I Too Sing America: The Harlem Renaissance at 100 [Hardcover]

Winner of the James A. Porter and David C. Driskell Book Award for African American Art History,I Too Sing Americaoffers a major survey on the visual art and material culture of the groundbreaking movement one hundred years after the Harlem Renaissance emerged as a creative force at the close of World War I.

It illuminates multiple facets of the era--the lives of its people, the art, the literature, the music, and the social history--through paintings, prints, photography, sculpture, and contemporary documents and ephemera. The lushly illustrated chronicle includes work by cherished artists such as Romare Bearden, Allan Rohan Crite, Palmer Hayden, William Johnson, Jacob Lawrence, Archibald Motley, and James Van Der Zee.
The project is the culmination of decades of reflection, research, and scholarship by Wil Haygood, acclaimed biographer and preeminent historian on Harlem and its cultural roots. In thematic chapters, the author captures the range and breadth of the Harlem Reniassance, a sweeping movement which saw an astonishing array of black writers and artists and musicians gather over a period of a few intense years, expanding far beyond its roots in Harlem to unleashing a myriad of talents upon the nation. The book is published in conjunction with a major exhibition at the Columbus Museum of Art. One measure of an exhibition catalogue’s quality is the degree to which it makes you want to go see the exhibition. In the case of this volume, let us just say that, since picking it up, I have been wracked with pain that I have not been able to visit the Columbus Museum of Art to catch the show it accompanies, which runs through January 20. It is asumptuously illustrated tome, with reproductions of pieces, variously iconic and little-known, by Palmer Hayden, Loïs Mailou Jones, Jacob Lawrence, Augusta Savage, Horace Pippin, and many, many more. Haygood is a biographer and journalist (famed for writing the story that became thelÃf