The Carnegie Museum of Art Presents the Photographs of Teenie Harris

Written by Shanique Macdonald Saturday, 29 October 2011 22:49

Pittsburgh, PA.- The Carnegie Museum of Art is proud to present "Teenie Harris, Photographer: An American Story" on view from October 29th through April 7th 2012. This groundbreaking exhibition will celebrate the artist/photographer whose work is considered one of the most complete portraits anywhere of 20th-century African American experience. Large-scale, themed photographic projections of nearly 1,000 of Teenie Harris's greatest images accompanied by an original jazz soundtrack will generate an immersive experience in the exhibition's opening gallery. Subsequent galleries will present a chronological display of these photographs at a conventional scale, and give visitor access to the more than 73,000 catalogued and digitized images in the museum's Teenie Harris Archive. The exhibition will offer an examination of Harris's working process and artistry, and audio commentary on the man and his work by the people who knew him. In addition, the photographs and many of these materials will be accessible on Carnegie Museum of Art's website.

During his 40-year career as freelance and staff photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation's most influential black newspapers, Teenie Harris (1908–1998) produced more than 80,000 images of Pittsburgh's African American community. The photographs, taken from the 1930s to the 1970s, capture a period of momentous change for black Americans. His subjects ranged from the everyday lives of ordinary people to visits by powerful and glamorous national figures to Pittsburgh, the nation's industrial center. From birthday celebrations to civil rights boycotts, the distinctive vision of Harris's photographs folds into the larger narrative of American history, art, and culture. The show has been organized by Carnegie Museum of Art staff, working with an advisory committee from Pittsburgh's African American community that provided direction for the exhibition's content, themes, and goals. Teenie Harris grew up in Pittsburgh's Hill District, a neighborhood once called "the crossroads of the world." A serious photographer from the age of 18, he started his professional photographic career in 1937 when he opened a studio and began to take on freelance assignments. In 1941, Harris was appointed staff photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier, the nation's preeminent black newsweekly. His images were disseminated nationally through the Courier, and played a key role in how African Americans visualized themselves.


Like the Scurlock Studio in Washington, DC, James Van Der Zee in New York, and P. H. Polk in Alabama, Harris depicted an innovative and thriving black urban community, in spite of the segregationist policies and attitudes of mid-century America. His images captured daily life in the Hill—weddings, funerals, family portraits, parades, church events, street scenes, graduations—as well as of the great men and women who visited the neighborhood, including Martin Luther King Jr., Paul Robeson, John F. Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt, Lena Horne, and Muhammad Ali. Some of the country's finest jazz musicians—Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Ahmad Jamal, Sarah Vaughan, and Duke Ellington—were photographed by Harris alongside bartenders, waitresses, and dancing crowds. The longevity of Harris's career offers an outlook on historic shifts that took place in the lives of African Americans everywhere. In the era of segregated baseball, for example, Harris photographed two legendary Negro League baseball teams, the Pittsburgh Crawfords (which Harris cofounded in the mid-1920s) and Homestead Grays. Later, when baseball's color barrier was broken, he photographed African American major league baseball players like Jackie Robinson and Roberto Clemente along with their teammates. The pride and optimism evident in Harris's photos of the Double V campaign from the World War II era (victory abroad, victory for racial equality at home), turned to growing moods of frustration and anger evident in images of militant protests in the late 1950s and 1960s. These photographs provide important insights to issues that are still pertinent today.


Nearly 1,000 of Harris's most striking and iconic photographs will be digitally projected as life-sized images in the opening gallery. The images, organized into seven sections—"Crossroads," "Gatherings," "Urban Landscapes," "Style," "At Home," "The Rise and Fall of the Crawford Grill," and "Words and Signs"—will be synchronized with an original jazz score produced by MCG Jazz, one of the nation's top organizations dedicated to the preservation, presentation, and promotion of jazz music. A second gallery will feature a chronological installation of small prints of the projected images that will include a referencing system for in-depth exploration of each photograph through a bank of computers and books also located in the gallery. In addition, the computers will provide access to the interactive website that has been created for the show. At the entrance to the third gallery, a mini exhibition of 12 fine-art-quality 16 x 20" prints selected by 12 experts will be accompanied by their personal analyses of the meaning, significance, and beauty of the chosen images. This gallery will also feature a large-scale map showing the places Harris lived, worked, and photographed and a multimedia presentation called "Artist at Work" that demonstrates Harris's technical skill and artistic vision, and shows how newspapers and publishers cropped and edited his work in order to tell a particular story. "Artist at Work" marries audio recordings of the stories and memories of Teenie Harris, as told by his family, friends, colleagues, and models, with a montage of projected images relating to their tales.

Carnegie Museum of Art offers a distinguished collection of contemporary art that includes film and video works. Other collections of note include works of American art from the late 19th century, French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, and European and American decorative arts from the late 17th century to the present. The Heinz Architectural Center, opened as part of the museum in 1993, is dedicated to the collection, study, and exhibition of architectural drawings and models. The Hall of Architecture contains the largest collection of plaster casts of architectural masterpieces in America and one of the three largest in the world. The marble Hall of Sculpture replicates the interior of the Parthenon. While most art museums founded at the turn of the century focused on collections of old masters, Andrew Carnegie envisioned a museum collection consisting of the “Old Masters of tomorrow.” In 1896, he initiated a series of exhibitions of contemporary art and proposed that the museum’s paintings collection be formed through purchases from this series. Carnegie, thereby, founded what is arguably the first museum of modern art in the United States. Early acquisitions of works by such artists as Winslow Homer, James McNeill Whistler, and Camille Pissarro laid the foundation for a collection that today is distinguished in American art from the mid-19th century to the present, in French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, and in significant late-20th-century works. Over the century, the museum has amplified its scope of interest to include European and American decorative arts from the late 17th century to the present. Architect-designed objects figure prominently among recent acquisitions and complement the Heinz Architectural Center. In addition, the museum’s collection includes photography, film and video,  Asian art (notably Japanese prints), and African art. In 1994, the museum completed a reinstallation of its pre-1945 American and European fine and decorative arts that combines them in a single chronological sequence. In 2003, the Scaife Galleries, home for many of the paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and decorative arts in the museum’s collection, reopened after a yearlong renovation. There is now a larger Works on Paper Gallery, and the contemporary art galleries incorporate decorative arts and works on paper along with paintings, sculpture, and film and video pieces. Some of the galleries now feature floor-to-ceiling, salon-style installations of the artwork. Resource areas and comfortable seating have also been integrated into the space. The Heinz Galleries are dedicated to the presentation of temporary changing exhibitions; they host three to five major exhibitions per year. In 2009, the Ailsa Mellon Bruce Galleries of decorative arts and design reopened after a complete renovation. The first major reinterpretation of the decorative arts collection in two decades, the installation traces the evolution of style and design in the Western world from the mid-18th century to the present. Visit the museum's website at ... http://web.cmoa.org

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