Visual Diversity Committee

Project 3, 2022: James Van Der Zee

In order to make our staff spaces more welcoming to all, we have transported a portion of a former gallery exhibition to our Smith Warehouse Rubenstein Library staff space. James Van Der Zee was an African American portrait photographer working the 1920s at the height of the “New Negro Movement.” Van Der Zee’s “Big City” subjects in Harlem, New York, reflect a shared ethos of the cultural ferment of the Harlem Renaissance at its height: to document a dignified image of cultural blackness, foster racial pride, and promote an aesthetic refusal to submit to the laws of Jim Crow. The original exhibition was in the Rubenstein Library Photography Gallery in 2021.