Locating Blackness in John Sloan’s Neighborhood Scene

PDF: Custer, Locating Blackness

The following essay contains language that readers may
find disturbing or otherwise challenging to encounter. 

The painting Movies, Five Cents by the Ashcan School artist John Sloan (1871–1951) depicts a crowded movie theater in New York City in 1907 (fig. 1). While audience members watch an embrace, latecomers jostle to find seats, and a woman at center turns away from the film to meet the viewer’s gaze. The interracial character of the crowd is notable: while most of the audience is white, a smiling Black woman in the back row also watches the film. While a part of the crowd, she is also positioned as “other” to it, raising questions about the place of Black New Yorkers in Sloan’s artistic practice and his daily urban life.

City scenes were a significant part of Sloan’s art in the first decade after he relocated to New York from Philadelphia in 1904.¹ Indeed, the artist’s correspondence and diary provide evidence of his urban observations and their connection to his art.² Regarding Movies, Five Cents, for instance, he wrote: “Walked out in the evening alone. Went into a 5c show of Kinematograph pictures on 6th Avenue. Think it might be a good thing to paint” (June 29, 1907). And the next day: “Made a late afternoon start on the interior of Moving Picture show” (June 30, 1907).³ At that time, Sloan lived and worked at 165 West Twenty-Third Street, less than a block from Sixth Avenue, which, between Twenty-Third and Fifty-Seventh Streets, was considered the main axis of the Tenderloin district—a neighborhood known for entertainment and nightlife (fig. 2).⁴ This area was also home to a significant Black population, which made up 18.6 percent of the district in 1900—the largest concentration of people of African descent in the city that year.⁵ Sloan’s inclusion of the Black woman and the setting of a “cheap amusement” signals the strong possibility that the movie theater was in this vicinity.⁶

Art historians have emphasized Sloan’s engagement with popular entertainment and his portrayal of urban visuality in Movies, Five Cents.⁷ They have also identified it as a notable exception to the predominance of white or white-presenting New Yorkers in his oeuvre.⁸ More broadly, art historians have observed the lack of Black subjects in the art of the Ashcan School; Alexis Boylan and Martin Berger draw out the artists’ emphasis on whiteness and omissions of interracial contact, respectively.⁹ The focus on whiteness—coupled with the fact that these artists were purported to paint New York as it was, deploying gritty realism and loose brushwork to indicate the directness with which they observed everyday life—has created a narrative about the art of the Ashcan School that has, in some instances, articulated the ways the movement upheld the hegemony of whiteness, and in others, sidestepped issues of race.¹⁰ Yet works like Movies, Five Cents, along with Sloan’s proximity to the Tenderloin, suggest that there is more to be said about the interactions of these white artists with Black residents and the structures of race, space, and power in early twentieth-century New York that this artistic movement reinscribed.

Building on my previous scholarship, this essay charts Sloan’s interactions with Black New Yorkers in his artistic practice and everyday urban life.¹¹ I demonstrate that the relative lack of Black New Yorkers in Sloan’s pictorial world does not reflect the complete vision of who Sloan observed but rather whom he chose to paint. Sloan’s art therefore visually reinforced the increasing segregation and displacement of Black residents in the Tenderloin, which was changing demographically while he lived there. While the shared urban spaces of the Tenderloin were sites of racial mixing, his paintings—though formed of paint that had been literally mixed—generally were not. This omission perpetuated tropes from nineteenth-century genre painting that instantiated Black disenfranchisement and hover like a specter over Ashcan art more broadly.¹²

I demonstrate that Black residents were, perhaps unexpectedly, at the center of Sloan’s paintings like Sixth Avenue and Thirtieth Street, New York City (1907; fig. 3) depending on how we look: they lived on his block, circulated in the streetscape, and provided domestic labor. By attending to Sloan’s archive, the historical urban setting, and the specificities of place in Sloan’s depictions, alternative narratives emerge.

