner for Human Rights, and most art critics dragged the museum over the coals. Hoving was right however about one thing. It proved to be something of a turning point in how major art museums thought of their interaction with their cities.