Van Vechten, Carl (1880–1964)
Carl Van Vechten (b. 17 June 1880, Cedar Rapids, Iowa; d. 21 December 1964, New York City) was an American writer who wrote about music,…
Carl Van Vechten (b. 17 June 1880, Cedar Rapids, Iowa; d. 21 December 1964, New York City) was an American writer who wrote about music,…
Historically, modern dance scholarship has followed the contours of the field as defined by John Martin, the revered dance critic for The New York Times,…
Magical on stage, elusive off stage, Janet Collins was an enigmatic and complex presence in twentieth-century dance. As the first full-time African American ballerina at…
Alvin Ailey counts among the most significant American choreographers of the second half of the twentieth century, and his company the Alvin Ailey American Dance…
A ballet inspired by a creation fable in Blaise Cendrars’s Anthologie nègre (1921), La Création du monde (The Creation of the World) was produced by…
During the years 1911–1917, Irene Foote Castle (1893–1969) and her husband Vernon Castle (1887–1918) explicitly marketed ragtime dancing as “modern” to their upper-class and, increasingly,…
In the 1920s and 1930s, Harlem became a major hub of New York City nightlife and a prolific space for African American artistic creation. It…
The jook house (also juke joint), an African American institution found mainly in semiurban areas in the Southern United States, is an important cultural phenomenon…
Born as Christopher Uchefuna Okeke in Anambra State, Nigeria in 1933, Uche Okeke is a founding father of Nigerian Modern Art. As one of the…
The Savoy Ballroom, Harlem’s largest and most famous ballroom during the Swing Era, was nicknamed ‘The Home of Happy Feet’. After it opened in 1926,…
Eleo Pomare was a dancer, choreographer, educator, and social activist who spent more than five decades contributing to the development of modern dance. As a…
The career of the English “creative” dancer, choreographer, teacher, and dance writer Penelope Spencer spanned the period between the World Wars. Spencer’s versatile training and…
Talley Beatty, whose career began in the mid-1930s and extended six decades, was a leading modern dance artist. He was a prolific choreographer, exquisite dancer,…
There are several features that distinguish African Hip-Hop music from the genre’s American origins. Principal targets of its social critique such as disenfranchisement and social…
Primitivism in modern art designates a range of practices and accompanying modes of thought that span the period from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century…