A note: African American and Black American I use interchangeably as they both refer to enslaved and free Africans originally in the colonial periods then expanding to African descendent peoples in the Americas. There is a bit of a blurring of whether the heritage of the folks mentioned are descendants of enslaved people in North America or the Caribbean or recent African migrants.

African American Craft History explores non-dominant, innovative American craft histories of the African Diaspora through a topical chronology beginning with a foundation in pre-colonial African aesthetics and then progressing from 1619 to the present. In the Americas, Black craftspeople were skilled laborers operating under duress and/or uninhibited. Some art forms they practiced include beadwork, coiffure, metalsmithing, luthier work, woodwork, textile weaving, ceramic making, basket weaving, and indigo dyeing. Tracing these craft practices will elucidate patterns of African craft ways in the United States, identify their aesthetic callbacks to the continent, and demonstrate the impact of African American makers on the broader history of American craft.

What initially interested me in this survey topic was working with the Chatham University Cheryl Olkes Collection of African Art of the 18th–20th Century. As a college-aged African American, this was the first time I touched objects from the continent yet I saw many echoes of these aesthetic and functional objects in my everyday life. As I went on in my career, a formative role I held was working on the Simone Leigh traveling survey originating at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and Sovereignty, her show at the 58th Venice Biennale. She was the first Black woman to represent the US at that auspicious and critical moment, re-examining American and European ties to colonialism and preserving the legacy of Black craft traditions. That sparked my making in ceramics and glass and dedicating myself to the lifelong (often self-taught) scholarship of African American craft.

Intro to West and Central Pre-Colonial African Craft Aesthetics

A saying goes that enslaved Africans who came through the Trans-Atlantic slave trade came empty-handed and not empty-headed. This week, we will explore the expansive African definition of art through beadwork, coiffure, metalsmithing, the work of luthiers (often making drums), woodwork, textile weaving, and indigo dyeing that found their way on the other side of the Atlantic. These forms echo through African American art.

Artworks include:

• Adinkra (Akan Empire) and Nsibidi (Cameroonian script)—visual scripts that become embedded into everyday objects that bring up life lessons and proverbs. These visual scripts are especially common in Akan gold weights.
• Dogon (in present-day Mali) were expert locksmiths and woodworkers who made the most stunning granary doors. They were the last peoples in West Africa to Islamize so they preserved so many rich traditions that may have been iconoclastic.
• Small handheld Dan masks (Liberia)
• Mende masks of the Sonde Society (an initiation for women in Sierra Leone)
• Cameroon Elephant Masks, long trunk fabric, and beaded headdresses were used to honor the kings
• Chi Wara is a Senufo headdress worn during rituals for agricultural prosperity 
• Akan Funerary Heads are terracotta heads kept in a funerary grove to honor nobility. Each was individualized but not hyper-realistic, minimal yet demonstrated cultural beauty standards 
• Crown of an Oba (Nigeria) is a beaded, cone-shaped crown that obscures the face and relates to Yoruba cosmology through animal allusions and its color scheme
• Benin Bronzes
• Kente cloth
• Akua Ba, an Akan wooden doll with schematized features to train women in child-rearing
• Nkisi Nkondi, ritual objects where medicine bundles are attached and nails driven inside to activate

Recommended resources: 

• Radiance of the Waters by Sylvia Ardyn Boone
• Flash of the Spirit by Robert Farris Thompson
• Olyusuna Ojikutu’s Collection near Washington DC

Art and Design in the Colonial Era

Many skilled laborers worked under duress and the few that were free were forcibly entangled in enslavement. Therefore, much of the work during this era was commissioned-based, or African cultural and religious traditions were practiced in secret.

