Souls Grown Deep, African American Vernacular Art of the South

Volume One: The Tree Gave the Dove a Leaf

The African American culture of the South has produced many of the twentieth century's most innovative art forms. Widely appreciated for its music-from the blues and jazz, to gospel, soul, and rock 'n roll the region has also played host to a less visible but equally important visual art tradition. Working without significant formal training, often employing the most unpretentious and unlikely materials, these grassroots artists have created powerful statements that, like the music, are strongly influenced by the legacies of African belief systems, rooted in community, and committed to cultural continuity. At the same time, however, this quintessentially American art testifies to the originality and transformative force of individual imaginations. Traditional yet fresh, sophisticated yet visually accessible, the art addresses some of the most pressing and profound issues of our day.

During the 1980s and 1990s, popular and critical interest in this genre has grown dramatically and has given it many names: "self-taught," "folk," "outsider," "visionary." Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South, Volume One, is the opening work in a multi-volume study that offers the first comprehensive exploration of this art form's development during the late-twentieth century. Souls Grown Deep illuminates a remarkable spectrum of creativity: the media of painting, sculpture, and works on paper; the region's outdoor art environments and art installations; historical examples from earlier eras; and relevant decorative arts and crafts.

With unprecedented thoroughness and scope, Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South takes readers inside these creators' worlds. Volume One includes lavishly illustrated, full-color chapters on forty vernacular artists, featuring many of their most widely exhibited artworks as well as hundreds more published for the first time. Writing from diverse perspectives, thirty-seven contributing essayists-including civil rights leaders, art historians, museum cura-tors, and folklorists-present artists' biographies and stylistic, thematic, and historical overviews crucial to an understanding of the art's origins. In addition, numerous first-person autobiographical accounts help bring the artists' stories to life.

"I always wanted to be free," said one black vernacular artist when describing the purpose of his art to historian Vincent Harding. Souls Grown Deep amplifies the calls for freedom and new vision among one of the Western world's historically disenfranchised peoples. Breaking away from the stereotypes that identity folk art with rural, isolated, and agrarian ways of life, these pages unveil an art that embodies social changes wrought by the civil rights movement and continues to adapt and to flourish at the dawn of a new century. Sure to challenge assumptions about art and American society, Souls Grown Deep is an indispensable resource for general readers and students interested in folk art and contemporary art, the South, or African American culture.

Jacket front; jacket back:
Jimmy Lee Sudduth
Africans in a Jungle [detaill, 1987

Author context

Notes

INDEX

REFS

SITES, WORKS