Jazz and American Art Select Fridays, 7:30 pm, 2019

Jazz and American Art

Select Fridays, 7:30 pm
2019

Free events Tours
A vibrant painting depicts a bustling nighttime street scene of an African American community in an urban setting. A glowing street lamp casts a blue hue over the scene, in which a diverse group of musicians play brass instruments and tambourines, people dance, and others converse. A tall man with exaggerated features stands on a pedestal that reads "Jesus Saves," playing a trumpet. To the right, a woman in a green dress and red stilettos walks a small white dog past an elderly man with a cane. In the background, buildings with lighted windows reveal more onlookers, including a market storefront with meat hanging in the window, a house with a front porch where a woman and a child observe the scene, and an apartment building with residents peering out.
A vibrant painting depicts a bustling nighttime street scene of an African American community in an urban setting. A glowing street lamp casts a blue hue over the scene, in which a diverse group of musicians play brass instruments and tambourines, people dance, and others converse. A tall man with exaggerated features stands on a pedestal that reads "Jesus Saves," playing a trumpet. To the right, a woman in a green dress and red stilettos walks a small white dog past an elderly man with a cane. In the background, buildings with lighted windows reveal more onlookers, including a market storefront with meat hanging in the window, a house with a front porch where a woman and a child observe the scene, and an apartment building with residents peering out.

Archibald John Motley, Jr., Gettin’ Religion, 1948. Oil on linen, 32 × 39 7/16 in. (81.3 × 100.2 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase Josephine N. Hopper Bequest, by exchange 2016.15. © Valerie Gerrard Browne

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Floor 7

Jazz has long been celebrated as a uniquely American art style. Emerging from Black communities who migrated to the major cities following the rise and expansion of Jim Crow laws in the Deep South, jazz is known for intermingling Black culture and improvisation. Taking inspiration from the Whitney’s current exhibition Jason Moran, this thematic tour will trace jazz's relationship to the visual arts through key pieces from the Whitney's collection, including works by Archibald John Motley, Jr., Norman Lewis, Florine Stettheimer, and others.

October 11

November 1

December 6

January 3

Ayanna Dozier is an artist, lecturer, curator, and PhD Candidate at McGill University. Her dissertation, Mnemonic Aberrations, examines the formal and narrative aesthetics in Black feminist experimental short films in the United Kingdom and the United States. Her writings as a cultural theorist can be found in Cléo, Artexte, and Another Gaze. She is the author of the forthcoming 33 1/3 book on Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope. Dozier is currently a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney and on staff in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University.  

Free with Museum admission.

On the Hour

A 30-second online art project:
Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

Learn more about this project

Learn more at whitney.org/artport

On the Hour projects can contain motion and sound. To respect your accessibility settings autoplay is disabled.