13 Masterpieces to See at the Newly Reopened Studio Museum in Harlem

Text-oriented works about Black ownership of ideas and spaces recur throughout this presentation. “watering a black garden,” reads one Raymond Saunders painting on hand here. “Yes we’re open & yes we’re Black owned,” reads a Lauren Halsey sculpture on view nearby. Cast across all four sides of a cube, Halsey’s text alludes to commercial copy splayed across store facades in South Central, the Los Angeles neighborhood where she is based. Although the Studio Museum is situated on the other side of the US, the piece also serves as a statement of purpose for this venerable New York institution, where Halsey was once an artist-in-residence.

Perhaps no other artist has been quite so consequential for the Studio Museum as William T. Williams, who famously submitted a proposal for the museum’s now-beloved residency program back in 1968. (The program has since raised multiple generations of Black artists, including quite a few participants in the new building’s inaugural hang.) But Williams was quite a masterful painter, too, and works like Trane exist as proof. The painting features frames of mustard yellow, faded purple, and cadmium red that blast open as multihued wedges are driven through them. The painting’s title is shorthand for John Coltrane, the jazz saxophonist who influenced many Black abstract artists of Williams’s era.

This is a Studio Museum classic, and for good reason: Kerry James Marshall, now recognized as one of the most important painters in the US, painted it in 1986, the year he completed his residency at this institution. In it, a Black man nearly recedes into a dark background; all that’s visible are a toothy grin, a pair of crossed eyes, and two fingernails. Marshall began as an abstract painter, then turned to figuration after reading Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. The novel’s Black narrator at one point says, “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.” The painting accordingly directs the eye away from the figure, toward a cascade of abstractions—one of which features a red cross against a blank background in reference to Kazimir Malevich, a painter who helped define a modernist canon dominated by other white males of his ilk.

Marshall’s painting nicely complements this Malvin Gray Johnson picture that sets its inky black figures against a purplish sky. A leading artist of the Harlem Renaissance, Johnson drew on the language of European modernism, collapsing space to a point where a mountain range in the background only appears as several overlapping triangles, as a Studio Museum collection catalog rightly notes. But Paul Cézanne, that great French painter of peaks, would never have created an image like this one, whose title is taken from a Black spiritual about all that awaits in a glorious Heaven symbolized here by undulating clouds. Two figures can just barely be seen holding their arms up from the darkness of the earth, toward paradise above. 

If Johnson’s picture flirts with the conventions of Christian art, this portrait takes things a step further. Barkley L. Hendricks covered its surface with gold leaf as though the canvas were a religious icon. Its subject is not a matriarch from the Bible but a figure from Hendricks’s own family—Kathy Williams, who sports an afro that rises and rounds her head like a halo. Though it appears to belong to another era, Hendricks’s painting is embedded with references to the work’s present: he drew his title from a popular blues song that was recorded by Buddy Moss in 1934 and later referenced by Nina Simone in her own 1967 tune. The painting’s power has never dimmed, however.

Also glowing at the Studio Museum is this new commission, which hums with life—literally. Norment has lined one wall with oversized brass tubes that she’s twined with wire. The Studio Museum informs us that Norment’s piece faces South, in acknowledgement of the “diasporic migratory patterns from North to South and South to North,” and that the heliotropism of the piece’s title refers to a plant’s growth in the direction of sunlight. Playing from an unseen source are the sounds of many voices calling out, a mass of invisible singers. Whether intentionally or not, those voices recall scholar Saidiya Hartman’s concept of “the chorus,” which she once described as “an assembly sustaining dreams of the otherwise.” Norment’s piece functions similarly.

Faith Ringgold, one of Harlem’s finest observers, paid homage to her neighborhood with this quilt featuring painted portraits of its residents. Lipstick-wearing women and mustachioed men are placed side by side; some face one way, some look the other, and still others gaze toward the center, where there’s a grid of 12 Harlemites. The piece signified both the beginning of one chapter in Ringgold’s career and the end of another in her personal life. It’s billed here as the first story quilt she ever created and the last piece she produced collaboratively with her mother, who died the year after Ringgold produced Echoes of Harlem. All that explains why this quilt feels both celebratory and elegiac.

Following a 1979 car accident, Howardena Pindell turned her practice inward, making paintings that meditated on personal experiences that were not necessarily always at the forefront of the abstractions produced beforehand. This one meditates on the fraught dynamics Pindell experienced as Black woman in an art world dominated by white men. (One can imagine many of those men uttering the painting’s textual phrases: “SERVE US,” reads one of them.) As a personification of the power imbalance, Pindell directs her attention toward Jasper Johns, a commercially successful painter whose work featured targets like the one represented here. The hash marks, too, recall Johns’s crosshatched works, though Pindell has notably described them in other terms, variously calling them the “sounds of a mantra” and “symbolic of African ritual scarification.”

While much of the Studio Museum’s efforts have focused on African Americans, the institution has always paid mind to artists of African descent outside the US as well. The current collection installation plays up the internationalism of the museum’s holdings and includes such artists as the Nigerian-born Ranti Bam, who is now based between Lagos and London. She makes her gorgeous clay vessels by embracing her objects before firing them, hence this piece’s title, which translates from the Yoruba to “divination” or “to pull close,” according to the Studio Museum. Left behind is a vessel resembling a flabby human torso—a corporeal presence produced with the help of the artist’s own body.

With her photographs and installations, Carrie Mae Weems has perceptively considered the narratives we append to still images, which may not always bear out the stories we imagine for them. In this triptych, she offers what appears to be a seduction: a smoking woman eyes a man, then embraces him. In isolation, each of these noirish pictures may communicate something very different, something more tensile and disturbing—especially because Weems shot them at a distance, as though she were a sneaky voyeur. Seen beside one another, however, the pictures convey warmth and romanticism. The images belong together, just like these lovers.

The big revelation of the Studio Museum’s current hang is Georges Liautaud. This Haitian metal sculptor worked as a blacksmith and gained some degree of international fame in the 1950s, appearing in vaunted biennials in Pittsburgh and São Paulo before being largely forgotten in the US in the intervening decades. (He doesn’t even have an English-language Wikipedia page.) The Studio Museum, which has impressively owned his work since the ’80s, is showing two of his sculptors, including this one representing a Caribbean folkloric figure who protects the forest. Liautaud contorts his mouth into an angular smile and shows him holding a staff.

Downstairs, near a basement-level space for live events, there’s this wonderful Maren Hassinger installation, which exerts a quiet presence in keeping with its title. Like other works Hassinger produced during the ’80s, this one features ropes whose wires Hassinger pulled apart. Planted in concrete masses on the ground, the bits of rope look like giant, frayed threads or “living, moving, growing things,” as the artist herself once put it. Yet another way of looking at the piece is as a forest of leafless trees, one that could be guarded by Liautaud’s Maitre au Bois. 

Words with the power to shape the world have long been the subject of Tony Cokes’s videos, many of which lift phrases from others’ texts and set them to pop music. The “OE” of this one’s title is Okwui Enwezor, the late curator whose exhibitions and books made space for artists from Africa, Asia, and Latin America in a Eurocentric canon. Drawn from a 2015 interview with Enwezor that was led by curator Amelie Klein, the text here takes up the notion of “recycling” among African designers, an act that Cokes, an American, makes literal by reusing and remaking Enwezor’s words. “So we have to really rethink all these different concepts,” reads the screen at one point. An accompanying soundtrack by DJ Hank makes heavy use of an Amerie sample in which the singer breathily intones the phrase: “I’m ready.”