Artists and artworks include: 

• Elizabeth Keckley, dressmaker and known for making Mary Todd Lincoln’s Victorian era dresses with large hoop skirts
• David Drake, an enslaved potter who wrote in verse on jugs used to store food 
• Colonoware defied the confines of mercantilism where the colonies produced raw material, shipped it to Europe, and then sold that product back. These utilitarian vessels floated under the radar
• Face Jugs, Edgefield, SC, relate to West African spiritual rituals and utilize kaolin which is believed to have transcendent and spiritual properties for the eyes and teeth 
• Thomas Commeraw, a ceramicist who made jars for oysters in NYC
• Harriet Powers, pictorial story quilt maker 
• Slave Drum, found in VA from West Africa
• Gullah Geechee Basket Weaving 
• Gee’s Bend and patterned quilts
• Thomas Day, formerly enslaved cabinetmaker
• Corn Husk dolls, simple dolls for enslaved children to play with 

Recommended resources: 

• Craft: An American History by Glenn Adamson
• “Thomas Commeraw, Free Black Potter in 1800s New York” Curious Objects podcast
• “Thomas Day: A Master Craftsman, With Complications” on NPR
• Black Craftspeople Digital Archive
• “The Life and Labor of Enslaved Potter Dave Drake with Ethan Lasser” Curious Objects podcast
• Brothers in Clay: The Story of Georgia Folk Pottery by John A. Burrison

Nineteenth-Century Black Craft Schools and Neoclassicism

After 1865, the end of the Civil War, many skilled craftspeople opened up businesses and continued their practices. The important ideologies of this period for social uplift included Booker T. Washington’s economic advancement through skilled labor and accommodation and W.E.B. Du Bois’ theories of advancement through education and cultural transcendence. Some of the economic, societal, and cultural pressures drove the emergence of a European expat community. Mary McLeod Bethune was an important progenitor of technical training institutes for African Americans. This all happened alongside the Industrial Revolution when technologies were changing quickly and factory work became increasingly available for mostly white men at first but expanded to others thereafter. Another important factor to mention whereby Black craftspeople made things under duress was chain gangs.

References include:

• Tuskegee Institute and A&M HBCUs
• Florville Foy, a major cemetery artist in New Orleans where raised graves increased the demand for Neoclassical ornamentation.
• Edmonia Lewis, a Black and Indigenous maker who constructed large-scale neoclassical sculptures 
• “The Economics of Negro Emancipation in the United States”
• Mary McLeod Bethune, an educator who founded Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute, which later became Bethune-Cookman University, a notable HBCU vocational-based institution
• Chain gangs were a new form of forced physical labor similar to enslavement but fueled by the carceral system supporting industry and other constructing endeavors 

Recommended resources:

• African American Art by Lisa Farrington
• “Brick Making and the Production of Place at the Tuskegee Institute,” Donald E. Armstrong Jr.
• “Kentucky’s Black Craft Trail and the Unequal Path from Berea College to Lincoln Institute,” E. Gale Greenlee and N.E. Brown, Hyperallergic

Social Realism, Modernism, and the Harlem Renaissance

During the Great Depression, there was increased support for the arts through the Work Progress Administration. That combined with the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural reset for African Americans in urban centers, created a boom of creativity. 

Artisans include:

• Richmond Barthe, figurative sculpture through bronze and stone relief
• Selma Burke, a sculptor most known for creating the FDR image that was appropriated for the quarter
• Augusta Savage, ceramicist and institution-builder/mentor
• Art Smith, a NYC-based jeweler 
• Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, a ceramicist who was the first Black woman to graduate from RISD
• Philip Simmons, an ironworker in Charleston passed his practice on to descendants and interested people

Recommended resources:

• “Dr. Kelli Morgan discusses Alain Locke’s seminal text The New Negro” from Black Art in America via YouTube
• “Art As We See It: Notable Sculptors of the 19th and 20th Century” from Museum of the African Diaspora via YouTube
• Art as Adornment: The Life and Work of Arthur George Smith by Charles L. Russell
• “Philip Simmons” in Craft in America
• “Black Clay Artists Everyone Should Know” in Design Miami

Agitprop & The Black Arts Movement 

Right after the Civil Rights Movement, there was a breaking away from external institutions to create collectives or cultural institutions within the community. A lot of this work borrowed from Abstract Expressionism or Pop Art at times with a uniquely political outlook. Marked by a new period of Pan-Africanism, many collectives like AfriCOBRA and Wetusi formed. Also, the Biafra Civil War in Nigeria caused the circulation of objects from the country, often looted and/or sold during dire circumstances.

