Awarded the Melchers-Gray award in 2024, N.Y.S. keeps its focus entirely on a mostly-still cutting board. One pair of hands cleans, prepares, rearranges a bowl of water, a piece of bread, a rag… Johnson’s exploration of domestic objects and maintenance accents are paired with voiceover selections from The New Negro or Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, a 1925 collection of essays edited by Alain Locke. These excerpts cross-examine the Harlem Renaissance’s cultural, spiritual, artistic, and social breakthroughs—grounded in the artist’s images of domestic work and care. Is there a line between research and lineage? Between domestic and academic? 100 years after the its publication, the questions brought forth by Locke’s work, and by the Harlem Renaissance as a movement, still remain potent and necessary.

N.Y.S. Transcript:

Excerpts from The New Negro; Voices of the Harlem Renaissance

Not all art is in a field of pure art values; there is poetry of sturdy social protest, and fiction of calm, dispassionate social analysis.

But reason and realism have cured us of sentimentality.

Instead of the wail and appeal, there is challenge and indictment.

Satire is just beneath the surface of our latest prose, and tonic irony has come into our poetic wills. These are good medicines for the common mind.

For us, they are necessary antidotes against social poison. Their influence means that at least for us, the worst symptoms of social distemper are passing, and so the social promise of our recent art is as great as the artistic.

It has brought with it, first of all, that wholesome, welcome virtue of finding beauty in oneself.

The younger generation can no longer be twitted as cultural non-descripts and accused of being out of love with their own nativity.

Gradually too, under some spiritualizing reaction, the brands and wounds of social persecution are becoming the proud stigmata of spiritual immunity and moral victory.

Already enough progress has been made in this direction so that it is no longer true that the Negro mind is too engulfed in its own social dilemmas, or too depressed to attain the full horizons of self- and social-criticism.

Indeed, by the evidence and promise of the cultured few, we are at least spiritually free, and offered through art an emancipating vision to America.

But it is a presumption to speak further, for those who in the selections of their work in the succeeding sections, speak so adequately for themselves.