A Stroll in the Gallery: Arts of the City

Thomas Hart Benton. Detail of Arts of the City. 1932. Whitney Museum of American Art (original installation), New Britain Museum of Art.

This image is part of a large wall mural called Arts in the City, which itself is one of an assemblage of large murals called Arts of Life in America. The murals were painted in 1932 in a room of the Whitney Museum of American Art in its former Greenwich Village location. A substantial part of the work was installed in 1953 in the New Britain Museum of Art, which hosts the virtual gallery where the murals can be seen in much greater detail.

I stumbled upon this image in a Google search for images from the Harlem Renaissance. Most of what I found were grainy, B/W photos, so Benton’s vivid colors and dramatic composition caught my eye. It may not be the broadest representation of the time and place, but it conveyed what I wanted to say about the mixing of race and class in Harlem. The Collyer Brothers definitely were isolated from that social milieu. Since then I’ve thought about Harlem’s role as one of America’s preeminent creative centers.

Finding this image and putting it into my first PowerPoint presentation was the moment I discovered that I could play in PPt. Until then, PPt had been a barrier to overcome, not a tool for my own creative discovery.

This is the first image of my Gallery Stroll series that I have seen only digitally, not physically. Now I’ve added the New Britain Museum of Art to my wanderlust list so I can stand in a room surrounded by the Benton murals.