MADISON, WI.- Nordic Utopia? assembles more than 60 drawings, paintings, photographs, textiles, film, music and dance to explore how travel impacted some African Americans’ visual and performance art. New scholarship chronicles the experiences of singers Josephine Baker and Anne Wiggins Brown; jazz tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon; dancer and choreographer Doug Crutchfield; painters Herbert Gentry, William Henry Johnson and Walter H. Williams; multimedia artist and designer Howard Smith and others. The objects on view offer insight into their lives, the social climates in which they worked and the reasons they relocated.

The exhibition draws from several private and public collections across the United States and Nordic countries including the National Gallery of Art and Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.; the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park; Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen.

Several images in the exhibition are on loan from Danish photographer Kirsten Malone, who started documenting the Denmark jazz scene in the 1960s. Among them are photographs of Dexter Gordon, who lived in Denmark from 1962-1976; Babs Gonzales, a New Jersey native who split his time between Denmark and Sweden; and Leonard “Skip” Malone, an author and journalist who served as the Black Panther Party’s primary contact in Denmark.

The exhibition also features several works by Howard Smith, who first traveled to Finland for a U.S.-sponsored pro-capitalism cultural festival. Eager to escape racism at home, Smith found community in Finland. The New Jersey-born artist later settled there, where he worked in drawing, painting, silkscreen, textile and paper collage. Vibrant florals, birds and landscapes featured prominently in his works, nine of which are included in Nordic Utopia?

Works by William Henry Johnson, who moved to Scandinavia for love, demonstrate his developed affinity for primitivism and folk art that would impact his painting upon his return to New York in 1938. Abstract paintings by expressionist artist Herbert Gentry reveal inspiration from Copenhagen’s dynamic jazz scene.

“Some artists left the United States on an intentional quest for refuge from prejudice and other social constraints. Others found creative freedom in Nordic countries that catapulted their artistic practice.” — Ethelene Whitmire, exhibition co-curator and professor, Department of African American Studies, University of Wisconsin–Madison

“The stories of African American creatives, journalists and scholars are told through iconic and rarely seen examples of their work held in public and private collections. These objects are brought into a transmedial dialogue with each other that conveys lively cultural exchange.” — Leslie Anne Anderson, chief curator, National Nordic Museum

Curators: Nordic Utopia? African Americans in the 20th Century is co-curated by Ethelene Whitmire, a professor in the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Department of African American Studies, and Leslie Anne Anderson, chief curator at the National Nordic Museum.

Whitmire was a Fulbright scholar and a visiting professor at the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Transnational American Studies in 2016-2017. She has received additional fellowships from the American-Scandinavian Foundation and the Lois Roth Endowment.

Anderson has been an American-Scandinavian Foundation fellow and a Fulbright scholar at the University of Copenhagen. She has organized over 20 exhibitions and has received the international Association of Art Museum Curators Award for Excellence in Exhibition and the Utah Museums Association Award for Excellence.