Characterizing the Tenderloin

In 1904 Sloan and his wife, Dolly (née Anna “Dolly” Wall), settled in their fifth-floor apartment, which doubled as his studio, on West Twenty-Third Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. During the next seven years, Sloan painted the people and sites nearby, including Madison Square Park to the east and the Tenderloin to the north.¹³ Art historians have commented on the Tenderloin as a critical locale in Sloan’s body of work, yet they have hewed to the artist’s visual engagement with the district’s nightlife and not addressed its interracial character.¹⁴ In works such as Sixth Avenue and Thirtieth Street, New York City and The Haymarket, Sixth Avenue (1907; fig. 4), for instance, locations and conspicuous clothing reference the district and its sex work.¹⁵ The Black community and the racial dynamics of the area are not addressed—despite Sloan’s attention to other specificities of place.

By 1904 there was an established Black community near Sloan’s apartment, particularly to the north and west. Photographs taken in 1903 and 1904 by the Byron Company, a commercial photography studio, convey the visible presence of Black urbanites nearby (fig. 5). Mapping 1910 census data shows that the site in Sixth Avenue and Thirtieth Street, New York City and The Haymarket, Sixth Avenue, as well as the possible location of Movies, Five Cents, are proximate to this community (fig. 6).¹⁶ Yet, the white and white-presenting residents who also lived and worked in the Tenderloin dominate Sloan’s scenes. This population included first- and second-generation Irish and Italian immigrants—groups whose racial status was changing in these years.¹⁷ Sloan may have felt an affinity toward the Irish community in particular; he asserted his own Irish heritage, and Dolly was also of Irish ancestry.¹⁸

When the Sloans lived on West Twenty-Third Street, the demographics of the Tenderloin were changing. The region still housed 8.8 percent of the city’s Black population in 1910, down from 18.3 percent in 1900, as Black residents increasingly moved to Harlem, San Juan Hill (the area just west of present-day Lincoln Center) in Manhattan, and Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn.¹⁹ As Jessica Larson describes in her essay in this roundtable, these shifts were due to a combination of Black displacement, spurred by the construction of Pennsylvania Station—for which buildings between Thirty-First to Thirty-Third Street and Seventh and Ninth Avenues were destroyed—and new arrivals of Black people from the southern United States and the Caribbean, who settled in other areas. Some Black residents also fled the area on account of racial violence in 1900, when the Black community endured beatings and murders at the hands of white citizens with no legal ramifications after a white undercover police officer died as a result of stab wounds inflicted by a Black man.²⁰ The district was marked by lingering racial tensions.

Within the neighborhood, Black residents were generally clustered on specific blocks (see fig. 6). According to activist Mary White Ovington, Black New Yorkers “were not scattered uniformly throughout the island, but were placed in selected corners.” These “corners” could sometimes be rows of two to eight tenements or certain blocks. Thirty-Seventh Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, for example, was “largely given over to the colored and is rough and noisy,” Ovington wrote in 1911.²¹ The lower Thirties around Seventh Avenue were also home to Black residents.²² (These were the blocks destroyed to build Pennsylvania Station and thus are blank on the map.) This clustering was perpetuated by discriminatory real-estate practices that limited where Black residents could secure housing.²³

Moreover, the copresence of sex work and the Black residential and business community in the Tenderloin was not incidental. As historian Timothy Gilfoyle explains, the growth of theaters, hotels, and department stores in the 1860s and 1870s drove wealthy New Yorkers away uptown. Landlords then either subdivided their brownstone houses and rented them to working-class tenants or leased the buildings to agents who rented them to sex workers who could afford the high costs.²⁴ The Tenderloin became a less desirable area in which to live, which meant that Black residents—who again faced limited options—could secure housing there. Sloan would have also witnessed the efforts of Progressive Era reformers to eradicate what they referred to as “vice districts” and what historian Kevin Mumford terms “interzones,” or Black-and-white sex districts.²⁵ Motivated in part by racist ideologies and fears of miscegenation, antivice committees and police targeted establishments that catered to Black and white patrons, or “black and tan” saloons, as well as interracial vice and sex.²⁶

