WAfrican-American art is a broad term describing visual art created by Americans who also identify as Black. 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, 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."
WAshley's Sack is a mid-1800s cloth sack featuring an embroidered text that recounts the slave sale of a nine-year-old girl named Ashley and the parting gift of the sack by her mother, Rose. The sack is on display at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C. Rose filled the sack with a dress, braid of her hair, pecans, and "my love always". The gift was likely passed down to Ashley's granddaughter, Ruth (Jones) Middleton, who embroidered their story on to the sack in 1921.
WBlack Art: In the Absence of Light is an 2021 American documentary film, directed and produced by Sam Pollard. The film follows various Black American artists and their contributions to the art world.
WBlack Futures is an American anthology of Black art, writing, and other creative work, edited by writer Jenna Wortham and curator Kimberly Drew. Writer Teju Cole, singer Solange Knowles and activist Alicia Garza, who cofounded Black Lives Matter, are among the book's more than 100 contributors. The 544-page collection was published in 2020, receiving strongly favorable reviews.
WBlack Titan, is a public artwork by American artist John Spaulding, located on the grounds of the Indianapolis Art Center, which is in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States.
WFuneral Procession is the name of a painting by Ellis Wilson, which went from obscurity to notoriety in 1986, when it was featured heavily in the episode "The Auction" of TV series The Cosby Show's second season. In the episode, Mrs. Huxtable wins the painting at an auction and pays $11,000 for it. She states that the painting was made by her "great-uncle Ellis". She said it hung in her grandmother's house and it was sold when her grandmother got sick and needed the extra money for medical bills. At the end of the episode, Dr. Huxtable hangs the painting over the family's living room mantle, where it would stay for the remainder of the eight-season series.
WGreat America is a 1994 acrylic-and-collage-on-canvas painting by American contemporary artist and professor Kerry James Marshall.
WHiawatha and Minnehaha are 1868 sculptures by Edmonia Lewis. They are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on view in gallery 759.
WPortrait of Phillis Wheatley is a lost painting used as the frontispiece for poet Phillis Wheatley's poetry collection Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, first published in 1773. Wheatley was the United States' first professional African American woman poet and the first African-American woman whose writings were published. She is also the third woman in the United States, regardless of ethnicity, to have her written work published. Copies of the engraving reside in the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library of the Yale University Library, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
WPost-black art is a category of contemporary African American art. It is a paradoxical genre of art where race and racism are intertwined in a way that rejects their interaction. I.e., it is art about the black experience that attempts to dispel the notion that race matters. It uses enigmatic themes wherein black can substitute for white. Some suggest the term is attributable to the 1995 book The End of Blackness by Debra Dickerson.
WRumors of War is a series of artworks by Kehinde Wiley examining equestrian portraiture in the canon of Western art history culminating in a bronze monumental equestrian statue by the artist of an African-American young man, created in response to the statue of Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart in Richmond, Virginia in particular and similar statues of high-ranking Confederate Army officers, some of which still stand in the United States despite persistent calls for their removal. Since the installation of Rumors of War in Richmond, all of the statues of the military leaders of the Confederacy have been removed from Monument Avenue where they had been since the first decade of the 20th century.
WSpiral was a collective of African-American artists initially formed by Romare Bearden, Charles Alston, Norman Lewis, and Hale Woodruff on July 5, 1963. It has since become the name of an exhibition, Spiral: Perspectives on an African-American Art Collective.
WA Study of Negro Artists is a silent film in black and white on four reels that was created in the 1930s to highlight the development of African-American fine arts. The film features many influential black artists associated with the Harlem Renaissance, including Richmond Barthé, James Latimer Allen, Palmer Hayden, Aaron Douglas, William Ellisworth Artis, Malvin Gray Johnson, Augusta Savage, Lois Mailou Jones, and Georgette Seabrooke. The 15-minute motion picture was made by Jules V. D. Bucher.
WThe Wood Sawyer is a mid 19th-century painting by American artist Charles E. Weir. Done in oil paint on board, the painting depicts a wood sawyer in New York City. The painting - described as a work of genre art - is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
WThrough a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People is a 2014 documentary film directed by Thomas Allen Harris. It is inspired by Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present by Deborah Willis, who also produced the film. The film had its premiere at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival on January 17, 2014.
WTwo Centuries of Black American Art was a 1976 traveling exhibition of African-American art organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). It "received greater visibility and validation from the mainstream art world than any other group exhibition of work by Black artists." According to the Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, the "landmark" exhibition "drew widespread public attention to the contributions to African American artists to American visual culture."
WThe Wall of Respect was a mural first painted in 1967 by the Visual Arts Workshop of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC). The mural represented the contributions of fourteen designers, photographers, painters, and others, notably Chicago muralist William Walker. Some of the artists would go on to found the influential AfriCOBRA artists collective. The work comprised a montage of portraits of heroes and heroines of African American history painted on the side of a building at the corner of Chicago's 43rd Street and Langley Avenue, an area called the Black Belt. Notable images included Nat Turner, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Gwendolyn Brooks, W.E.B. Dubois, Marcus Garvey, Aretha Franklin, and Harriet Tubman.