SOURCE: "Three Artists in Melvin B. Tolson's Harlem Gallery," in Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 18, No. 3, Fall, 1984, pp. 122-27.

In the following essay, Hansell analyzes the roles of the three artists in Tolson's Harlem Gallery.

The first and final chapters of Melvin B. Tolson's Harlem Gallery, "Alpha" and "Omega," serve many purposes, the most important of which is to introduce or recapitulate aesthetic principles exemplified and developed throughout the poem. My summary here of the crucial chapters is designed to serve as the introduction to a study of three characters, John Laugart, Hideho Heights, and Mister Starks, each of whom is an artist and contributes substantially to the dramatic embodiment of the aesthetic principles underlying the volume.

Beginning my study of three major characters with the discursive, ode-like chapters seems appropriate also because Tolson's poem opens with several chapters that focus on subjects, race and art in particular...