Although segregation had “taken hold” of the city, the shared urban spaces of the Tenderloin were still places of encounter for people of different racial backgrounds.²⁷ Movies, Five Cents references this quality and could be seen as underscoring the interracial sexual relations present in the Tenderloin. While difficult to discern, the film on the screen in the painting could be a “kissing film,” a genre of early cinema. Sloan may have also considered a film such as What Happened in the Tunnel (1903), which alluded to an interracial kiss.²⁸ The parallelism between the hypothetical on the screen and the reality of the Tenderloin places pressure on Sloan’s work, compelling it to speak to the area both as a site of racial mixing and of separation.

Seeing Versus Picturing

At the encouragement of his friend and mentor Robert Henri (1865–1929), Sloan derived artistic inspiration from walking the city.²⁹ As the works discussed thus far indicate, the Tenderloin was very much included in this scope. Records indicate that Sloan observed his fellow city dwellers of African descent and that his general omission of them in his art was accompanied by negative attitudes toward them—as if he did not deem them worthy of inclusion in his city scenes.

Sloan’s depiction of urban incidents often took the form of “memory pictures,” in which he would see an incident and paint it from memory in his studio.³⁰ He repeatedly returned to sites near his house to prepare for his paintings, studying them carefully and relying on his firsthand impressions. The day before he started to paint Sixth Avenue and Thirtieth Street, New York City, for instance, Sloan recorded in his diary that he had gone for a walk on Sixth Avenue (June 12–13, 1907).³¹ To take another example, the day after starting work on The Haymarket, Sixth Avenue, Sloan recorded that he “took a walk up Sixth Ave. to have another look at the Haymarket” (September 7, 1907).³²

Sloan documented seeing Black New Yorkers on his walks—circumstances that otherwise often fed into his subject matter—writing about walking along Seventh Avenue, which cut through the heart of the Black Tenderloin in the blocks of the Twenties and Thirties (May 12, 1908, and May 23, 1909). His comments attest to his familiarity with the area as well as his own denigrating views: “In the afternoon out, walked down 7th Avenue,” he wrote, “Saw a poor, young drunken woman who was evidently the property of a n****r. He was shoving and dragging her along, speaking fiercely to her. [A] n****r neighborhood, saloons of the lowest sort” (November 27, 1906). Although he does not give a cross street, the mention of Seventh Avenue suggests he was referring to the Tenderloin. Sloan used a racist slur to refer not only to the person he passed on Seventh Avenue but also to the “neighborhood,” by which he almost certainly means the area within the Tenderloin where Black residents found spaces to live and to conduct business.

As I have shown elsewhere, Sloan also saw Black neighbors across the shared open-air space of the tenement block. But while works such as Pigeons (1910; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and Three A.M. (1909; Philadelphia Museum of Art) revel in the activities of his white or white-presenting neighbors, he did not paint his Black neighbors and wrote disparagingly about them. On March 29, 1908, he noted that he saw “a ‘n****r’ dressing in a little dirty dingy hall room across back of us the dingy white of the clothing and bed etc. and the n****r invisible in the gloom mixing in color with the dark” (March 29, 1908).³³

According to the 1910 census, the western half of Sloan’s block, bounded by West Twenty-Third Street, West Twenty-Fourth Street, and Seventh Avenue, was predominantly inhabited by white or white-presenting first- or second-generation immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and Germany.³⁴ In the building at 160 West Twenty-Fourth Street, however, lived twenty individuals of African descent. The demographics of this block—with this building occupied exclusively by Black residents and the surrounding residences listed with an overwhelming majority of white residents—points to the segregation by building if not by neighborhood at this time and suggests the spatial limits this placed on Black New Yorkers.

