HARYOU (Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited): State-Supported Art in the Interior Colony, c. 1962–1965

Abstract A social institution for the Black “interior colony,” the antipoverty organization HARYOU (Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited) originated in contradiction. Established with US federal funds yet maintaining a critique of American coloniality, HARYOU filtered state forms of suppression and citizenship norms through its anticolonial project. Alongside social service offerings like job training and housing assistance, the organization offered a suite of art and cultural programs, including fine arts, dance, and design. The art that emerged from these programs fleshes out the paradoxes that constitute the organization’s foundation. On the one hand, HARYOU—as an anticolonial project—presented art as a form of never-ending decolonization without the inevitable limits imposed by the realization of statehood. Yet, materially, HARYOU fulfilled its federal patron’s objectives. It kept Harlem quiet in the summers after the uprising of 1964, a pacification its art was key to realizing. Ultimately, HARYOU’s art isolates the problematic of control embedded in the promise of art as a force of decolonization.