Ever since 1502, when the first group of Africans was brought to the New World, African-Americans have kept cultural traditions of the African continent alive through an awareness of the past. These retentions are revealed in African-American crafts, folktales and storytelling, dance and music, and religious practices. The persistence of African traditions bears out the truth stated by philosopher and writer Alain Locke, that "even with the rude transplanting of slavery . . . the American Negro brought over as an emotional inheritance, a deep-seated aesthetic endowment."
In the early 1920s, Alain Locke returned to New York City from his studies and travels in Europe, eager to share with his colleagues the knowledge that artists in Paris were being inspired by the power of African art. His 1925 essay "The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts" was a watershed — the first philosophical treatise to encourage African-American artists to focus upon things African for artistic inspiration.
Over the decades, currents of African awareness have interacted and influenced one another. Hands have remembered how to make quilts, braid hair, beat complex rhythms on the drum. Minds have explored ancient black history and set down on canvas, or in stone or wood, interpretations of an African heritage. The objects in this section demonstrate that the Legacy of Africa lives.
|