Souls grown deep: African-American vernacular art in the South

New Crisis, The, Sep/Oct 2000 by Simmons, Judy Dothard

This Special Crisis Cultural Folio contains photographs of striking works of art taken from a 500-page book destined to be a definitive reference and a family heirloom for the next several generations. The subject is the work of African-American Southerners whose art is cultivated in the school of hard knocks, The title, Souls Grown Deep, is inspired by the last line ("My soul has grown deep like the rivers") of the 1928 Langston Hughes poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers."

Thornton Dial, for example, whose multi-media piece appears on the previous page, became an artist after being a blacksmith, welder, concrete mixer, a fishnet maker, and a house painter. Born in 1928, Dial is the Grand Old Man of African-American "outsider art." Since this art is not a product of the Euro-American academy that dominates American "high culture," the artists who create it have been dismissed or underestimated by vested interests in the fine arts community. It's an old story. The activities of African Americans are often attributed to anything except intelligence, discipline, critical vision, and aesthetic intention. Basketball virtuoso Isiah Thomas once commented that many sports commentators speak as if black players come out of their mothers' wombs dribbling a ball. The survival experiences, huge effort, and preternatural focus of highachieving African Americans is boiled down to "natural rhythm," "instinct," or just plain undeserved luck.

Thomas' point is echoed and updated by sports industry consultant and Wharton School prof Kenneth Shropshire, writing in his Africana.com column, "Fair Game," about the Williams sisters' impact on tennis: "As Venus rolled toward victory over Martina Hingis in the quarterfinals of Wimbledon on the Fourth of July, commentator and former player Chris Evert described the match-up as `the great thinker against the great athlete' - the thinker, of course, being Hingis and the athlete, Williams."

Championing this art and producing Souls Grown Deep has brought collector and curator William Arnett to financial ruin and soul anguish. He and eldest son Paul are the executive editors of this powerful, uplifting, lavishly produced compendium, with its 801 photographic plates on high-gloss, 110-pound premium silk paper.

In the sense that he has struck a mighty blow for AfricanAmerican aesthetic rights (and, thus, for the great spirit), William Arnett is akin to the mysteriously motivated and utterly possessed John Brown, a 19th-century anti-slavery champion of African humanity. like other white people thought to be too food of people of color, Arnett's choleric, bodacious rebellion against America's artistic enslavement to ruling-class tastes and fictions has subjected him, he says, to slander, sabotage, and economic ostracism. There is certainly precedent to back his claims.

Nevertheless, Souls Grown Deep exists (Tinwoodbooks.com; 1-877-370-3337), and bears the imprimatur of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York Public Library). Earlier this year Arnett was chatting with author Amid Baraka in a Birmingham, Ala., Japanese-- food restaurant. As Arnett unfolded his (oft-told) tale of travail, the perky poet-playwright said, "All this happened to you just for trying to put black art before the world, and you're white. Imagine being black...." The historical value of Souls Grown Deep is boosted beyond priceless by the essays that describe and respond to the art. Andrew Young, Maude Southwell Wahlman, Babatunde Lawal, and Baraka are among the essayists who give perspective and context to these graphic works, Historian Vincent Harding has contributed a powerful reflection on "the transformative spirit" of the "southern-based, religiously inspired democratic insurgency of the 1950s and 1960s referred to as the civil rights movement." It takes at least a day to read it-it's that heavy trying to follow all his connections between sociopolitical visionaries and freedom-fighters like Fannie Lou Hamer of the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party, and revolutionary Birmingham minister Fred Shuttlesworth, and the visual artists. "Too often we have overlooked the powerful creative spirit of the movement and its participants," Harding writes, "thereby missing or undervaluing their constant visionary surging toward new human possibilities, transformative hope, and democratic experimentation ... such creative power could not be confined to political, economic, and traditional social domains ...And these visual artists were too sensitive, too gifted and too deeply in search of the truth of their time for them not to realize that a new time and space was thrusting forward in the bosom of the old, beginning right in the midst of their own southern heartland."

And the artists' words are here, too, as well as their sculptures, paintings, and multi-media embodiments of critical intelligence, aesthetic skill, and spiritual attunement. My soul grows deeper each time I sit with this oracular production, this bible of 20th-century southern AfricanAmerican art.