The Art of Reading: “The Warmth of Other Suns”

Isabel Wilkerson’s book follows three individuals, representative of the six million Black Southerners who participated in the Great Migration to northern or western destinations. The Wall Street Journal’s review of this work states “Ms. Wilkerson does for the Great Migration what John Steinbeck did for the Okies in his fiction masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath.”

After a conversation about Warmth, take a docent-led tour of works in Mint Museum Uptown’s American Art, Modern + Contemporary, and Craft + Design collections to draw connections between this work and our art.

“I was taking a part of the South to see

If it could grow differently,

If it could bend in strange winds,

Respond to the warmth of other suns

And, perhaps, to bloom.” – Richard Wright, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (poem edited for effect)