Visual History of Black Creative Spaces by Alex Harsley
“From the Victoria to the Village: Alex Harsley’s Visual History of Black Creative Spaces”
This retrospective by Alex Harsley features portraits of famous Black Americans including luminaries such as John Coltrane, Shirley Chisholm, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sun Ra, as well as unknown children and adults in Harlem and Manhattan in general.
Perhaps the most important thoroughfare in Harlem is 125th Street, and one of the most legendary locales on this street is the Apollo Theater. Historic, iconic, a touchstone for entertainment and intrinsically linked to Harlem and the American Black community, the Apollo has experienced ups and downs over time, but in recent years it has been a showcase for performing arts in Manhattan.
And now the Apollo has an additional renovated space that is straddling a balance between the arts and Harlem’s growing stature as a tourist attraction and economic engine. The Victoria Theater at the Apollo is a multi-use arts and entertainment center, merged into a luxurious hotel. Is this a wise use of space or odd bedfellows?
The Apollo has been well known for Amateur Night and launching the careers of several musicians and performers, from Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn to James Brown and Luther Vandross, Sammy Davis Jr. and D’Angelo and Gladys Knight and others. Singers, dancers, musicians spanning various genres, have made their way to the Apollo stage and roared to popularity. The Apollo has also had its share of financial woes and has been resuscitated. Countless tourists have stood in front of it and taken selfies.
It seems more than fitting that another older theater on 125th Street has been revived and merged into the Apollo brand, but it is built into and around a contemporary hotel. It’s both intriguing and jarring, in my opinion. We saw this up close when we attended a photography exhibition staged inside the Victoria.
We saw an early springtime retrospective of photographer Alex Harsley’s decades of work, including many fascinating portraits of African-American musicians, performers, and Harlem dignitaries. “From the Victoria to the Village: Alex Harsley’s Visual History of Black Creative Spaces” was a fantastic display of photographs by the lively octogenarian known for running the 4th Street Photo Gallery and the nonprofit Minority Photographers organization. Harsley’s work in recent years has also been shown at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn and other New York City spaces, and his exhibition at the Victoria was a fitting tribute not only to his wide-ranging work but also an indelible homage to the Apollo and Harlem.
But in order to get to the floor with the photographs, we had to go through part of the hotel, the Renaissance New York Harlem Hotel, with its chic Victoria Restaurant and Bar. Upscale (and with prices that reflected that), it was a bit unexpected for this native New Yorker. The Victoria Apollo is also featuring music and theatrical productions, staged in two smallish theater spaces, as well as the arts exhibition space.
This mix of trendy hotel rooms and a restaurant with arts and entertainment is not new, but it does cause one to ponder the direction of arts, of nonprofit groups side by side with for profit entities, and also the direction of Harlem itself. Is this inevitable or a curiosity? Will purists be offended and everyone else understanding? The Apollo Theater is alive and well, and it is also evolving.
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