Kadir Nelson's painting for the cover of this week's issue celebrates the Schomburg Research Center, in Harlem. He says he wanted to create "a stylistic montage as an homage to the great Harlem Renaissance painters: Aaron Douglas, William H. Johnson, Norman Lewis, Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett, Archibald Motley, and Palmer Hayden.” Also on Nelson's mind were artists and performers like the Nicholas Brothers, Billie Holiday, and Duke Ellington; the activist Malcolm X; and writers such as James Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston.
Mina Kaneko is a former member of The New Yorker’s editorial staff.
Françoise Mouly has been the art editor at The New Yorker since 1993.
Goings On
What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week, online, in N.Y.C., and beyond. Paid subscribers also receive book picks.
Letter from Montgomery
Bryan Stevenson Reclaims the Monument, in the Heart of the Deep South
The civil-rights attorney has created a museum, a memorial, and, now, a sculpture park, indicting the city of Montgomery—a former capital of the domestic slave trade and the cradle of the Confederacy.
By Doreen St. Félix