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In the winter of 1958, the writer James Baldwin was transforming his novel Giovanni’s Room into a play. The novel was published to great controversy two years earlier, for depicting tender relationships and desire between men. During a theater workshop, the show was not received well, but a Black woman in her late 20s defended the play. Later, Baldwin would say, “She talked to me with gentleness and generosity never to be forgotten. A small, shy, determined person, with that strength dictated by absolutely impersonal ambition: She was not trying to ‘make it’—she was trying to keep the faith.”
That woman was Lorraine Hansberry, a writer who, in 1959, would make history as the first Black American woman to have a play on Broadway with A Raisin in the Sun. Although the duo didn’t know each other during the workshop, they recognized across the room a queerness, a political vision and a restless creativity. This connection blossomed into a deep friendship, one that would fuel their respective careers and personal lives.
This form of Black, queer kinship is placed front and center in a new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery: “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance.” Running through April 20, 2025, the exhibition celebrates the ideas and life of Baldwin, a prolific 20th-century writer acclaimed for his essay collections (Notes of a Native Son, The Fire Next Time), novels (Go Tell It On the Mountain, If Beale Street Could Talk) and plays (The Amen Corner, Blues for Mister Charlie).
The exhibition is named after a short story by Baldwin, originally published in a 1960 issue of the Atlantic. The story’s speaker is a Black singer and performer originally from Alabama who moved to Paris and started a family. On the eve of moving back to the United States, he goes out to bars while wondering if he can (or should) reacclimate to American racism.
Like much of Baldwin’s writing, the short story probes the relative nature of identity: Can your sense of self change based on where you are, and who surrounds you? This potent question connects to the exhibition, curated by the National Portrait Gallery’s director of curatorial affairs Rhea L. Combs in consultation with the Pulitzer Prize-winning theater critic and writer Hilton Als. Combs and Als recontextualize Baldwin within a specifically queer group: his friends, other political figures of his time and contemporary artists whose work resonates with Baldwin’s.
Though Baldwin was open about his sexuality and relationships with men, he also didn’t subscribe to queer labels. When journalist Richard Goldstein asked Baldwin in 1984 about gay America, he responded, “I simply feel it’s a world that has little to do with me, with where I did my growing up. I was never at home in it.” Still, the catalog for this exhibition notes that it is “a reckoning of sorts” for Baldwin and other subjects, a reckoning that also “affirms their queer lives.”
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Combs first was inspired to create the display after seeing the 2019 exhibition “God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin” at David Zwirner Gallery in New York City. That exhibition was curated by Als, who (like Baldwin) is a gay Black writer situating contemporary art alongside personal histories. Als says that having an appreciation for Baldwin’s full personhood drove his creative choices in that exhibition.
“My intention at the Zwirner show was to keep him having a body, and having a vibrancy and life,” says Als. “Having this relationship to the museum dictated that there were certain strictures, but I was really adamant about Baldwin being alive and queer.”
Als first discovered Baldwin as a young teenager, when someone who knew Baldwin gave Als the essay “Notes of a Native Son.” In part because Als had a difficult relationship with his father, the essay startled him on both an emotional and literary level.
“It really was one of those transformative experiences,” Als says. The essay was about the difficulty of legacy. “I was so moved by it, that he just kind of was in my skin. By being in my skin like that, he was becoming part of my language. All a writer has, really, is experience and his love of reading. So it was my love of reading and reading him that contributed to my sense that language could be something very grand, and rhetorical and beautiful.”
Initially, Combs envisioned transferring much of the Zwirner exhibition into the National Portrait Gallery. However, her discussions with Als soon led the pair to think more broadly about Baldwin’s social circle. Within his lifetime, Baldwin was a witness and participant of the civil rights movement in the 1960s; he was also involved in the arts scene of Greenwich Village, and traveled and lived throughout Europe. All of these connections are featured in “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon.”
“We want to think about this expanse of what it means to be at the National Portrait Gallery,” says Combs, “to be able to fully understand the ways in which Baldwin had an opportunity to showcase his ideas, but where those ideas actually come from. And who else, whose voices was he also speaking with and for, that didn’t necessarily have the same platform.”
Women who formed friendships with Baldwin, including Nina Simone, Toni Morrison and Hansberry, are highlighted in the exhibition’s photography. Pictures of Baldwin interacting with these women throughout the 1960s and 1980s show him fondly speaking to them with a wide smile.
Some women were engaging with the same issues and artistry as Baldwin, but they often weren’t given the same level of fame within their lifetimes. The exhibition also notes that while Baldwin was relatively frank about his sexuality as a gay man, his women peers had to tread carefully about sharing their sexuality and queerness. The showcase features two 1957 issues of the lesbian periodical The Ladder: It was only in 1976, 11 years after Hansberry’s death, that The Ladder editor Barbara Grier publicly revealed that the writer had contributed letters to the publication.
Soyica Diggs Colbert, a scholar of African American studies and performing arts at Georgetown University and author of Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry, says the challenges women like Hansberry faced were numerous. Although Colbert stresses that Hansberry did describe herself as a lesbian, and that she wrote in pseudonyms for a variety of publications, not just queer ones, she sympathizes with Hansberry’s awareness to express her sexuality in different ways than Baldwin.
