Touching upon every aspect of artistic creativity, the Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro movement – was an African American cultural movement embracing the literary, musical, theatrical and visual arts, that largely took place from the 1920s with the Great Migration, through the mid- to late 1930s and early 1940s, fading away with the Great Depression. The recent exhibition The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, organised by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met), in New York, from 25 February to 28 July 2024, explored this significant moment in early twentieth-century African American art and culture and offers a timely opportunity for re-examining the works of its long-overlooked artists. In the field of visual arts, African American women artists featured in the Met show included sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (1887–1968), painter Laura Wheeler Waring (1887–1948), sculptor Augusta Savage (1892–1962), painter Loïs Mailou Jones (1905- 1998) and sculptor and printmaker Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012).

The art of the Harlem Renaissance was not defined by a unified stylistic standard amongst the figures, but the work by those women artists commonly associated with the movement found echoes in the prescriptions of theorist and philosopher Alain Locke in his anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925). In this manifesto, A. Locke urged African American artists to produce work that reflected self-pride and to use the aesthetic designs of African art as cultural references and guidance for their work. Because Black people had been caricatured and stereotyped in American visual culture and literature, African American artists were encouraged to engage in portrayals of Black people and lives that would counteract demeaning and negative imagery.

As suggested by the Met exhibition title, the Harlem Renaissance was not confined to the neighbourhood of Harlem in New York, but spread across and beyond the United States, in cities nationwide and overseas. For African Americans artists, writers and musicians, France represented a place to fulfil their artistic dreams and a refuge from racial discrimination in the United States. Many women artists of the Harlem Renaissance, such as Selma Hortense Burke (1900–1995) and Nancy Elizabeth Prophet (1890–1960), expanded their experience and knowledge in Paris, often studying in fine art schools with renowned professors, visiting art collections or exhibitions that impacted their work, exhibiting in salons and art galleries, mingling with people from everywhere, or receiving the support and advice of Black artist expatriates living in the capital.