Howard Smith’s works on display in Madison, Wisconsin USA

Nordic Utopia? African Americans in the 20th Century - exhibition has traveled to Madison. It can be visited at the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin Aug 10–Nov 10, 2024.

Nordic Utopia? assembles drawings, paintings, photographs, textiles, film, music and dance to explore the ways in which travel impacted some African Americans’ visual and performance art. New scholarship chronicles the experiences of singers Josephine Baker and Anne Wiggins Brown; jazz tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon; dancer and choreographer Doug Crutchfield; painters Herbert Gentry, William Henry Johnson and Walter H. Williams; multimedia artist and designer Howard Smith and others. The objects on view offer insight into their lives, the social climates in which they worked and the reasons they relocated.

“Some artists left the United States on an intentional quest for refuge from racial prejudice and other social constraints. Others found creative freedom in Nordic countries that catapulted their artistic practice,” said exhibition co-curator Ethelene Whitmire a professor in the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Department of African American Studies.

Exhibition has been curated by Dr. Ethelene Whitmire, Professor, University of Wisconsin—Madison; with Leslie Anne Anderson, Chief Curator, National Nordic Museum.

The Chazen Museum of Art, Aug 10, 2024

The Observer, May 30, 2024

NewCityArt, Aug. 2, 2024