CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/29/2023

The power of Black presence in 'Just Above Midtown'

Featured spreads are from MoMA's superb document, Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces—the first major excavation of JAM, Linda Goode Bryant's 1974–86 gallery and "laboratory for experimentation" centered around Black artists. To be celebrated with a panel talk Monday, January 30, at Artbook @ MoMA PS1, this historic volume is filled with artworks, documentary photographs, archival documents, ephemera, essential timelines, essays, an interview between Linda Goode Bryant and Thelma Golden and statements by the artists, volunteers, collectors and cultural collaborators who made JAM an NYC landmark. In her interview with Golden, Goode Bryant sums it up: "Every day, I'm bowled over by the resourcefulness, imagination and creativity of Black folk. And I've always just wanted to be around that, to be part of that, to support that. There's so much that we're faced with that can cause us to doubt ourselves or to think we don't exist except as the flip side of a black-and-white coin. And I just go, 'No, look at our beauty and amazingness. How can you even doubt that?' I feel that these days—and I'm ancient now, so it could be generational—there's a notion that Black exists in the absence of white, and that's bullshit. Black exists in the presence of Blackness. We exist—what we are, who we are, our power—in our presence, not in the absence of white folks."