Neon ceramic and roses

Because Morningside Heights is always busting with cool art events, we often forget that we live in a city that busts even further with art. Just a couple blocks north is the Studio Museum in Harlem, where new Bwogger Zoë and not-new bwogger Amara headed on Thursday night.

While most students make the rounds at the Met or the MoMA for ArtHum or to class up their Instagrams, the Studio Museum of Harlem gets a little less student attention. The museum is free for Columbia students, and also stays open a lot later than other museums – you can check it out until 9 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays. And it’s on 125th, which is totally walkable from campus (or only a $3 UberPool, which is what we opted for). The current exhibitions are worth seeing, especially Their Own Harlems. A celebration of the centennial of Jacob Lawrence’s birth, the exhibit explores the impact of Harlem on a variety of artists. Some of the art, like Lawrence’s own tempera paintings, date back to the 1950s, but other pieces were created as recently as 2010. All of it drives home a central point too often neglected by Columbia students: that Harlem has long been and continues to be a source of artistic inspiration and cultural resources.
We came to see Their Own Harlems, but ended up checking out the rest of the museum as well.

Here are some highlights:

The Schomburg Library, 1986-87, Jacob Lawrence

This serigraph was my favorite Lawrence piece in the exhibition. A lot of his work focuses on the vibrancy of everyday life. This print makes even reading books in a library look beautiful and exciting.

Shape Up and a Trim, 2017, Devan Shimoyama

This piece is from another exhibit, Fictions. Fictions includes a lot of different work, ranging from paintings to sculptures and multi-channel video installations. It’s rare to find images of queer black people in museums, so I was thrilled to find this piece: a multimedia collage that focuses on the tension between standards of black masculinity and the reality of queer black lives.

Big Bad Pickup, 2017, Nikita Gale

Utilizing several mediums, Gale created a sort of interactive exhibit that tested our interactions with inanimate objects. He made an attempt to highlight the control we often think we have over objects by creating an installation that produced sounds at differing time intervals. The exhibit was pretty intriguing; I definitely tried to figure out how to make the guitar sound before realizing that was the whole point.