UCI Podcast: Bridget R. Cooks takes us inside the Met

Bridget R. Cooks has done it all in the art world, transitioning from a young artist into a dedicated art historian during her years pursuing a B.A. at UC Irvine. An early foray into museum education led to the eventual curation of multiple exhibitions across the United States and writing her first book, Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum, which won the inaugural James A. Porter and David C. Driskell Book Award in African American Art History in 2013.

A decade later, Cooks was invited to participate on the advisory committee for an upcoming six-month show at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art titled “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism.” She also wrote a piece detailing the history of Harlem Renaissance exhibitions at the Met for the event’s official catalogue.

What is the Harlem Renaissance? The UCI professor and Chancellor’s Fellow of art history and African American studies will answer that question in this episode of the UCI Podcast. In addition, she’ll tell us what it’s like to serve alongside some of her heroes, why her career is exactly what she’s “supposed to be doing” and how time spent at a museum can benefit everyone.

This episode was recorded in the podcast studio at UCI’s ANTrepreneur Center. The music, titled “Don’t Fret,” was provided by Quincas Moreira via the audio library in YouTube Studio. You can read more about Cooks’ experience with this special exhibition here.

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TRANSCRIPT

Cara Capuano / The UCI Podcast:

From the University of California Irvine. I’m Cara Capuano. Thank you for listening to The UCI Podcast. Our guest today is Bridget R. Cooks, UC Irvine professor and Chancellor’s Fellow for the Departments of Art History and African American Studies.

Her research focuses on African American artists, Black visual culture and museum criticism. She wrote Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum and has also curated several exhibitions throughout the United States. She has also served as museum educator for the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Thank you for taking the time to talk to us today, Professor Cooks.

Bridget R. Cooks:

I am delighted to be here. Thank you so much.

Capuano:  

I am really enthused to discuss a current project that you’re involved in, which is an upcoming exhibition focusing on the Harlem Renaissance at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. But before we get into your unique involvement with that important undertaking, I want to get to know a little bit about you. Why art?

Cooks:

Yes, it’s a great question. I, like many other people, enjoyed making art in high school. I went to North Hollywood High School, which is also known as the “Zoo Magnet.” And I had a lot of time drawing animals at the zoo – we had our classes at the zoo – and wanted to study art after that. And I came to UCI as an art major, realized I knew almost nothing about the history of art, started taking art history classes, totally fell in love with the drama of the stories of artists. And then, realized that there was a real lack of information about African American artists in my classes and in the field, and was really encouraged by my professors to get a Ph.D. and contribute to a critical and historical writing about Black artists. And it’s just been exactly what I’m supposed to be doing.

Capuano:

What a wonderful story… You started as an artist and then you decided, “No, let’s examine artists.”

Cooks:

Yes. And it’s been a wonderful way to see the world, to connect with people. Now that I’m faculty here, to help students find their path – especially because we’re such a science-centered school, and this is another way for students to express themselves and think critically. And it’s been really my life’s purpose, you know, in a way that’s been really fulfilling.

Capuano:

I have the goosebumps right now. Thank you for sharing that personal history. I always enjoy learning about the foundations and the inspirations that lead our UCI faculty to go certain ways and devote their careers to different topics.

Onto that major event in the art world that I alluded to earlier: an opening date of February 25th, 2024, for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York’s significant exhibition called “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism.” You have a role in this survey show of Harlem Renaissance art. How are you participating?

Cooks:

Yeah, I am so delighted and honored to have been a part of the opening of this exhibition. My job has been as a member of the exhibition advisory committee, so I was invited to be part of that committee by the esteemed curator, Denise Murrell, who’s curator-at-large at the Met. And I was also asked to be a contributor to the exhibition catalogue, which just came out this month. So, it’s been wonderful working with Denise. I mean, she is a real legend already in the field. She had an exhibition in 2018 called “Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today” and it showed in the U.S. at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University and then broke all previous attendance records at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. And from that, she was offered a position at the Met as curator, and now has worked herself up to be Curator at Large.

The exhibition is called “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” and it’s a wonderful opportunity to show these artists together. They haven’t been seen together in quite a long time. It’s also a kind of overdue homecoming in the sense that in 1969, there was a huge show that’s considered the first blockbuster art exhibition in the United States that happened at the Metropolitan called “Harlem on My Mind.” And in that exhibition, the artwork by artists from Harlem was excluded. So, it’s been long overdue to have this kind of recognition – particularly at the Met – for that reason.

Capuano:

How would you describe what the Harlem Renaissance is?

Cooks:

The Harlem Renaissance, I think of as an artistic and cultural blossoming in our nation. Like most movements, there’s no specific start date and end date, but when I teach, I think about it as the time period between the ending of World War I and the stock market crash – so, 1919 to 1929.

