Neighborhood Watch: Sugar Hill is Sweet on Diverse Art

Once home to NAACP members such as W.E.B. Du Bois and the famed prodigies of the Harlem Renaissance, Sugar Hill, the neighborhood between West 145th and 155th streets, continues to thrive on synergistic forces of artistic vision and flux.

At The Museum of Art and Origins, a brownstone on West 162nd Street (between Amsterdam and Edgecombe avenues), Sugar Hill’s tradition of artistic community remains strong. George Preston—artist, art critic, professor, and Columbia graduate—began the Artist’s Studio. frequented by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, on the Lower East Side in 1959. Now uptown, Preston offers tours of the museum by appointment and provides viewers with access to literature on the objects.

Rooms on the first floor are dedicated to West African art and Gabun art, in which Preston allows recent tribal statues to share space with more ancient pieces of the same carving style. The second floor exhibits modern and contemporary international art. The forthcoming show “Me and Some of My Friends from the Cedar Tavern” will feature Bob Thomson’s portrait of Allen Ginsberg, San Francisco Cityscapes by actor Robert De Niro’s father, Robert De Niro Sr., and work by Preston himself.

Preston’s brownstone also transforms into a bed and breakfast, with recent lodgers including the curator of Pompeii. He tailors the room’s art to the visitor’s taste, which to him does not signify pampering but rather “progress that only the elite can provide.”

In the eyes of Preston, Sugar Hill’s art scene carries its artistic tradition into the present. Characterizing the neighborhood as both “more [and] less like it used to be,” he notes a positive increase in the streets’ ethnic diversity.

His friend Sherman Edmiston, owner of the local Essie Green Gallery, argues that diversity is what strengthens a collector’s desire for art that withstands intense critical review. Essie Green, the gallery that first housed American Artist Romare Bearden’s work, specializes in exhibiting the art of Black masters.

The current exhibit, “A New Beginning: Benny Andrews Etchings and Aquatints” is inspired by a parallel between the Black artist’s struggle to gain exposure and President Barack Obama’s recent election. Thus, the show, according to Edmiston, “deals with the ends of civil rights struggles.” Furthering the inclusive theme, Charles Alston’s renowned Harlem Renaissance expressionist paintings share wall space with the untrained, outsider work of Clementine Hunter.

Fueled by an intrepid past, the Harlem art scene’s swelling artist population proves to be a tinderbox for emerging ingenuity.