On the Record: Black Creators and the Jazz Age

Exhibition organized by Harry Ransom Center graduate research assistants sheds light on black creators from the collections whose work exemplifies the spirit and history of jazz.

The music of saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker, photographs of jazz and swing singer Billie Holiday and saxophonist Dexter Gordon, a jazz-inspired essay by Langston Hughes, and a novel by writer Claude McKay are some of the works spotlighted in a display organized for Black History Month 2023.

We connected the dots between several disparate collections and brought together materials whose relationships are often hard to document in descriptive language or hierarchical order, which in turn makes discovering those relationships hard. This is especially true when we are focusing on Black creators in the Ransom Center’s collections.
—KAYLEIGH VOSS

Focused on the creative output of Black performers, the display showcases the cultural influence of jazz across art forms and the improvisational nature of the creative process, pulling materials from many different collections housed at the Center.

Kayleigh Voss, one of the organizers, says, “We hope that the display is an example of a critical (in both senses of the word) kind of archival research. We connected the dots between several disparate collections and brought together materials whose relationships are often hard to document in descriptive language or hierarchical order, which in turn makes discovering those relationships hard. This is especially true when we are focusing on Black creators in the Ransom Center’s collections.”

Indeed, the organizers were themselves inspired by jazz as they put together the display. In their introductory statement, they say, “Like research, jazz is both an individual art form as well as a collaborative process. It is iterative; it requires improvisation. Researchers and archival staff must work together to make the lives and experiences of people of color in the archive more legible and available for research.”

Organized by Melissa Aslo de la Torre, Maggie Mitts, Adrienne Sockwell, Kayleigh Voss, and Courtney Welu, “On the Record: Black Creators and the Jazz Age” is displayed on the second floor of the Ransom Center, just outside the Reading and Viewing Room through March 17, 2023.