Visual Arts

The study of African American art, or art by African Americans, is a field of inquiry that has grown over the course of the 20th century, along with the subject matter. The focus is the study of black artists and their works of art in media such as painting, sculpture, craft, printmaking, video, mixed media, and performance art. The field is driven by the analysis of the meanings and contexts of the works of art, as well as the lives and experiences of the artists. Works vary in terms of content and style and the relationship to issues of blackness, African American history, and identity. There has been debate as to whether black artists whose work does not engage issues of blackness in America can be considered “African American” artists. This issue has largely been discredited in favor of an understanding that any work of art by an African American, no matter the content, is a reflection of the lived experiences and multidimensional concerns of black artists in America. Critics have challenged the idea of this categorization by claiming that it creates an artificial segregation of artists and their work based on an ill-defined construct of race in America. They contend that individual artists create within the framework of multiple human identities. In spite of varying viewpoints and challenges to the delineation of the field along racial lines, the study of African American art has remained a viable mode of inquiry, in large part because of a lack of attention to black artist from mainstream histories of art. A few African Americans entered the world of professional art in the 19th century. In the early 20th century, a critical mass of black artists began to coalesce around the country. Many developed visual languages that spoke to the particular social, cultural, and spiritual aspects of black life in America. Black artists gained academic training and began to enter into the mainstream professional art world, albeit marginalized by racial strictures. During the black consciousness movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the study and analysis of the art of black Americans emerged as a cohesive field. Early literature was focused on recovering the artwork and biographies of artists lost to the indifference of the mainstream art world. Postcolonial criticism influenced the modes of analysis regarding study of the art of African Americans and the field gained new scholarly attention. The literature on this subject has grown since the last quarter of the 20th century. The sources cited in this article focus on broader thematic treatments of the field and less on the work of individual artists.