Frank Stewart learned young how to fail often with his camera.

A painter could spend days on a canvas only to realize the result was a “monstrosity,” the acclaimed photographer and artist said during a conversation with New York University Professor of Performance Studies Fred Moten ’84 at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research’s Hiphop Archive last week.

"In terms of representation and volume, we have to work on both fronts," says Henry Louis Gates, Jr., director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University and board member of the Whitney Museum of Art. "The Whitney is never going to have only black art in it or the Met. For American culture to be represented, it must be integrated."

Kasseem Dean, known in the music world as Swizz Beats, was used to seeing Gordon Parks’ photographs in meetings with business partners and at the homes of friends who were not African American. It was far more unusual to see the artwork in front of the people Parks represented.

CAMBRIDGE — Nigerian playwright and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka's collection of African traditional art includes bold, expressive masks, vessels, and figures — carved in wood, cast in bronze, sometimes adorned with beads or feathers. We don't know who made them. We do know how they were made.

For photographer Dawoud Bey, activism and art have long been linked. Bey, whose portraits of Harlem form the centerpiece of the exhibit "Harlem: Found Ways‚" now at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art, first connected with his chosen visual medium through a protest.

Through July 15, Harvard's Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art analyzes the history and changes in a historic neighborhood in "Harlem: Found Ways.‚" Anchored by two photo series by Dawoud Bey, created 40 years apart, the exhibit highlights the gentrification that's changing Harlem's identity as a famed black culture capital.