“Your life is already artful — waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.” – Toni Morrison.
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There are numerous collections of African-American art throughout the United States in institutional, corporate, and private possession. Some of the major collections were established before 1950, but many were formed in the late 1960s or after ..Read More.
As the world’s most universal musical genre, jazz represents a long continuum of traditions coming out of the African American musical experience in this country. This continuum starts with the early arrival of enslaved Africans from the .. Read More.
In the early years of comic books, African Americans sometimes appeared as minor characters, usually in the demeaning guise of familiar stereotypes. Not until the 1960s did blacks begin to appear as important figures in mass-circulation...Read More.
For more than 200 years, African American performers have appeared on the American stage. Despite the prejudices that they have faced both within the theater community and from the entertainment-seeking public, they have made significant ....Read More.
African-American drama draws from at least two sources: the heritage of Africa and that of Europe. On the North American continent, those cultures met, interacted with Native American traditions and a new physical environment, and produced ...Read More.
African-American folklore is a mode of creative cultural production that manifests itself in expressive forms such as tales, songs, proverbs, greetings, gestures, rhymes, material artifacts, and other created products and performances. ...Read More
“It was a time when the Negro was in vogue.” This ironic comment by one of the period’s leading writers evokes the irony and mystery of the Harlem Renaissance. Between the end of World War I and the beginning of the ...Read More.
Hip hop was created by youths of African American and Caribbean (including Latin-Caribbean) descent in the early 1970s. At the time, the counter-disco movement was developing, and gangs in the Bronx, New York, were becoming...Read More.
A culturally hybrid art form, the African-American mural is deeply rooted in ancient and modern African cultures; it also draws from both traditional and modernist Euro-American aesthetic and sociopolitical values...Read More.
Black music—that is, music composed or performed by people of African descent—is basic to the study of African-American history and culture, and to an understanding of American culture in general. Libraries collect it in all formats and ..Read More.
Since its inception in early seventeenth-century Florence, Italy, opera has been the dominant form of staged musical storytelling in the European musical tradition. During the last two centuries of its evolution, African Americans and persons ...Read More.
From the time of their first arrival in the New World, Africans were involved in a wide range of artistic endeavors. Much of the early art of African Americans was considered folk art and was connected to routines of life and work....Read More.
African Americans shaped the practice of photography from its origin in 1840 and have participated in its history as practitioners and subjects. The larger American public was fascinated with the daguerreotype as soon as Louis-Jacques-Mandé ...Read More.
African-American poetry is the first formal literature created by Africans and their descendants in the New World. It is a body of literature that emerged out of the largest forced migration in human history, the subsequent enslavement of ...Read More.
Historically, printmaking has fallen into the category of graphic arts, and includes relief printing, engraving, etching, aquatint, silkscreen printing, and lithography. Although the African forebears of African Americans had their own traditions ...Read More
Proto-rap refers to the pre-1980 social, cultural, and aesthetic movements that shaped the characteristics of hip hop. Rap developed from roots in the African and Latino diasporas, the earliest of which began around 1500....Read More.