O Write My Name

Christopher Benincasa interviews curator Angela Sergonis about a new show at the — 50 photos of acclaimed African American artists — from Lena Horne to Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston to Dizzy Gillespie. In the 1920s, Carl Van Vechten, critic, novelist, and chronicler of the Harlem Renaissance, began photographing black writers, musicians, and artists — the result is the vivid portrait archive now on display at the museum.