African American religious art is a powerful form of expression that reflects the deep faith, resilience, and cultural identity of African Americans. Rooted in the experiences of the African Diaspora, slavery, and the Jim Crow era, this art form has evolved over centuries, finding expression in various forms, from paintings and sculptures to quilts and "yard shows".
The cultural origins of these artworks can be traced back to the African Diaspora, slavery, and the Jim Crow era of institutionalized racism, which restricted both physical freedom and freedom of expression for African Americans. Despite these barriers, in the segregated and comparatively safe spaces of churches and cemeteries, as well as in the fields and forests, African Americans created a cultural language that led to the evolution of distinctly African American musical forms such as gospel, blues, jazz, and rock ‘n’ roll.
These rich musical traditions were paralleled by visual traditions that typically were symbolic in form or concealed from view in order to escape censure or destruction.
Working with little or no formal training, and often employing cast-off objects and unconventional materials, these artists have created visually compelling works that address some of the most profound and persistent issues in American society, including race, class, gender, and religion.
Only during the modern civil rights movement did these visual traditions and their messages move into the open - initially in the private yards of African American homes, and later in commercial galleries and public museums.
Read also: Experience Fad's Fine African Cuisine
Historically marginalized, patronized, or promoted with reductive terms such as folk, naive, or outsider, these artists have earned equal consideration in the history of American art.
Put in the context of the larger American Art collection at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the works - which include some of the finest contemporary art created in the United States-have the potential to influence American cultural studies to more accurately reflect the nation’s historical diversity and complexity.
Many African American Religious paintings focus on seemingly ordinary images, featuring people going to the church for spending some quality time together on Sundays. These are the kind of soothing pictures that are neutral enough to be displayed virtually anywhere, including offices and workplaces.
These are moments of extraordinary importance for Christians, so these African American Religious paintings are going to be cherished for many years to come.
The beauty of religion is that it provides people with the support they need during the rough times, while helping them keep an eye at the big picture. There are not many things that can help you weather the storm while keeping things into perspective, so it is easy to explain the popularity of religious artwork.
Read also: The Story Behind Cachapas
MUSEUMS ACROSS THE NATION are surveying more than 150 years of African African American art. Coinciding with Black History Month, the exhibitions engage a spectrum of themes, presenting an expansive look at Black artistic production. From Sacramento, Calif., to Cincinnati, Ohio, Charlotte, N.C., and New York City, the exhibitions highlight the work of women artists, African and Black American artists active in the modern era, 19th century potters, and art from the collections of historically Black colleges and universities.
Key Artists and Their Contributions
Several artists have made significant contributions to African American religious art, each with their unique style and perspective:
Thornton Dial's The Last Day of the Roosters
Thornton Dial (1928 - 2016)
Dial - whose life encompassed the institutionalized racism of Jim Crow, the modern civil rights movement, and the first African American president - is the most acclaimed artist represented in the collection.
Dial began making art after losing his job as a steelworker in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1981. His ambitious artworks address a panoramic array of issues spanning from African American experience in the South to the events of 9/11 and America’s war in Iraq.
Read also: Techniques of African Jewellery
His works have been included in solo exhibitions at the New Museum of Contemporary Art (1993); the American Folk Art Museum (1993); the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2005); and the Indianapolis Museum of Art (2011), as well as numerous group exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial (2000).
Dial’s sculpture Lost Cows (2000 - 2001), created with painted skeletons of cows, ostensibly addresses the cycles of life and death that are critical to rural agrarian life.
As the title Lost Cows suggests, the sculpture critiques the supposedly superior white supremacists (represented by pelvic bones that resemble Ku Klux Klan masks) that created the Jim Crow system, while simultaneously becoming dependent upon - and “lost” without - the African Americans who worked as nannies, servants, maids, cooks, drivers, and caddies (represented by a white golf bag).
Lonnie Holley (b. 1950)
Lonnie Holley's artwork
The 1979 death of Holley’s niece and nephew in a house fire led him to carve their tombstones, which marked the beginning of his career as an artist in Birmingham, Alabama.
Holley combines the most pedestrian of recycled materials to create visual stories - often linking the past to the present - that are intended to teach and to inspire.
His work has been included in solo exhibitions at the Birmingham Museum of Art (2003) and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, College of Charleston (2015).
Holley’s assemblage Him and Her Hold the Root (1994), the artist’s most iconic and striking work, is comprised of a smaller “female” rocking chair that rests its “arm” upon a larger “male” chair, as if mirroring the supportive and stabilizing relationship of an absent female/male couple.
