In December 1973, acclaimed writer and future Pulitzer Prize winner Toni Morrison wrote a letter to her longtime friend James Baldwin.
Working as a senior editor with the book publisher Random House at the time, she wrote to the famed essayist to thank him for giving her a quote in support of her newly released novel “Sula” and to apologize for the book publisher’s decision not to purchase Baldwin’s novel, “If Beale Street Could Talk.”
“I can’t tell you how I love you for having written it,” Morrison wrote, stating that she would have loved nothing more than to become a “Beale Street” groupie in promoting it. Readers can feel the adoration and fondness the author held for Baldwin in the letter, which is now on display in the nation’s capital alongside a host of other works honoring Baldwin, his life and his community.
“This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance,” a new exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., named after the queer writer’s short story, opened to the public last week to coincide with his 100th birthday in August.
Inside the exhibit, visitors can take in an eclectic set — from correspondence between Baldwin and his contemporaries to portraits, photographs, literature, video projections and more.
Rhea L. Combs, the National Portrait Gallery’s director of curatorial affairs, wants visitors to the exhibit to view Baldwin not solely as a seminal figure but as someone who was also greatly influenced by the voices he surrounded himself with — voices that, for years, went unrecognized.
“Oftentimes portraiture is representational of an individual. Baked into that is sort of a hierarchy in terms of who gets their image on the wall,” said Combs, who curated the exhibit in consultation with Pulitzer Prize winner Hilton Als. “When you’re thinking about honoring James Baldwin, I wanted to do that in a way that is true to how I understood him through his writing, which was about community.”
In the exhibit, visitors can see images of the queer civil rights activists and creatives Baldwin called friends who impacted his life, including activist Bayard Rustin, playwright Lorraine Hansberry and singer Nina Simone. It also features contemporary art from Faith Ringgold, who received her first exhibition review from Baldwin; photographer Richard Avedon, whom Baldwin collaborated with for the 1964 book “Nothing Personal”; and others.
Creatives who didn’t know Baldwin personally but were inspired by his life and legacy are also featured in the exhibit. The late poets Marlon Riggs and Essex Hemphill were largely unheralded Black queer artists who drew inspiration from Baldwin and used it to guide their own work. They were important to feature in the exhibit as they represented a “passing of the baton” of queer resistance, Combs said.
“They used their art form to make sure they spoke truth to power,” she explained, referring to Riggs’ and Hemphill’s work to uplift and celebrate the lives of Black queer men. “They are reverberations of James Baldwin.”
All of these figures come together in the exhibit to provide visitors with a complete picture of the iconic writer’s life and the things he found important. “Community, care, chosen family. These were the things that I think about when considering the portrait of a person,” Combs continued.
“Those are the elements in which inspired me for this show.”
“This Morning, This Evening, So Soon” will be shown from July 12 through April 20, 2025.