The New Negro Movement, Cultural Nationalism, and Modernism in the Black Diaspora
From Harlem to Havana, this lesson traces how artists of the African diaspora transformed modern art into a language of identity, resistance, and belonging, bridging the New Negro Movement and Caribbean cultural nationalism through visionary forms and politics.
The discussion begins with the New Negro Movement in the United States and the rise of cultural nationalism in the Caribbean, highlighting how visual artists drew on diasporic aesthetics and political consciousness to shape a new sense of identity. Figures such as Winold Reiss, Aaron Douglas, James Vanderzee, and Archibald Motley are examined in connection to Harlem’s cultural flowering of the 1920s and 1930s. Attention then shifts to the Caribbean, where Pedro Figari, Victor Manuel, Antonio Gattorno, Edna Manley, Ronald Moody, and Wifredo Lam exemplified the search for national and regional identities through figuration and abstraction. The lesson also considers sculptors and painters such as Sargent Johnson, Alvin Marriott, and Petion Savain, whose practices situated art within wider currents of cultural affirmation and resistance. Finally, attention is given to Jacob Lawrence, Rose Piper, and Elizabeth Catlett, whose works crystallized themes of diaspora, social struggle, and modernist innovation, illustrating how artistic production articulated both formal experimentation and the politics of belonging.
January 34, 2026 - from 3 PM to 5 PM CET.
