Black Historicism and Alain Locke's Vision for a Harlem Museum of African Art

On February 7, 1927, the Blondiau Theatre Arts Collection of Primitive African Art opened at the New York Art Circle Gallery. At a moment when the American cultural scene was captivated by African artifacts—French art dealer Paul Guillaume had recently declared that “Negro art is fashionable”—this exhibition, comprising more than 400 objects collected by Belgian diplomat Raoul Blondiau during his time in Ghana and the Belgian Congo, captured the fascination of New Yorkers. The first exhibition of African art organized by an African American, Alain Locke, philosopher, critic, and central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, framed these objects not merely as the sources of European modernist innovation but as aesthetic achievements in their own right, capable of inspiring a distinctly Black school of art.

Locke ultimately envisioned the creation of a Museum of African Art in Harlem. To this end, he worked tirelessly to make African art accessible to Black audiences: he published images of African sculpture in The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925), argued for the integration of African art into Black aesthetics in his cultural criticism, and exhibited his “Harlem Museum of African Art” collection at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library, Fisk University, Howard University, and the Hampton Institute.

Drawing on the programs, pamphlets, and advertisements produced in support of Locke’s Harlem Museum of African Art, my project argues that Locke sought to inaugurate a new Black historicism—one that was developmental, possessed a “classical” origin, and resisted the dominant portrayal of Africa and its descendants as ahistorical, atemporal, and primitively fixed. Countering what Johannes Fabian would later call “the denial of coevalness”—the relegation of the racial “other” to an earlier stage of human development—Locke insisted that Black people, too, were historical subjects. Yet rather than merely reproducing a Eurocentric model of historical consciousness, Locke’s effort to forge a connection to an African heritage reveals a pragmatic reconstruction of the historicist form. He acknowledged in “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts,” published in The New Negro that Black Americans approached African art with “the same alienated and misunderstanding attitude as the average European Westerner.” Locke recognized that to claim historical agency within a Eurocentric world, one had to strategically inhabit and transform its very structures.

Because my research draws on both material culture and Locke’s writings and lectures, my poster will include close analyses of the visual and textual materials—pamphlets, advertisements, and exhibition images—that were key to communicating the purpose of African art. The poster format, I believe, is especially fitting for this project: as Locke’s own carefully designed promotional materials demonstrate, he understood the transformative power of symbols and imagery in redefining the category of race itself.