GC Library: Black History: On the Web: African Americans and the Arts

WEBSITES ON African Americans and the Arts

On the Web: African Americans and the Arts, captures websites on topics and themes of artistic contributions and the celebration of expression by African Americans. We hope you find the information presented useful, relevant, applicable, and educational.

In 2024, we examine the varied history and life of African American arts and artisans. African American art is infused with African diasporic, Caribbean, and the Black American lived experiences. In the fields of visual and performing arts, literature, fashion, folklore, language, film, music, architecture, culinary, and other forms of cultural expression the African American influence has been paramount. African American artists have used art to preserve history and community memory as well as for empowerment. Artistic and cultural movements, such as the New Negro, Black Arts, Black Renaissance, hip-hop, and Afrofuturism, have been led by people of African descent and set the standard for popular trends around the world. For centuries Western intellectuals denied or minimized the contributions of people of African descent to the arts as well as history, even as their artistry in many genres was mimicked and/or stolen. However, we can still see the unbroken chain of Black art production from antiquity to the present, from Egypt across Africa, from Europe to the New World.

Reference: Association for the Study of African American Life and History Website

Library of Congress: An Artistic Rebirth
The early decades of the 20th century saw an explosion of artistic expression in the African American community. The move to the cities, as well as the greater confidence that came with leaving behind Jim Crow society, contributed to an unparalleled surge of creative enterprise, as artists, writers, composers, and musicians explored the nature of modern African American identity through their work. A dizzying array of new mass media-film and records, then radio and television-exported this revolutionary art to the rest of the country and the world and helped African American artists take a new and commanding role in the cultural life of the nation.
National Archives: Black Arts Movement
The Black Arts Movement was a Black nationalism movement that focused on music, literature, drama, and the visual arts made up of Black artists and intellectuals. This was the cultural section of the Black Power movement, in that its participants shared many of the ideologies of Black self-determination, political beliefs, and African American culture.
National Humanities Center: The Making of African American Identity: Volume I, 1500-1865
Enslaved as well as free African Americans pursued opportunities to create poetry, paintings, sculpture, and other forms of artistic self-expression. Many, of course, had to create their opportunities to create. (Perhaps southern archives hold drawings created by slaves in the private papers of antebellum slaveholders, there to be discovered by researchers.)
Smithsonian American Art Museum: African American Art
SAAM is home to one of the most significant collections of works by African American artists in the world.
These artworks span three centuries of creative expression in various media, including painting, sculpture, textiles, and photography, and represent numerous artistic styles, from realism to neoclassicism, abstract expressionism, modernism, and folk art. From a rare group of photographs by early African American studios to an important group of works by self-taught artist Bill Traylor to William H. Johnson’s vibrant portrayals of faith and family, to Mickalene Thomas’s contemporary exploration of black female identity, the museum’s holdings reflect its long-standing commitment to Black artists and the acquisition, preservation, and display of their work.