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Black Folk Art Defined
Table of Contents
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Black Folk Art Defined..............................03 Artist Highlight...........................................07 The Makeshifters …………………..…….. 13 Healing in Color........................................17 The Fresno Feature..................................19 With Gratitude………………………………21
NeFesha Ruth, Founder of Black Folk Art Magazine
In African American culture, the term “Black folk,” is
indicative of the collective Black community. This colloquialism was utilized by W.E.B. DuBois, in his 1903 book entitled, “The Souls of Black Folk.” In contemplating this seminal work, writer Ibram X. Kendi stated that at the time of DuBois writing, "Racist Americans were making the case that Black people did not have souls, and the beings that did not have souls were beasts." Kendi reminds us that DuBois wanted the world to know the humanity of Black folk. “Black Folk,” being a moniker for Black people and a phrase that has been deeply embedded in Black culture extending well beyond the DuBois 1903 manuscript to Tank and the Bangas 2022 song, Black Folk. The term brings Black people to the closest feeling of community. For Black people, the term often evokes memories of family reunions, Sunday dinners, elders within the community, perseverance, and the remembrance of those who came before us; as many African Americans often state that, “we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors.” There is a natural undercurrent of interdependence on one another, past, present, and future, that Black folk tend to have. The term “folk art,” has a controversial definition in the art world. It has been a term that has lacked clarity and agreement on the definition. According to the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), the term folk art is used for the genre of art produced in culturally cohesive communities or context and guided by traditional rules or procedures for creation in accordance with mutually understood traditions, and in some cultures allowing greater or lesser latitude for personal expression. According to AAT there is a distinction between folk art, outsider art, and self-taught artists. The term ‘self-taught,’ has the very apparent definition of someone with no formal training but according to the AAT, it also has the implicit definition of very personal vision or aesthetic, and whose work is usually unmediated by the standards, traditions, and practices of the culture of the art world, as embodied by the international art markets and established art institutions. Due to the term folk art being
we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors
very “tradition oriented,” there is a conflict with the term being used synonymously with “selftaught,” which leaves one with the belief that the art is not influenced by any one culture or tradition making much folk artist, according to Bendetti, more culturally taught than self-taught.
For this reason, in my definition of Black Folk Art, I use the term, “culturally autodidactic artist.” This term merges the idea that an artist can be self-taught, influenced, and developed inside of their cultural conservatory, i.e. the Black community and culture. In reflecting these definitions, Bendetti continues, “communal learning experiences, whether as part of a family, an ethnic group, or an art school, each leave a distinctive cultural imprint. If one does not attend art school, one's work will express one's other (personal and cultural) experience. If one has been taught by, and identifies very strongly with, a particular cultural community, one’s work will show evidence of that tradition.” I do not believe that the definition can be nor should be a linear and binary definition but, rather, there is a merging that has to be taken into account. The term selftaught when it comes to artists is often referring to artists that have not been taught at an institution yet, people are naturally going to be influenced by their surroundings and their culture.
Black Folk Art in America, 1930-1980 exhibition at the Corcoran Museum of Art
art that reflected their culture
For Black folk, folk art has a unique definition. In response to the, Black Folk Art in America, 1930-1980 exhibition at the Corcoran Museum of Art, Mary Schmidt Campbell stated that, “Black culture has sustained both a vibrant folk art and a sophisticated modernist output.” For Black people, folk art is intertwined with folklore, music such as the blues and negro spirituals, lyrics and poetry, style, and subject matter. Material culture plays a great role in Black folk art. The Black folk artist has created art that reflected their culture and spoke for their people.
Black Folk Art in the Black Community
I grew up in a small suburban town 20 miles outside of Philadelphia, PA in South Jersey. Most people knew the city as Deptford but when you took a closer look at the make-up of this city, you saw a microclimate of Black culture and community nestled in a small and intimate neighborhood called Jericho. For many, the name Jericho may ring a bell of the biblical narrative
Panel 40, The Great Migration Series by Atlantic City, New Jersey native Jacob Lawrence When the Israelites first crossed the Jordan river and entered Canaan land, the first city they entered was the city of Jericho. In the Black culture, songs have been written and sung by artists like Mahalia Jackson singing, “I’m on my way to Canaan”. Canaan land was the idea of liberation and freedom; it was the promised land. As bell hooks explained, “everything Black people in America have seen or experienced has been filtered through that primal experience of exile, and that includes a longing to return to “the promised land.”(3) As a child, this little town of Jericho felt like the promised land to me. Surrounded by Black culture and community, I saw the ingenuity and creativity of Black folk as the pulse of our experience.
Jericho was just short of Delaware and just outside of Philadelphia. During slavery, it was a place where Black folk ran to find freedom. My ancestral journey was one of many. Unique in its relations yet a story that many can relate to. I say unique because my father’s grandmother, my great grandmother, was the cousin of Harriet Tubman. My family surely found their way from the plantations of the eastern shores of Maryland to the free city of Philadelphia. My grandmother on my mother’s side reigned from the Gullah Geechee people of North Carolina. Like many Black folk in my New Jersey neighborhood, we came from the south and we brought the south with us, just as our ancestors brought Africa with them. In the South as in Africa, creativity had been a way that Black folk had connected with their spirituality, shared their thoughts and beliefs, relayed messages, passed down ancestral knowledge, and endured the hardest of times and the hellish of moments. Creativity has carried Black folk through the transatlantic slave trade, slavery in the south, reconstruction, civil rights, and the Black power movement.
