Collection 1880s–1940s

510

Looking for Langston

Ongoing

MoMA

Isaac Julien. Looking for Langston. 1989. 16mm film transferred to high-definition video (black and white, sound), 46:29 min. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the artist. © Isaac Julien
  • MoMA, Floor 5, 510 The David Geffen Wing

Looking for Langston, a 1989 film by British artist and filmmaker Sir Isaac Julien, meditates on the life and legacy of African American writer and activist Langston Hughes. Hughes was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a movement of the 1920s and ’30s in which artists and intellectuals centered around New York’s Harlem neighborhood fostered new forms of Black cultural expression. Julien’s film layers archival footage from the period with fictional sequences of a community of queer men.

“Hughes is an icon, and also an emblem of the closet, a space that was enabling HIV infection, and AIDS, to become insurmountable in Black communities in America and England,” the artist has said. In Looking for Langston, Julien connects the historical repression of homosexuality to the cultural context of the late 1980s. Complemented by photographs, prints, and books, this installation explores how image-makers of different identities and backgrounds have shaped the representation of Black and queer life across time.

Organized by Antoinette D. Roberts, former Curatorial Assistant, and Caitlin Ryan, Assistant Curator, Department of Photography, with Rachel Remick, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography.

18 works online

Artists

Licensing

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research/circulating-film.

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].

Feedback

This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please send feedback to [email protected].