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.
