Between Acts 1935

Curator: Archibald Motley’s “Between Acts,” painted in 1935, presents an intimate, albeit staged, interior scene rendered in oil. Editor: The immediate impression is of tension—a performative stillness punctured by a slightly unsettling voyeurism. It’s as if we've walked in on a private, coded moment. Curator: Motley masterfully manipulates the gaze through a series of framing devices: a mirror reflecting one woman preening, another figure smoking in the foreground, and the man with the top hat framed in the doorway. Note the deliberate use of pinks and reds dominating the canvas. Editor: And the costuming. Those details reveal so much. Is the man meant to be read as some kind of wealthy 'sugar daddy'? The almost cartoonish rendition plays into caricatures of that era. Meanwhile, the stark nudity alongside these hyper-theatrical garments suggests a space where roles are deliberately adopted and shed, complicating gender roles. Curator: The circular forms reappear through out this composition—in the carpet pattern, in the framed artwork behind the seated figure, echoed again in the curves of the mirror and even the chair leg, and they create visual harmony—but to what end? Do they unite these three actors or separate them, isolating each in their performance? Editor: Well, isn’t it also speaking to the complexities of representing Black intimacy in the 1930s? The title "Between Acts" emphasizes the in-between spaces, the moments outside of societal expectations and projections onto Black bodies—perhaps a radical vulnerability allowed only amongst themselves, interrupted, we can assume, by that menacing white gaze. Curator: The interplay of light is fascinating. Notice how the stark white light illuminates the dressing table but doesn't touch the faces. I mean the focus on backs, literally, but figuratively too. Editor: Exactly. We're never allowed access to genuine expression, it all remains shrouded in layers of performance—social, economic, gendered, racial. But the erotic charge within these frames destabilizes and resists fixed meanings. Curator: This examination has shown me just how successfully Motley balances a meticulous arrangement of forms with nuanced ideas of visibility and disguise. Editor: Indeed. "Between Acts" provides a powerful commentary on identity and representation in a deeply racialized society, made visible through those brilliant semiotic signals of the era.