African-American art is a broad term describing visual art created by African Americans. The range of art they have created, and are continuing to create, over more than two centuries is as varied as the artists themselves. Some have drawn on cultural traditions in Africa, and other parts of the world where the Black diaspora is found, for inspiration. Others have found inspiration in traditional African-American plastic art forms, including basket weaving, pottery, quilting, woodcarving and painting, all of which are sometimes classified as "handicrafts" or "folk art".
Many have also been inspired by European traditions in art, as well as personal experience of life, work and studies there. Like their Western colleagues, many work in Realist, Modernist and Conceptual styles, and all the variations in between, including America's home-grown Abstract expressionist movement, an approach to art seen in the work of Howardena Pindell, McArthur Binion and Norman Lewis, among others.
Like their peers, African-American artists also work in an array of media, including painting, print-making, collage, assemblage, drawing, sculpture and more. Their themes are similarly varied, although many also address, or feel they must address, issues of American Blackness. A part of this media can include physical designs found within the home.
Once known as the "sculptor of horrors", Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller favored a mix of conceptual realism and symbolism, and took inspiration from ghost stories. Mentored by Henry Ossawa Tanner, critiqued by Auguste Rodin, and exhibited in the 1903 Salon, she recognized that a continued career relied on "meet[ing] requests for race-based work from the leading Black scholars, activists, and luminaries who controlled the commission pipeline". By accepting that reality, W. E. B. Du Bois became one of her patrons, and she became the first African-American woman recipient of a federal commission ... for progress-themed dioramas for Jamestown's tercentennial ... and, later, for the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation", but it all came at some cost.
Another extreme is illustrated by an artist like Emory Douglas, the former minister of culture for the Black Panther Party, whose art was consciously radical, and has since become iconic. "[C]redited with popularising the term 'pigs' for corrupt police officers", his best-known imagery was often harshly critical of the existing power structure, openly violent and, like all political iconography, intended to persuade.
Sculptor Edmonia Lewis, by contrast, financed her first trip to Europe in 1865 by selling sculptures of abolitionist John Brown and Robert Gould Shaw, the Union Colonel who led the enlisted black 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment during the Civil War. She would later incorporate issues of race more subtly, using modern themes and ancient symbols in Neoclassical sculpture to suggestive ends. In response to a bust Lewis had made of her, her patron Anna Quincey Waterston wrote admiringly of her: "Tis fitting that a daughter of the race / Whose chains are breaking should receive a gift / So rare as genius."
The grandchild of slaves, print artist and sculptor Elizabeth Catlett was also an activist. Although some of her art includes confrontational symbols from the Black Power movement, she is best known for her portrayals of African-American heroes — Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Harriet Tubman — and strong maternal women. Sculptor Augusta Savage's work was similarly uplifting. In a large commission for the 1939 New York World's Fair, Lift Every Voice and Sing, which is often described as the Black National Anthem, inspired a called Lift Every Voice and Sing, also known as The Harp as it depicted black singers as the strings of the instrument.
Richard Hunt, is a sculptor born on Chicago's South Side in 1935. A recurrent theme of his work is the integration and expression of African-American history and culture, despite his focus on his own freedom as an artist to work in an abstract mode or one referential or suggestive of his subjects. A descendant of enslaved people brought to this country through the port of Savannah, Georgia, Richard Hunt has singularly made the largest contribution to public art in the U.S.; more than 160 public sculpture commissions grace prominent locations in 24 states and Washington D.C. As a 19-year-old, Richard Hunt taught himself how to weld. Only two years later, he gained national recognition when the Museum of Modern Art acquired his sculpture, Arachne. Another Richard Hunt sculpture, Hero Construction, now stands as the centerpiece of The Art Institute of Chicago. Richard Hunt has held over 150 solo exhibitions and is represented in more than 100 public museums.
Painter Faith Ringgold, who is known for her politicized art, has been described as having a "gorgeous gut punch". Her The American People Series #20: Die which depicts a bloody clash between Cubist black and white figures, was hung opposite Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in the newly renovated MOMA in 2019, the better to start a conversation between the "savage force" of their respective compositions. Conceptual artist Fred Wilson focuses on other kinds of composition, "juxtaposing wildly anomalous items, such as a slave statue and a set of fine china". A 1999 MacArthur "genius grant" recipient, his work encourages "unpacking and upending assumptions about race and history surrounding each".
