Harlem, New York

A second print depicting Harlem, likely a variant or companion work to the other composition of the same title, this woodblock reflects Sekino's sustained engagement with New York's most culturally distinctive neighborhood during his American residencies. Harlem in the mid-twentieth century was a center of African American cultural life, and Sekino's prints from this context — made by a Japanese artist working in an adopted country — represent a form of cross-cultural witness. This version may emphasize different aspects of the neighborhood: a street corner, a building facade, figures in conversation, or the compressed vertical energy of the brownstone-lined blocks. As with the companion print, Sekino would have approached the subject with the observational habits of meisho-e landscape tradition, finding in the American urban environment the same attention to place and atmosphere that governed his Japanese landscapes. Multiple treatments of a single location suggest deep engagement rather than passing documentation.