Together, they support a large, anthropomorphic tree root with a “trunk” and “limbs” that recalls both family tree genealogies and the preservation of oral history and traditions through the generations.
The composition clearly references elders remembering their roots, but it also subtly suggests that a younger generation is in danger of forgetting - or ignoring - its past.
Ronald Lockett (1965 - 1998)
Lockett, the cousin of Thornton Dial, lived in Bessemer, Alabama, and inherited from his uncle and mentor a belief in the political and social power of art.
His works, many fabricated from sheet-metal siding, focus on both timeless themes of life, death, and rebirth, as well as contemporary political and social issues, including nuclear destruction, domestic terrorism, civil rights, and the degradation of the environment.
Lockett’s works - all created in the decade before his death at 32 from complications of HIV/AIDS - were recently featured in a major retrospective exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum (2016).
Lockett’s sheet-metal assemblage England’s Rose (1997) was inspired by the death of Princess Diana, who was among the first public figures to physically embrace people living with HIV/AIDS.
The vertical bars recall both the vertical fence of Kensington Palace that was inundated with floral bouquets and the public’s perception that Diana was “imprisoned” by her role in the royal family.
The gradual but inexorable descent of the rose bouquets from vivid life and light at the upper left into death and darkness at the lower right would have had special resonance for Lockett, who died the year after the work was completed.
Purvis Young (1943 - 2010)
Purvis Young's Artwork
Young first turned to art while imprisoned as a teenager, when he began reading art books. Following his release in 1964, he was inspired by the example of the Black Arts movement, which advocated for politically engaged works that addressed African American experience.
In the late 1960s Young’s Overtown Miami neighborhood rapidly declined into poverty and crime after the completion of Interstate 95 deprived the community of street traffic and consumers.
Young sought sanctuary in the then-vacant “Goodbread Alley,” where he installed hundreds of mural paintings in an outdoor public gallery that documented both the harsh realities of life in Overtown, and his belief in divine intervention.
Young’s oil painting Talking to the System (ca. 1975), depicts three righteous young people, two of them with beatific halos, confronting four white and two black elders.
The painting pays tribute to the essential role played by young African Americans - some of them martyred - in confronting systematic and institutionalized racism through the civil rights and black power movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
At the same time, Young’s painting speaks to the perennial tension between older and younger generations, a dynamic that transcends race.
Ralph Griffin (1925 - 1992)
Ralph Griffin's Noah's Ark
Griffin began making art around 1978 and is best known for creating sculptures from driftwood branches and roots that he retrieved from “Poplar Root Branch” stream near his home in Girard, Georgia.
He asserted, “There’s a miracle in that water, running across them logs since the flood of Noah.” Griffin prized roots that appeared to have great age and “deep feeling,” and responded intuitively to the shapes and subjects that they suggested, saying that he “put a bit of vision on the root.”
His root sculptures also evoke associations with the famous black conjure root, John the Conqueror, said to have talismanic and magical properties.
Griffin’s Noah’s Ark (ca. 1980), his most important wood assemblage, is based on the biblical account of Noah, who is instructed by God to build an ark for his family and a sampling of all the world’s creatures prior to the deluge.
Griffin’s extraordinary conception of the Genesis story appears to conflate the blue waters of the flood, the white sky, the blood red of the flesh destroyed in the deluge, and the black mountain where the ark came to rest in one abstracted, boat-shaped form.
For Griffin, the apocalyptic associations of Noah’s ark may have foreshadowed the equally cataclysmic slave ships that carried their human cargo across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa to America.
Joe Light (1934 - 2005)
Joe Light's Artwork
The redemptive messages of Light’s art were shaped by a delinquent adolescence, two prison terms, and a religious conversion in which he found spiritual guidance in traditional Jewish teachings.
Light drew inspiration for his art from the Old Testament, and saw himself as a modern-day Moses exhorting viewers to adhere to moral standards of conduct in order to achieve spiritual salvation.
Around 1975 he began painting both sacred and profane images to critique hypocrisy and injustice, but also to cultivate understanding and truth, exhibiting them publicly on and around his house in Memphis, Tennessee.
Light’s oil painting Dawn (1988) appears at first glance to be an indecipherable jumble of the calligraphic forms that the artist termed “Abraham’s writing,” after the biblical patriarch.
Closer examination reveals the inverted and reversed phrase God of Israel, a personal declaration of devotion and a public proclamation of the path to spiritual salvation.
