One measure of an exhibition catalogue's quality is the degree to which it makes you want to go see the exhibition. In the case of this volume, let us just say that, since picking it up, I have been wracked with pain that I have not been able to visit the Columbus Museum of Art to catch the show it accompanies, which runs through January 20. It is a sumptuously illustrated tome, with reproductions of pieces, variously iconic and little-known, by Palmer Hayden, Lois Mailou Jones, Jacob Lawrence, Augusta Savage, Horace Pippin, and many, many more. Haygood is a biographer and journalist (famed for writing the story that became the film The Butler), and he's accomplished the rare feat of weaving together rich scholarship with luminous prose. Including contributions from a variety of experts, it takes an expansive view of its subject, looking not only at visual art but vernacular photography, writing, and periodicals of the movement. 'The Harlem Renaissance lives,' Haygood writes. 'It sings. It continues to do its part to explain America to itself, and also to the world.' This book is a superb vehicle for that remarkable story. -Andrew Russeth
Celebrating the centennial of the creative and intellectual flowering, I Too Sing America is a unique exploration of the subject that brings a journalist together with his hometown museum and the community where he grew up in Columbus, Ohio... Titled after Langston Hughes's iconic poem, I Too Sing America considers the Harlem Renaissance as a movement not confined to either upper Manhattan or the interwar period, but as a historical moment of national and international significance that continues to have reverberations far beyond its typically noted end date in the mid-1930s. The catalog is a wonderful volume lavishly illustrated with the art and photography that defined the Renaissance. Haygood's essays on how Harlem emerged as the mecca of Black America, the feverish publishing the period sparked, the dance, theater, and music the era engendered, the two Reverend Powells, and W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston, appear throughout the volume. His contributions are punctuated by writings about individual visual artists, including Malvin Gray Johnson, Winold Reiss, Aaron Douglas, Palmer Hayden, Augusta Savage, and James VanDerZee, authored by the museum's curators. -Culture Type
