Harold Jackman, a socialite, model and patron of Black art, also taught social studies in New York City public schools for 30 years. As a child, he moved from London to New York City, where he was a frequent habitue of Harlem’s legendary soirees and began a lifelong friendship with the writer Countee Cullen. Carl Van Vechten, via Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library/James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection

The 1934 painting “Aspects of Negro Life” by Aaron Douglas, who has been called “the father of Black American art” and who was a leading painter during the Harlem Renaissance. He founded the art department at Fisk University in Nashville, a historically Black university. The piece is featured in the Metropolitan Museum’s “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” exhibit. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; Karsten Moran for The New York Times

The photographer James Van Der Zee in a self portrait taken in 1918. One of the most prolific documentarians of life in Harlem during the 1920s and ’30s, he “brought to life the optimism of the Harlem Renaissance,” Arthur Lubow wrote in The New York Times. James Van Der Zee

The Vaudeville performer Josephine Baker in a 1929 portrait by George Hoyningen-Heune. Her life spanned French music-hall stardom and American civil rights. A French resistance fighter, she basked in a freedom in Europe that she said she did not enjoy in the United States, where she later refused to perform for segregated audiences. George Hoyningen-Huene Estate Archives

The painter Ernest Crichlow often imbued his work with politics, expressing outrage and reflecting social injustices and shifting social realities. For example, the lithograph “Lovers” (1938) depicts a Ku Klux Klansman sexually assaulting a Black woman in her bedroom. Joseph Schwart/Corbis Historical, via Getty Images