Souls grown deep: African American vernacular art of the South; Vol. 1.

William Arnett, ed. Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South: Vol. 1. Atlanta, GA: Tinwood Books with The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, 2000. 568 pp. $100.00.

Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South is published by Tinwood Books, a publisher dedicated to the folk art of African Americans. It is the first of what promises to be a series of three volumes that deal specifically with this artistic phenomenon. William Arnett, a collector and the guiding force in this production, has amassed a collection that figures prominently in volume one. In this book we are presented with some of contemporary America's most remarkable visual artists; it is an anthology rich in the spectrum of art, cultural traditions, and history that helps us to reflect upon and redefine our nation's culture.

Forty contemporary Southern artists are profiled here, accompanied by 800 color photographs. William Arnett and his son have brought together leading scholars, political figures, and writers to provide a wide range of perspectives and insights into the nature of folk art and America's mulatto culture.

The book begins with Langston Hughes's poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," then offers a map of the United States which focuses upon the Southern states in which these forty artists have lived and worked--Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and a portion of East Texas. An essay by Paul Arnett which accompanies the map establishes the process by which this art will be analyzed in relation to American culture. Arnett notes that in the 1920s, when Langston Hughes spoke of the Euphrates, Congo, Nile, and Mississippi as his models, there were other rivers to be considered. "In northernmost Georgia," Arnett writes,

unnamed mountain rivulets bounce together to form the small Conasauga River, a brook that gives itself over to the Oostanaula, then the Coosa, and finally the Alabama River, which, after a sidelong meander through downstate Alabama, couples tentatively with the Tombigbee (Choctaw: "coffin-makes"), lingers as the Mobile and Tensaw Rivers, and passes into the Gulf of Mexico. Along their way, these waters pick up knowledge and experience. In middle Alabama they move through Montgomery, the second capital of the Confederacy and birthplace of the civil rights movement. The cross-roads of Benton greets them after a few more turns, not far from the former plantation of George Traylor, whose ex-slave Bill Traylor began in the 1930s at age eighty-five to translate his experiences into persuasive, sparse drawings that, while seen by some in his lifetime, were not publicly exhibited again until almost thirty years after his death.

What both William and Paul Arnett want the reader to understand is that this book is not about historiography and theories of African American culture or folk art or an analysis of relationships between vernacular art and other art forms. This is a book that looks at symbolic elements, at the less visible side of American culture. It is an attempt to record artistic personal and cultural histories.

The intention is honest and noble. The editors do not attempt to present finite descriptions of either the artists or the work. They are quick to admit that all the varied names given to this genre--Primitive, Naive, Intuitive, self-taught, folk, unschooled, vernacular, outsider, isolate--are meaningless titles that say more about the social and historical fantasies of the describers than about the people thus described. Civil Rights leaders and historians provide assessments of the Movement's impact on black folk artists which introduce relevant historical topics. William Arnett then proceeds to chronicle the artists and their works in biographical monographs with topical analyses that focus on specific themes, as well as through first-person autobiographical accounts.

This is a beautiful book. The photographs and the art work offer powerful images. The strength of this book rests in its attempt to update the survey of a Southern, African American, non-academic living art tradition. Referencing the 1984 Corcoran Gallery exhibit Black Folk in America--930-1980, which established many of the stereotypical issues that have plagued the genre for nearly two decades, the Arnetts reexamine these issues in light of new "discoveries" of artists and the myriad developments in historical, anthropological, curatorial, and philosophical methodologies.

Another strength is the eclectic selection of invited contributors such as former Civil Rights leader and Mayor of Atlanta Andrew Young; artist Lonnie Holley; Representative John Lewis; Babatunde Lawal, a native of Nigeria and currently professor of art history at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond; and Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones), each of whom provides an expansive environment in which we can understand the work of each of the forty artists included in the book. An interesting aspect of this selection of essayists, whether intended or not, is an opportunity to view exactly how racism exists in the art business. Included are writers like Lucy R. Lippard, who is known for her writings on contemporary art and not for her writings on folk art, and Maxwell L. Anderson, director of The Whitney Museum of American Art, an institution that continues to resist the examination of America's mulatto culture, and has been responsible for many of the misconceptions and much of the stereotyping of the art and the a rtists.

Anderson's essay, in its very brevity, presents an apologetic statement about the ways in which the business of art in the United States maintains a system of "mainstream" art and "other." He writes:

The ways in which art museums consecrate artists and art movements are ever more complicated. In the early years of this century, museums presented displays of art works as a means of educating the small attending publics of the time. Institutional missions were less contingent on social and political pressures from the community, and the conferral of elevated stature on living artists was the business of commercial galleries, not museums. The situation today is complicated by the continuing hegemony of the New York art market.

The pre-selection of suitable artists for display in American art museums usually begins not in the imagination of the curator, who cannot be asked to canvass the wealth of material in fifty states and throughout the world, but in the galleries of Soho and Fifty-seventh Street, where a proving ground is fraught with issues beyond those of what might narrowly be defined as artistic merit.

Lucy Lippard's essay reveals how, in the art business, no matter what one has to say as an artist or an art historian of color, one's interests and vision are always distorted to become a mirror that reflects the image of whites. Lippard writes:

As vernacular art becomes increasingly respected, and popular, the preponderance of male artists, collectors and writers in the field becomes a more pressing question. I am inevitably reminded of the days when the women's movement first hit the art world and some of us began making lists of women artists to contact. There were amazingly few. But when we started to look for them, they came out of the woodwork, and the women's art movement took off.

Yet we know that there are an equal number of female artists who make folk art. Even Lippard admits to the number of female artists as she lists them by name: "Gertrude Morgan, Nellie Mae Rowe, Mary T. Smith and Georgia Speller." However, Lippard never gets to the heart of the matter. She never examines the work of these artists. She never gets near what Alice Walker referred to as the nature of "our mother's gardens."

And Phyllis Kind's very short discussion on Steve Ashby's work, written as if it were taken from a public relations tear sheet--"The experienced eye he focuses on the world and that guides his hand implies an assured and sophisticated understanding of his culture. In today's art world, we find Ashby's healthy contempt for verisimilitude (even to the point of flatly contradictory planar integrity) particularly timely"--is so removed from the artist and his work that one wonders if she has any direct contact with the artist at all.

In one sense, this information is all to the good. We need to know how racism operates in the art business because it is the business of art that defines and historicizes our culture. The one problematic area that exists within this book is the presumption that its readership is white. It is a curious oversight, considering the inclusion of black and white writers, American and non-American, male and female, political and art professionals. But it cannot be misinterpreted, given statements like "We hope to follow a long and roundabout path towards a simple destination: promoting a respect for the art and spurring further inquiry. Beyond that, we hope to provoke such questions as 'What does it mean to be African American, American and human, at century's (millennium's) end?' "Further on there's this one: "Above all else, we have sought to let the artists' voices be heard and to allow the depth (as well as the breadth) of their visual expressions to be seen. By doing this, we hope to shift debate about, and ana lysis of, this art away from prior romanticization and instrumentalities. We want to stand back from the perception that black folk art, like its people, exists to serve. In letting the work and the artists speak and show for themselves, we anticipate that many stereotypes--both negative and the misleadingly positive--will, de facto, come under challenge."

Given the fact that so many collectors today are of a multiethnic, multiracial, multicultural background, I suspect that these perceptions will be corrected. Art history is an organic entity. It is ever evolving. The more inclusive the historians and the more inclusive the artists, the more inclusive the audience that views the work, buys the art, and buys the books.