About
Opened in the fall of 2014 and rededicated in the fall of 2025, The Alain Locke Gallery of African & African American Art at the Hutchins Center features contemporary and historical exhibitions of African and African American art, archival materials, and historic objects. It is the only art institution at Harvard dedicated to the art of the African Diaspora.
The Locke Gallery includes 2,300 square feet of exhibition space in a single ground-level space. The gallery is fully accessible for visitors using wheelchairs and other mobility devices.
Alain Locke
Alain LeRoy Locke (1885–1954), the “dean of the Harlem Renaissance,” was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, descended from a prominent family of notable Free Black Philadelphians. His father Pliny died when “Roy” Locke was only eight years old, leaving his mother Mary to guide him through childhood and adolescence. She instilled in him a powerful sense of self-confidence about his intellectual abilities, a necessary antidote during the Nadir of American race relations. That self-confidence also proved invaluable in his personal life, as a gay Black man in a sexually and racially restrictive society.
After graduating (with ease) from Philadelphia’s prestigious Central High School, he entered Harvard in 1904 and immediately found a spiritual home. Locke was recognized for his intellectual and expressive gifts, winning numerous plaudits and awards, including the prestigious Bowdoin Prize for his essay on the 19th century English poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson. He graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa a year early, in 1907.
After Harvard, Locke became the first African American Rhodes scholar, eventually finding a place at Hertford College, after several other, more prominent Oxford colleges rejected him on account of his race. His time at Oxford was initially more difficult, socially, than at Harvard, in part because of the social exclusion of the other American Rhodes scholars. Locke gravitated instead to a cohort of colonial scholars of color at Oxford. He founded the African Union Club and the Cosmopolitan Club, both intended to further cross-national friendships and explore the connections between African and African American culture, a goal that would become a lifetime’s work.
On returning from Oxford and following a short spell in Berlin, Locke briefly traveled through the American South with Booker T. Washington, made his home in Washington, DC, and joined the Howard University faculty in 1912, to eventually form the most prestigious department of philosophy at an historically African American institution. Locke received his doctorate in Philosophy from Harvard in 1918—becoming the first African American to do so.
The peak of Locke’s cultural influence came in the 1920s with the birth of the Harlem Renaissance, and his role as “a catalyst,” in the words of his biographer Jeffery C. Stewart, for “a revolution in thinking called the New Negro.” In March 1925 he edited a special issue of the Survey Graphic on the New Negro, which he then turned into his groundbreaking collection of literature, essays, illustrations, spirituals, art, and bibliographies, The New Negro: An Interpretation of Negro Life. A “paean to a new Black masculinity,” as Stewart writes, the Survey Graphic’s “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro” issue and the stunning anthology which immediately followed reflected a “‘new psychology’” of Black “‘self-determination,’” “transnational mobility,” youthful “spiritual nationalism,” and a sexual, social, and racial fluidity all centered in Harlem. Locke defied the pervasive stereotypical imagery that characterized Blackness as ugly, debased and threatening, and, instead, in the words of Stewart, “demanded the right of African Americans to beauty,” an aesthetic ideal he cultivated as the first Black art historian. Yet, by the early 1930s, as the Depression compounded economic crises for African Americans already suffering Jim Crow systemic discrimination, Locke’s vision of what David Levering Lewis famously characterized as “civil rights by copyright” seemed a relic of a conciliatory past. In a marked shift away from the aesthetic he had championed in the Harlem Renaissance, Locke would come to advocate for the more direct protest offered by Black social realism. For Locke, who now positioned himself foremost as a literary critic, art needed to both reflect the highest artistic standards and voice Black social protest.
Locke’s promotion and celebration of African and African American art, including the bequest of his papers and collection of African art to Howard University in 1955, was perhaps his most enduring legacy. He died aged 68 in New York City. In the words of scholar Mary Ann Calo, “Locke defined the possibilities and parameters of African American art. (Alain Locke Collection of African Art).
Sources:
Alain Locke Collection of African Art, Howard University, Washington, DC. https://www.doaks.org/resources/cultural-philanthropy/alain-locke-collection-of-african-art
Harris, Leonard. "Locke, Alain Leroy." Oxford African American Studies Center. 31 May. 2013; Accessed 18 Sep. 2025. https://oxfordaasc.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195301731.001.0001/acref-9780195301731-e-34551
Patterson, Martha H. and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds., The New Negro: A History in Documents, 1887–1937. Princeton University Press, 2025.
Cécile Fromont
- Faculty Director, Alain Locke Gallery of African & African American Art
- Professor of History of Art and Architecture
Hutchins Center Executive Committee
Cécile Fromont is an art historian specializing on the visual, material, and religious cultures of Africa, Latin America, and Europe in the early modern period (1500-1800). Her scholarship sheds light on the cross-cultural ebbs and flows that unfolded during this period across and around the Atlantic Ocean. Her research and writing center on African expressive, spiritual, and material cultures and their ramifications in Latin America and Europe, demonstrating how the often violent, but vital connections between the three continents gave contours to the early modern world and continue to shape our own times.
In current projects, she investigates the nature and material manifestations of political and spiritual power in the era of chattel slavery, the aesthetic entanglements that the Atlantic slave trade created and sustained between Europe and Africa, and the conditions of visibility and invisibility of colonialism and racialized slavery in France’s public monuments and collections from the seventeenth century to today.
She is the author of several award-winning books, including The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo (2014) and Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola (2022). The latter appeared alongside two digital-humanities publications (find them here and here). Co-authorship and editorship are central to her field-building scholarly practice. She has edited, co-edited and co-authored several essays and volumes, including the book Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition and, with Esther Chadwick, a special issue of the journal Art History on the theme of the Vast Atlantic.
Her work also unfolds at the intersection of art and scholarship. Recent projects in this realm include Debris of History, Matters of Memory a collaboration with Gloria Cabral and Sammy Baloji at the 2023 Venice Architectural Biennial.
Beyond academia, she collaborates internationally with museums and other public-facing institutions on publications, exhibitions, and programming aimed at broad audiences. She lends her expertise to news stories and media productions in venues such as Netflix, NPR, PBS, Arte, the New York Times, and Le Monde.
Born and raised in Martinique, her ancestors came to the island from Africa, South Asia, and Burgundy. She graduated from Sciences-Po Paris before receiving her AM and PhD from Harvard.
The Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard is the preeminent research center in the field of African, African American, and Afro-Latin American studies. It supports research across the humanities and social sciences on the history and culture of people of African descent the world over and provides multiple platforms for collaboration and the ongoing exchange of ideas. Located in the heart of Harvard Square, the Hutchins Center sponsors visiting fellowships, art exhibitions, publications, multidisciplinary research projects, art and music archives, and other initiatives. Working in collaboration with other Harvard entities as well as universities and programs around the world, the Hutchins Center is committed to expanding awareness and understanding of this vital field in the academy and beyond.