A Utopian Space for Black Artists, Reimagined at MoMA
Just Above Midtown, an incubator of some of the most important Black avant-garde art of the 1970s and ’80s, is the subject of a new exhibition.
By Aruna D’Souza, 2022
Some of David Hammons’s most important early shows took place here. So did the first appearance of Lorraine O’Grady ’s celebrated performance piece, “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire.” It was where Senga Nengudi debuted her sculptures of stretched-out pantyhose weighted with sand, and where Howardena Pindell first showed her abstract “dot” paintings, composed of paper chads. Musicians like Greg Tate, Lawrence (Butch) Morris and Vernon Reid jammed here. Stevie Wonder showed up at the opening. And Miles Davis, whose tailor was also in the building, would pop in from time to time.
“The energy was just oozing out the door,” Nengudi recalled of Just Above Midtown Gallery, known as JAM. “It was like a magnet would pull people in because there was always something going on.” JAM was founded by the artist and social activist Linda Goode Bryant in 1974 at 50 West 57th Street. Over the next 12 years and in three locations, it would become an incubator for some of the most important Black avant-garde artists of the 20th century.
More than just an art gallery, the artist Lorraine O’Grady has written, it was “a place as much as a world, a place where people ate together, discussed and argued, drank and smoked together, collaborated on work, slept together, pushed each other to go further, and partied ’til the cows came home.”
The predominantly white art world paid it little heed. The Museum of Modern Art, in particular, Goode Bryant said in a recent conversation, “was only four blocks away, and yet a universe away.” Now JAM is the subject of a major exhibition at that very institution, opening on Oct. 9. The question for Goode Bryant and the exhibition’s curator, Thomas (T.) Jean Lax, is how to capture its spirit — what Lax called the “unbridled sense of opportunity JAM offered to come by, try some stuff out, and, importantly, to fail.”
“I want to test that proposition,” Goode Bryant said. “Can JAM be JAM at MoMA?”( … )