It was a movement that brought about new work in literature, in theater, in dance, and also the visual arts. And so, it really was an interdisciplinary opportunity for African American artists, who were coming largely from agriculturally based societies in the South. Also, there were folks coming from the Caribbean to different points that were cosmopolitan cities in the United States.

So, we think about the upper Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem, but we also have people working in Chicago. We have people working in South Carolina. We have Sargent Johnson, who was the only California artist who was part of the Harlem Renaissance, and the Huntington Museum is opening an exhibition of his work later this month.

So, it was a time of great creative activity. A time when Black people were seeing themselves in other people in new sort of metropolitan communities. They were inspiring each other’s work. They were creating collectives to discuss ideas about what African American artists should be doing, what kind of social responsibilities might they have, what aspirations they had to travel, what kind of subject matter was appropriate for their work. And it was really the first time in history that we had this kind of cultural convenings happening.

Capuano:

Certainly, something that deserves celebration at the Met.

Cooks:

Yes, absolutely.

Capuano:

This particular exhibition – about 160 works of diverse and wide ranging media, a lot of paintings, sculpture, but also film projections, some photography – a huge portion of this collection that’s going to be on display is on loan from various sources. What was it like for curator Denise Murrell and her team to bring this expansive collection together from all these different places?

Cooks:

Denise and her team have done an extraordinary amount of work – research, research, research and a lot of travel. Even though we have seen – sparsely – exhibitions, collective exhibitions, of art of the Harlem Renaissance before, you know, since the latest one till now, there’s work that has not been exhibited before. And Denise was able to talk to families to see what they had in their private collection. She’s also done a lot of research at the Schaumburg and at various historically Black colleges and universities – HBCUs – to see what’s in storage. She’s talked to descendants. She’s gone through all kinds of archives to be able to get this work together.

You know, one of her particular areas of interest is this connection between African American artists and European artists. And so, she was able to do research on both sides of the Atlantic to show a kind of communication and exchange between African American artists and European artists. In this way, she’s really arguing for the centrality of Black creativity to the definition of an international and cosmopolitan sort of artist citizen, and that’s an aspect of the exhibition that hasn’t been talked about enough in previous museum presentations.

Capuano:

So, it’s almost like an expanded view on the true history behind it.

Cooks:

Yeah, it’s, it’s really interesting. My contribution to the catalogue has been to look at the history of group exhibitions of artists in the Harlem Renaissance, and from one iteration to the next, we see an expansion. So, at first the expansion was geographical. We were looking at artists who were coming from Jamaica who were part of the Harlem Renaissance.

Then we started to look at the kinds of production of images of Black people during the Harlem Renaissance by people who were not Black, to see how they were contributing to this new image of a modern Negro person using the language that they used at the time. And so, this is another kind of geographic expansion.

There are some artists I’ve never heard of and there’s several works in the exhibition that I didn’t even know existed. So, she’s been expanding in terms of depth for work of particular artists, but then being even more inclusive strategically to think about the kinds of exchanges that Europeans had with African Americans.

Capuano:

This is the first time Harlem Renaissance movement art has been demonstrated and featured in New York City since 1987 – so, that’s a span of almost 40 years. Why now?

Cooks:

I know. Yeah, it’s incredible. So, Mary Schmidt Campbell and the late, great David Driskell were the primary curators for that exhibition of Harlem Renaissance art. It happened in ‘87 at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

We have had some group exhibitions since then, but the way that we can think about its timeliness now has to do with having Denise in this position at the Met. There are more Black curators at the Met than there ever have been before. The first one was Lowery Stokes Sims, who is one of my queens in the field, and another member on the advisory committee. So, it really is about having a recognition of what Denise could do. Her job builds on the legacy of folks like Lowery Stokes Sims. Mary Schmidt Campbell also is part of the advisory board. It’s kind of a strategic placement of people and multiple generations of work that has brought us to this point.

Museums are absolutely faced with a kind of cultural reckoning that many institutions have found that they’ve had to address since the year 2020. So, that’s also a contributing factor to why now. I really think all the stars just align. There still had to be some kind of magic for this to really get to a point of manifestation. A lot of hard work and a lot of people contributed to this. Some of them are not even with us today, but they’ve left things in place, opportunities in place, so that Denise could do this work.

Capuano:

It’s like many powerful forces have manifested together for this moment. It’s amazing.

