Harlem Renaissance identity was built on seeking African origins over Western art

Evidence

For this purpose, we need to go back to the beginning of the twentieth century and look at the 1920s as a founding moment of African-American culture. This was the era of the Harlem Renaissance, when for the first time in its recent history (the migration of the blacks from the South to the North dates back to the 1910s), the black ghetto went through a period of unprecedented enthusiasm in African-American art. The constitution of a strictly African-American visual identity was therefore determined by its inscription at the heart of an “autonomous” cultural territory. This identity was based on a search for African origins and a will to favor the latter to the detriment of prevailing Western artistic practices. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2877