The slurs in Sloan’s diary reveal not only his racial bias but also exude a painterly quality—“mixing in color”—as if he were considering this sight as a subject for a painting but decided against it. This is one of several instances in which Sloan seems to consider depicting a Black urbanite and, to my knowledge, does not execute corresponding scenes. For example, he writes, “Saw n****r wench watching cats today. Good subject” (April 20, 1906). Similarly, Sloan describes seeing a Black caregiver in Madison Square Park—an area just east of the Tenderloin: “Colored nurse girl with pretty white baby in carriage. The nurse has a young tough white bench acquaintance. The breeding of the baby is in sharp contrast” (April 14, 1907). He painted Nursemaids, Madison Square (1907, Sheldon Museum of Art) around the same time, populating it with white or white-presenting figures.

Sloan’s language presents a complicated modeling of these would-be paintings. With his words, he draws out the contrasts of black and white, which suggest his dislike or distrust of mixing: in the sighting from his window, the “white of the clothing and bed” and the neighbor “mixing in color with the dark”; in the park scene, the “sharp contrast” between the Black nurse and white baby. His language sounds painterly, but it maintains binaries on the spectrum of value (light to dark). And yet, he records these spaces of racial mixing. These quotations reflect the simultaneous realities of both interracial mixing and separation, as they were experienced by Sloan, especially in the Tenderloin.

Black New Yorkers were also integral to his life and artistic practice. In spring 1908, the Sloans hired William Bell to clean the studio. Sloan noted that “a colored man, sent by Mrs. Glackens at Mrs. Sloan’s request . . . scrubbed the whole floor.” Bell returned at least two other times that spring (April 30, May 1, and May 4, 1908). In 1909 the couple hired another helping hand; Sloan wrote that he was “waiting around while the little colored girl cleans up the place” (June 17, 1909). In 1910, Sloan recorded that he went out, “leaving Lily, the darky girl, to wield the duster” (January 20, 1910), and in the fall of that year, he recorded that he was “up early and helped Edward Allen, colored, 127 W. 31st Street who started in to apply the Kalsomine to the studio walls” (October 6, 1910).³⁵ According to this entry, Allen lived nearby—in the Tenderloin—and aided Sloan in literally whitewashing his studio. Recognizing that these workers circulated in and around the Sloans’ home places them not on the outskirts of his urban life, as his art might make it seem, but rather at its center.

Sloan was not the only Ashcan artist to live or work near an area with a significant Black population or to hire Black assistants. In this suite of essays, Larson discusses how the studio locations of George Bellows (1882–1925) and Robert Henri—one block from San Juan Hill—informed their artistic practice. William Glackens (1870–1938), whose wife, Edith, connected Bell with the Sloans, lived in Greenwich Village at 3 Washington Square North from 1904 to 1908. Previously, Glackens rented a studio at 26 West Twenty-Fourth Street, which he shared with George Luks (1867–1933) in 1897 (one block northeast of where Sloan would move in 1904), and he also worked out of the Holbein Studio Complex at 139 West Fifty-Fifth Street in 1896 and again in 1898, before he rented a studio at 13 West Thirtieth Street in 1899.³⁶

These artists lived in areas—the Tenderloin, San Juan Hill, and Greenwich Village—that had historically been, or still were, home to Black populations.³⁷ When seen through this lens, the Ashcan artists’ work could be viewed as reinforcing the logic of eminent domain and displacement in New York, particularly of minoritized communities, such as the razing of Seneca Village for the creation of Central Park or the aforementioned demolition of Black-occupied tenements for the building of Pennsylvania Station.³⁸

Picturing Black Residents

When Sloan does depict Black people in the city, they are sidelined in various ways, visually echoing the increasing segregation of New York and continuing practices common to nineteenth-century genre painting that reinforced Black disenfranchisement.

