Laura Wheeler Waring’s Girl in Pink Dress commanded my attention as soon as I walked into the room at the Met where she was displayed. In a space full of portraits and busts—a room of black faces—hers immediately stood out. Warm and reflective, the gaze of the titular girl is turned away from the perspective of the viewer. Still, there’s something in her upright posture, in the firm set fingers on the wooden stool beneath her, that betrays her awareness that she’s being observed. She’s certainly dressed to be seen. A spray of pink flowers cascades over her brown shoulder. Her hair is delicately, elegantly coiffed. She doesn’t shrink under our observation. Her expression is not one of a girl surveilled. She’s at ease in her finery, at ease being regarded.
Girl in Pink Dress is one of several of Waring’s paintings that were featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent exhibition, “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism,” which ran from February through July of this year. The exhibition is the second of its kind at the Met and can be read as a sort of corrective to the first: the 1969 exhibition “Harlem on My Mind,” which included photographs by the legendary James Van Der Zee but didn’t feature a single painting or sculpture by a black American artist. “Harlem on My Mind” was met with near universal censure by the black artists it claimed to represent, who picketed outside the museum with signs that read “Harlem on Whose Mind?”.
