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Zora Neale Hurston

National Portrait Gallery

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Object Details

Artist
Carl Van Vechten, 17 Jun 1880 - 21 Dec 1964
Sitter
Zora Neale Hurston, 1891 - 28 Jan 1960
Exhibition Label
Zora Neale Hurston was a writer and anthropologist whose novels and essays revealed the vital ethnic culture of southern African Americans. Raised in the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida, Hurston moved to New York City to study with Franz Boas and became a striking, stylish figure of the Harlem Renaissance. A charismatic raconteur, Hurston was brutally honest in writing and in person. In Mules and Men (1935), she captured the rich voices and mythos of the African American oral storytelling tradition. In Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), her heroine learns independence the hard way and concisely captures the modernist ethos of the self: "You gotta go there to know there." In her essays Hurston analyzed the aesthetics of spirituals, sermon s, juke joints, and African American vernacular English. Alice Walker’s rediscovery of Hurston in the early 1980s—after four decades of neglect—remains one of the great comeback stories in American literary history.
Credit Line
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
1935 (printed 1983)
Object number
NPG.83.188.24
Restrictions & Rights
Usage conditions apply
Copyright
1935 negative © Carl Van Vechten Trust Gravure and compilation ©The Eakins Press Foundation
Type
Photograph
Medium
Photogravure
Dimensions
Image: 22.6 × 15 cm (8 7/8 × 5 7/8")
Sheet: 55.8 × 35.6 cm (21 15/16 × 14")
Mat: 61 × 40.7 cm (24 × 16")
See more items in
National Portrait Gallery Collection
National Portrait Gallery
Topic
Costume\Jewelry\Necklace
Interior
Costume\Headgear\Hat
Costume\Dress Accessory\Belt
Zora Neale Hurston: Female
Zora Neale Hurston: Literature\Writer\Novelist
Zora Neale Hurston: Humanities and Social Sciences\Folklorist
Portrait
Record ID
npg_NPG.83.188.24
Usage of Metadata (Object Detail Text)
Usage conditions apply
GUID (Link to Original Record)
http://n2t.net/ark:/65665/sm4d9dfd216-bc9a-427f-aeff-9d1d2711ad70
There are restrictions for re-using this image. For more information, visit the Smithsonian's Terms of Use page .
International media Interoperability Framework
IIIF provides researchers rich metadata and media viewing options for comparison of works across cultural heritage collections. Visit the IIIF page to learn more.
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