Images

"This illustrated book brings together for the first time a significant body of imagery devoted to the expressive culture of African Americans from the 1770s to the 1920s. It includes over 250 paintings, engravings, and drawings which depict scenes of music, dance, religious practice, and storytelling in the everyday lives of blacks in their own, private social world. Here you will find images of country dances, corn-husking frolics, rural festivities, hunting, political gatherings, children at play, weddings, parades, the Negro burial, and many other themes. Over 120 artists are represented, including such eminent nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American painters as Thomas Eakins, Charles Demuth, Eastman Johnson, Winslow Homer, and William Sidney Mount, as well as lesser-known but important artists. This book is not a social history; instead, it allows the visual imagery to tell its own story. The authors focus on identifying, describing, and analyzing the cultural art forms and activities that lie at the roots of African-American traditional culture as represented in the pictorial record."--BOOK JACKET.