Artists include: 

• Napoleon Jones-Henderson, Boston-based weaver from AfriCOBRA who incorporated shiny thread from old mills in New England
• Akinsanya Kambon, former Black Panther turned ceramicist
• Elizabeth Catlett, sculptor and foremother of the Agitprop movement 
• David MacDonald, ceramicist and Syracuse University Professor (mentored by Joseph Gillard at Hampton University)
• Melvin Edwards, a metalsmith most known for his abstract assemblage lynching series

Recommended resources: 

• Commonwealth: Art by African Americans in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston edited by Lowery Stokes Sims
• “Artist Talk: Akinsanya Kamon on Social Justice” from the Crocker Art Museum via YouTube
• “An Affirmation of a Legacy w/ Artist Napoleon Jones-Henderson” Studio Noize! Black Art Podcast

Black Feminist Art

Primarily taking place from the late ‘60s to the ’90s, Womanism, and Black Feminism were prevailing theories undergirding the creativity of this period.

Artists include: 

• Faith Ringgold, narrative quilts, and soft sculptures 
• Joyce J. Scott created beaded works
• Betye Saar, assemblage works
• Emma Amos, textile-based works and member of the Spiral Collective
• Martha Jackson Jarvis, a land-based artist who works in wood, clay, and other media 
• Dinga McCannon, fiber and multimedia artist 
• Renee Stout, iron cast work

Recommended resources: 

• Joyce J. Scott: Messages edited by Mobilia Gallery
• Emma Amos episode of Art in Color via YouTube
• Black Art: A Cultural History by Richard Powell
• The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts by John Michael Vlack

Postmodernism (1970s-1990s)

During this period, Thelma Golden coined the theory of Post-Blackness which signals a time of transcendence of arbitrary categories of what is Black art and argues that it no longer mattered (debatable). Many contemporary artists respond to this theory in various ways and revive craft traditions, aesthetics, and histories from the past.

Artists include:

• Nick Cave, known for creating sound suits modeled after the performance attire made during pre-colonial masquerades
• Thaddeus Mosley, abstract woodworker
• Therman Statum, glassblower

Recommended resources: 

• Crafted: Objects in Flux by Emily Zilber
• “Reflections on Reclaiming Space and Voice: The 2020 African American Craft Summit,” by Julia Hirsch and Mya Lewis, Folklife
• “Healing Arts: Black Doll Making” from The Phillips Collection via YouTube

Contemporary Makers

Makers from all over the diaspora harken back to traditional craftsmanship as well as introducing new and innovative techniques to craft whether it be scale, material, technology, or how they ascribe multiple layers of meaning.

Artists include:

• Simone Leigh, ceramicist, first Black woman to represent the U.S. in the Venice Biennale
• Hugh Hayden, a contemporary woodworker uses the jaggedness of materiality to allegorize the struggles of Black people in America 
• Tiff Masey, a metalworker who makes large-scale jewelry 
• Diedrick Brackens, weaver
• Stephen Hamilton, upright loom weaver, natural dye maker, woodworker
• Osa Atoe + Kaabo Clay, ceramicist and founder of a Black ceramicist organization. Her parents are from Nigeria
• Ambrose, textile-based work concerned with the Southern landscape, people, and culture 
• Sharif Bey, a ceramicist who combines his childhood looking at West and Central African objects in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History also combines fragments of Syracuse China Co. pottery
• Theaster Gates, ceramicist, and institution builder
• Sonya Clark, fabric and hair-based artist
• Roberto Lugo, a ceramicist known for honoring famous people on his pots with graffiti-like imagery 
• Bisa Butler, Kool-aide color quilt maker 
• Paul Briggs, ceramicist
• Corey Pemberton, glassblower 
• Lydia Thompson, a ceramicist who makes hand-built work about migration and multigenerational storytelling 

Recommended resources: 

• Simone Leigh monograph edited by Eva Respini
• “BAIA Talks: Tiff Masey” from Black Art in America via YouTube
• African American Craft Initiative at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife & Cultural Heritage
• New Politics of the Handmade Black Craftsman Roundtable
• Critical Craft Forum

This list is only the beginning of the craftsmanship of Black makers. Craft is an accessible vehicle to preserve culture when there were laws about Africanized art forms and religions through hidden imagery in functional objects and multi-generational teaching and storytelling.