To return to Movies, Five Cents, two young women in the audience capture the viewer’s attention: the white woman at center who locks eyes with the viewer and the Black woman in the back row, whose white shirt stands out amid the dark theater. Both play to Sloan’s interest in portraying the new freedoms young women experienced in the city during this time. The Black woman appears to be enjoying independence in a public urban space, seemingly unaccompanied—rare for women of any race. Yet, she is rendered more stiffly than the white figures: her face is in profile, while those of some of the white figures are angled, emphasizing the way their bodies occupy space. Her back is bolt upright in the chair with her arm pressed unnaturally backward, toward the seat. Although this may convey alertness, it could also visually recreate Sloan’s potential unease with her as part of his urban scene. Despite this awkward posture, she smiles widely. Her grin conveys pleasure at the film but also seems disproportionate compared to the reactions of the white audience members, none of whom show the same degree of delight. This detail is highly specific—while the white figures’ lips are at times indiscernible, Sloan articulated the mouth of the Black woman clearly. The same is true in Fishing for Lafayettes (1908, private collection), another rare depiction of a Black urbanite by Sloan.³⁹. The dark unmodulated skin and the red lips of the singular Black figures in these paintings recall racialized stereotypes.

Sloan would have been familiar with such tropes. They were prevalent in advertisements and other forms of visual culture, and he himself used such dehumanizing caricatures in his illustrations for the popular press.⁴⁰ Not only does the Black figure in Movies, Five Cents recall features of harmful caricatures, such as the wide grin; it also perpetuates visual formulas from genre painting that othered and stereotyped Black Americans.⁴¹ As art historian Elizabeth Johns argues, antebellum genre scenes focused on white figures. Black figures, when shown, were typically set apart—often portrayed in relation to larger (white) society, either through their role in paintings as a foil for humor, in service of the white figures’ entertainment, or through their placement in a different space or separate social sphere. Further, there was a sameness to the Black figures in nineteenth-century genre painting: they were generally shown as dark, dressed as farm workers, and cheerful or childlike.⁴²

Sloan picks up on these conventions. The single Black figure present in Movies, Five Cents is set apart from the white crowd. In contrast to the white patrons, who are shown in various postures and ages, she is not further individualized. The same formulations are present in Sixth Avenue and Thirtieth Street, New York City, where white city dwellers of varying economic statuses and occupations populate the scene. From the disheveled woman who crosses the street to the possible sex workers in their plumed hats, to the  men who watch them at the far right of the scene, the white citizenry is differentiated. The Black woman in Movies, Five Cents is not afforded the same distinction.

Sloan’s record makes clear that although he saw and interacted with Black residents in New York, he largely omitted them from his pictorial world. His pictures visually accelerate the segregation and displacement that was happening in the Tenderloin, isolating the area’s Black residents or pushing them out of the frame. Given all of this, however, it is worth asking ourselves as art historians: whom do we see when we look at his paintings?

In Sixth Avenue and Thirtieth Street, New York City, the diagonals of the elevated train and the storefronts converge on a racially ambiguous figure wearing a cap who walks toward the viewer (fig. 7). At the back of the crowd, in the middle ground of the picture, the figure is centered compositionally and takes on a quiet power. Could this have been someone like Edward Allen, walking home after painting Sloan’s studio walls? Or is this figure a holding place, acknowledging Sloan’s inability to flesh out Black figures present in his midst? While it is true that Sloan’s oeuvre is overwhelmingly white, paintings like Movies, Five Cents and the lens of urban history prompt us to see a bigger picture.

Cite this article: Lee Ann Custer, “Locating Blackness in John Sloan’s Neighborhood Scene,” in “Blackness, the Ashcan School, and Modern American Art,” edited by Jordana Moore Saggese and Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, In the Round, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 11, no. 1 (Spring 2025), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.19804.

Notes

I thank the guest editors, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw and Jordana Moore Saggese, who also organized the session “Blackness and the Ashcan School” at the College Art Association’s annual conference in March 2022, from which this roundtable emerged. I am grateful to Anne Cross, Christine Garnier, Margarita Karasoulas, and Dina Murokh for their feedback. At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Kathleen Foster, Sophia Meyers, and Emily Friedman made materials accessible; at the Delaware Art Museum, Heather Campbell Coyle and Rachael DiEleuterio shared expertise and archival resources; and at Vanderbilt University, Alyssa Sklar aided with GIS mapping.

About the Author(s): Lee Ann Custer is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Vanderbilt University.