ABSTRACT
Study of the interwar decades provides important insight into how African American art history has been written and how it has changed. The privileged status of the “primitive,” the African, the “folk,” and the authentic in Harlem Renaissance discourse has been well established in the literature. Their analytical power was rooted in widespread expectations that racial difference would manifest itself in art and viewers should be able to recognize it. The 1987 exhibition, “Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America,” raised important questions about the cultural context of the Harlem Renaissance, and the nature of art historical judgments that led to the subsequent invisibility of many black artists associated with it. Renewed interest in audiences and consumers has moved the Community Art Center program from the margins to the center in accounts of Federal Art Project ideology, goals, and success, and in so doing elevated the visibility of African Americans within New Deal art historical scholarship.