“Today in 2024, being a Black woman intellectual is still something that’s primarily illegible to the public,” says Colbert. “So at Hansberry’s time, for her to show up as someone in her 20s—as an intellectual, as a writer, as a playwright on Broadway, as a Black woman—was unprecedented. That doesn’t even account for her sexuality, it just accounts for the visible things that people ascribe to her identity when she walks in a room. And so it’s impossible that she did not feel this tension.”
Both Baldwin and Hansberry were dramatizing tragic figures in their narratives as a method for asking larger questions about America. They wanted their audiences “to understand what is foreclosed by way of these tragic circumstances that their protagonists find themselves in,” says Colbert. “What would it look like in a world where these possibilities weren’t foreclosed? That would be not only good for the individual protagonists, but good for the whole society, good for the whole culture, good for the larger nation.”
Because so many of the featured subjects are storytellers, Combs paid special attention to how this exhibition’s story unfolds. She wants to help disrupt the idea of a singular genius by showing that all historical figures work within a deep web of connections.
“The United States is really about this notion of individualism, manifest destiny. Even portraiture as an art form wants to bring forth the individual and hail them up as the all-knowing,” says Combs. But artists’ contributions are “based upon a constellation of ideas and values that help to shape and mold us. Many of the people to whom Baldwin found counsel were women, so it was critical for us that we gave them their notoriety and their moment in a celebration of him. Because if they were all alive, they would all be at the party.”
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Along with featuring Baldwin’s many close friends and confidants, Combs explores the lives of people inspired by Baldwin, including Texas Representative Barbara Jordan, author bell hooks, artists Marlon Riggs and Essex Hemphill and photographer Lyle Ashton Harris. In the exhibition catalog, Als notes that many of the featured artists died at a young age, whether because of cancer, like Lorraine Hansberry, or because of AIDS-related complications, like Riggs and Hemphill. Combs says that the inclusion of deceased artists among living artists like Harris and Glenn Ligon is intended as a hopeful celebration.
“When someone is no longer with us, someone is willing and able to pick up the baton,” she says. “Those individuals that are here, they’re continuing the legacy. Continuing to shine a light. And that was really important to us, not only to recognize the short lives that had outsized impact, but how that outsized impact continues to ripple.”
Als and Combs go even further as curators in disrupting what is considered a portrait. The exhibition shows archival materials, including the fingerprints of gay civil rights activist Bayard Rustin from his arrest in New York City in 1946 for allegedly “offering to commit a lewd or indecent act.” It also features abstract work, like Jack Whitten’s USA Oracle (Assassination of M.L. King), a painting depicting a chaotic swirl of colors and body parts, and Ligon’s Untitled (Hands/Stranger in the Village), which densely layers Baldwin’s words using silkscreen ink, coal dust and glue.
Combs says looking at the materials of Ligon’s work can help viewers understand the larger points he’s making about the country.
“There is a coal dust that is part of the materiality, it’s very delicate, but at the same time, it can leave a real impression,” says Combs. “That is, I think, a wonderful metaphor of Black experiences in America. They can be quite vulnerable, and tenuous, but they’re imbued within the fabric of America.”
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Since August 2, 2024, would have been Baldwin’s 100th birthday, the National Portrait Gallery is not the only museum celebrating Baldwin’s legacy this year. The National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) is offering its own programming, including a July 25 panel discussion of Baldwin’s work featuring playwrights Suzan-Lori Parks and Tarell Alvin McCraney, as well as NMAAHC museum specialist Tulani Salahu-Din.
“Baldwin always looked at the common denominator of our humanity,” says Salahu-Din. “He always encouraged a coalition of people based not on what he considered to be certain superficialities, but on that common human identity. I think that’s one thing that we can certainly take away from Baldwin. In these times, we have to build coalitions that include people of diverse sexuality, racial diversity, religious diversity. That is the approach that Baldwin really would have taken.”
Salahu-Din also highlights the fact that for Baldwin, it was “critical to understand one’s self, because for him, that tied to the nation, because individuals comprise the nation.”
Als echoes this statement, saying that part of what drew him to Baldwin’s writing was his ability to connect individual issues to societal ones.
“A larger issue at work in those pieces that I loved was how the personal married to the world,” says Als. “He had an amazing way of saying that the personal experience was valid, mostly in connection to the history of the universe. I just thought it was such an incredible kind of beauty, that he had devised a way to be rhetorical without being ideological.”
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Toward the end of Baldwin’s short story “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon,” the speaker ponders how he’ll be quickly forgotten by Paris after he leaves.
“After departure, only invisible things are left, perhaps the life of the world is held together by invisible chains of memory and loss and love,” Baldwin writes. “So many things, so many people, depart! and we can only repossess them in our minds. Perhaps this is what the old folks meant, what my mother and my father meant, when they counseled us to keep the faith.”
Just as Baldwin and his friends kept the faith in each other, today’s artists and thinkers are keeping faith in him. The National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition might be a way of making visible what otherwise would be the “invisible chains” of Baldwin’s legacy.
With new collections of his writing, cinematic adaptations of his work and events happening across Washington, D.C. in 2024, Baldwin has perhaps never before been more celebrated culturally. Yet Combs doesn’t take any of this celebration for granted, considering the fact that toward the end of his life, Baldwin wasn’t as societally revered.
“I feel like it’s been in the last decade, 15 years, that people are seeing him as this deity,” Combs says. “But before that, I mean, he died broke. He was kind of dismissed, and so I think this is really us giving him his flowers.”
“How lucky we are,” says Als, “that he’s not so alone anymore. That’s one of the great, beautiful gifts of his writing and his being.”