3. Art & Literature

How did the literature of the Harlem Renaissance play a central role in conversations around Black identity in America and abroad? In this episode we’ll learn about publications like Opportunity, The Crisis, and Fire!! which each promoted a unique political and aesthetic perspective on Black life at the time. We’ll learn about Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston before they became household names and explore how collaboration and conversation between artists, writers, and scholars came to define the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance.
Learn more about the exhibition at metmuseum.org/HarlemRenaissance
Objects featured in this episode:
Laura Wheeler Waring’s covers of The Crisis, September 1924 and April 1923: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/9bc8c3c6-0cfc-d314-e040-e00a18062904https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/b9f2b588-8fbe-d39b-e040-e00a180679bc
Winold Reiss, Cover of Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life, February 1

Bonus Episode: Tarot

Grab a cup of tea and join us for a bonus episode on tarot. We learn about the cards from their patrician origins to the present day, when tarot is being used to subvert limiting tropes of gender and sexuality. A tarot deck begs some questions: what makes something art? And who decides? Some of the answers may surprise you. We meet the artists behind a queer, Southern, collective tarot deck, and hear from an educator at The Met how tarot can be a source of both beauty and resistance. Plus: Camille Dungy, host and tarot skeptic, gets a slightly apocalyptic reading from a fellow poet. Producers Adwoa Gyimah-Brempong and Eleanor Kagan take us behind the scenes: probing something that's not quite a material, but whose story is too dynamic not to share.

Guests:

Suhaly Bautista-Carolina, creator of Moon Mother Apothecary and senior managing educator of audience development, Education, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Marco Leona,

Art and Medicine


Have you heard people say visiting a museum is good for you? Why is that? Grace Calame-Mars, a Nursing Professional Development Specialist, and Carolyn Halpin-Healy, an Art Educator at The Met, know the first-hand benefit of art in museums as a tool to help our well-being. Hear about the art therapy program they helped organize for medical professionals at NYU Langone Hospital, where close-looking exercises improved clinical observation skills and strengthened empathy, which became especially valuable tools during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Guests: Grace Calame-Mars, nurse educator at NYU Langone and Carolyn Halpin-Healy, art educator

Objects mentioned in this episode:

Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Netherlandish, 1525–1569). The Harvesters, 1565. Oil on wood, 47 x 63 3/4 in. (119 x 162 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1919 (19.164)

Figure: Seated Couple, eighteenth–early nineteenth