Narrative artists like Jacob Lawrence use history painting to tell a story in images, as his own Migration Series shows. The 60-panel epic depicts the relocation of a million African Americans to the industrialized North after World War II. As in the cases of Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald, history painting can also involve portraiture; in this instance, the official portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama, respectively.
Artists like Horace Pippen and Romare Bearden chose more ordinary subject matter, relying on contemporary life to inspire uncontroversial imagery. The influential Henry Tanner did, too, in paintings like The Banjo Lesson and the Thankful Poor although those paintings — like many of his landscapes and Biblical scenes — often seem illuminated from within. The first African-American to enroll in the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1880, Tanner studied with Realist painter Thomas Eakens. He went on to become the first African-American artist to earn international acclaim. He was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1910 and designated an honorary chevalier of the Order of the Legion of Honor in 1923.
Design can be used as a way to "facilitate cultural communication." The United States' complex history with slavery and its aftermath informs how many Black Americans choose to incorporate parts of Black culture into art and design. This is because many parts of Black American culture have been shaped by Western interactions with Africa, which has impacted the lived experiences of Black Americans for generations. This impact has been seen through the creation of art, as many art pieces like woodwork, pottery, and furniture have been used as a symbol of freedom for Black Americans during times of struggle for emancipation.
African-American art is influenced by traditional African culture and Western culture that was forced upon Black slaves. There can be tensions between these African and Western identities for African Americans, especially when African Americans let their heritage inform their design decisions. This is because there is also a complex relationship between the artwork Black designers create and the current Eurocentric standards that still exist within America's art and design fields. Historical assimilation impacts the creative process of including Black culture within design pieces. Sometimes, Black designers change their work to align with these Eurocentric standards to gain more recognition.
Early African-American art
Pre-colonial, Antebellum and Civil War eras
The earliest evidence of African-American art in the United States is the work of skilled craftsmen slaves from New England. Two categories of slave craft items survive from colonial America: articles that were created for personal use by slaves and articles created for public use. Examples from between the 17th century and the early 19th century include: small drums, quilts, wrought-iron figures, baskets, ceramic vessels, woodcuts, and gravestones.Patton, Sharon F. (1998), African-American Art, Oxford University Press.
Many of Africa's most skilled slave artisans were hired out by slave owners. With the consent of their masters, some slave artisans were also able to keep a small percentage of the wages earned in their spare time to save enough money to purchase their freedom, and that of their family members.Romare Bearden, Harry Henderson, A History of African-American Artists. From 1792 to the Present. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993.
The public works of art produced by slave craftsmen were an important contribution to the Colonial economy. In New England and the Mid-Atlantic colonies, slaves were apprenticed as goldsmiths, cabinetmakers, engravers, carvers, portrait painters, carpenters, masons and iron workers. The construction and decoration of the Janson House, built on the Hudson River in 1712, was the work of African-Americans. Many of the oldest buildings in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Georgia were built by craftsmen slaves.
Some colonial art may have been by enslaved artists, but because the works are not signed, cannot be positively identified as such. For instance, the Boston printer Thomas Fleet is known to have owned an enslaved woodcut artist named Peter Fleet, who is mentioned by Isaiah Thomas in his history of early American printing, and whose initials appear on a woodcut illustration for the 1743 pamphlet The Prodigal Daughter. It is not possible to identify exactly how many other woodcuts in John Fleet's many publications were cut by James Fleet.
In the mid-18th century, John Bush was a powder horn carver and soldier with the Massachusetts militia fighting with the British in the French and Indian War.USA Today. May 2005, Vol. 133 Issue 2720, pp. 48–52. 5p. Patrick H. Reason, Joshua Johnson, and Scipio Moorhead were among the earliest known portrait artists, from the period of 1773–1887. Patronage by some white families allowed for private tutoring in special cases. Many of these sponsoring whites were abolitionists. The artists received more encouragement and were better able to support themselves in cities, of which there were more in the North and border states.
Harriet Powers (1837–1910) was an African-American folk artist and quilt maker from rural Georgia, born into enslavement. Now nationally recognized for her quilts, she used traditional appliqué techniques to combine local legends, African symbolism, Bible stories, and natural phenomena on her quilts. In her storytelling quilts she critically reflects her complex experience of the post-slavery United States. Only two of her late quilts have survived: Bible Quilt 1886 and Bible Quilt 1898. Her quilts are considered among the finest examples of 19th-century Southern quilting.Hicks, Kyra E. (2009), This I Accomplish: Harriet Powers' Bible Quilt and Other Pieces.Harriet Powers, Early Women Masters. .