Exhibition - Richmond Barthe: A New Day Is Coming

Curated with Isaac Julien

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is proud to present Richmond Barthé: A New Day Is Coming, a solo exhibition of sixteen sculptures by the Harlem Renaissance master Richmond Barthé (1901–1989) curated with renowned artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien (b.1960). The exhibition will survey the most productive decades of Barthé’s career, from 1929 to 1966, with an emphasis on the works of the 1930s and 1940s that established him as a foremost sculptor of his era. A New Day Is Coming also debuts a new film by Julien, which he describes as an “archival meditation” on Barthé and his work composed of historical documentary footage discovered during research for Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die) (2022), an immersive, five-screen film installation commissioned by the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.

A quintessential artist of the Harlem Renaissance, Barthé created a pioneering body of sculpture that elevates the Black subject. Much of Barthé’s oeuvre reflects his penchant for allegory and an embrace of classical realism that rendered him a stylistic outlier of his generation. He consistently sought to convey a universal sense of heroism reflective of the African diaspora through his sculpture, producing a refined body of bust-length portraits and full-length figures portraying a variety of individuals, including historical luminaries, archetypal, religious, and mythological subjects, and contemporary celebrities from the dance and theater worlds. While the Black male figure was a prevailing focus of Barthé’s practice, a consideration of his larger oeuvre reveals a career-long investment in depicting subjects of both genders with authority and empathy. Often working from memory, Barthé used his superior technical ability to imbue his sculptures with a sense of movement and emotional interiority, affectingly capturing the spiritual essence of his subjects. A New Day Is Coming will feature several of the artist’s most celebrated sculptures, such as Feral Benga (1935), which portrays Parisian cabaret dancer François “Feral” Benga; Julius (c.1940), a portrait of Julius Perkins, Jr., a child actor and musician active in Harlem; Stevedore (1937) a heroic representation of the working everyman; Black Madonna (1961), an iconographic interpretation of the Holy Mother as a Black woman; and The Negro Looks Ahead (1944), a symbolic rendition of Black fortitude.