Cooks:

I don’t think it would’ve been possible to do it before. You know, one of the other things that I’ll mention is there’s a wonderful exhibition that’s a permanent exhibition called the “Afrofuturist Period Room” that’s at the Met. And it’s a really fantastic contribution to even the concept of the period room. But it’s a space that looks at the history of Seneca Village and the presence of African American people in New York, and then thinking sort of cosmically into speculative futures through science fiction, but also looking at objects from the collection to help us think about African Americans past and present. And I think having that as a part of the permanent identity and the permanent collection of the museum also laid some groundwork for the possibility of this exhibition happening now. So, I hope people who are hearing our conversation – and who may be able to go see the show – make sure that they also go see that period room.

Capuano:

Noted, thank you. I appreciate you sharing with me the piece that you contributed to the catalogue so that I could prepare for our conversation today and my reading experience of the history of the times that art of the Harlem Renaissance movement has been on demonstration really evoked a lot of emotional responses for me. Obviously, the awe and the inspiration and the learning, but also sadness, frustration, anger, exasperation of the way that some of the reviewers treated past exhibitions of this art. What’s it like for you when you embark on these deep dives into facets of America’s art history?

Cooks:

I love it. I just love it. I love being an art historian. I love the Nancy Drew aspects of being a “detective.” And it’s not just fictional like that – like a Nancy Drew character. It really is incredible detective work going through archives and talking to people to do oral histories, to find out how they’ve contributed to the Black art world, the mainstream art world as Black people. It’s so exciting that we have this opportunity to ask different questions of history, you know, to go back into the archives, but to also find new participants, people who were not involved before, who now are willing to speak or maybe are being asked for the first time to speak. So, I feel very privileged to be a part of this history in the making, and I am absolutely honored to be part of this pantheon of people who Denise has collected to help her and support her in this exhibition.

Capuano:

That’s amazing. When do you plan to visit?

Cooks:

Yes, we are having a very fancy opening and dinner. I bought a dress…

Capuano:

Okay!

Cooks:

Which was really very fun to do. On the 20th of February, we’re going to have this opening, and then there is a suite of programs that are set for the run of the exhibition. I can’t wait! I really can’t wait. And I look forward to teaching the material. I mean, I teach the Harlem Renaissance in my art history classes here, but to be able to look at this new material, new images, a new wave of conversations, I am really excited to do that in the future.

Capuano:

When you think about what you already know is being featured, what are you most looking forward to?

Cooks:

I am looking forward to a gallery that’s going to be focused on portraiture in particular. I’m very interested in the history of portraiture, and I’ve had students who’ve done really great writing on portraiture in the Harlem Renaissance. So, there will be some new objects in there – new to my eyes. And then to see the kind of constellation of paintings that Denise has put together, showing connections between European modernists and African American modernists. I think that’s really going to open up multiple fields, in terms of being more inclusive and thinking about connections in ways that hadn’t previously been articulated visually in an exhibition. So, you know, even though I am a specialist in the field, I am planning on learning some new things that will affect the way that I think about the Harlem Renaissance and share information with my students.

Capuano:

To use your earlier metaphor, it sounds like this exhibition has the potential to open up new doors to a lot more investigative work.

Cooks:

Absolutely. And when we are privileged enough to experience new doors opening, we always think about new dissertation topics for our students, new sets of people that need to have oral histories done, new archives that might be available that we haven’t looked at before with the same kinds of questions. So, it’s really going to lead to another generation of investigation.

Capuano:

That’s marvelous. Is there anything that we didn’t get to today that you wanted to talk about?

Cooks:

I think I’ve mentioned all of the things that I wanted to. I mean, there’s so much more to say. I think listeners being on the lookout for solo exhibitions of artists who are in the show – some of our local listeners may have seen the Archibald Motley retrospective that happened at LACMA several years ago. I’ve already mentioned the Sargent Johnson show that’s going to open later this month. So, really to look for more opportunities to see works by individual artists in the exhibition in more depth.

Capuano:

Sometimes just spending time thinking about different times is very well-spent time, if that makes sense.

Cooks:

It does. And we need to, I think – as a culture – see what we can learn from history, what it has to offer us. And this is a really beautiful and enriching way to do it.

Capuano:

Thank you so much for joining us today, Professor Cooks, and sharing your wisdom around the art world, around art history, and specifically the history of Black visual culture.

Cooks:

Thank you so much for asking me all of these questions and helping to bring this information to everyone.

Capuano:

I have absolutely relished this conversation.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York will present the groundbreaking exhibition, “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism,” from February 25th through July 28th, 2024.  

For the latest UCI news, please visit our recently redesigned website, news.uci.edu. I’m Cara Capuano. Thank you for listening to our conversation, which we recorded in the studio of UCI’s ANTrepreneur Center. The UCI Podcast is a production of Strategic Communications and Public Affairs at the University of California, Irvine. Please subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.