Brightening the History of Harlem

Murrell herself knows something about identity and change. After graduating from Harvard Business School, in 1980, she got a job in finance, but it was art that captivated her, and she soon began graduate studies in art history. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia in 2014, a few years before “Posing Modernity” opened, and while she was working toward her dissertation she began to ask questions about Manet’s Laure. Other “unknown” Black women followed, including the mixed-race German-born aerialist Miss La La, muse to Degas. In “Posing Modernity,” Murrell was at her best—her freest as a thinker and a curator—when focussing on the nineteenth century; her imagination soared through all the erasures and elisions of the time and made something exciting and novel.