AESTHETIC AND SOCIAL ISSUES in the history of black American art have often been difficult to disentangle from one another. Such confusion is encountered in all art, of course, but it has been a particular burden for black Americans. Art represents and sanctifies what is valued in a society; the ability to create and appreciate art implies heightened human sensibility and confers social status and prestige. A people said to be without art, or with a degraded form of it, reputedly show themselves lacking in the qualities that dignify human experience and social interaction. They are said to be "uncultured," "primitive," unable to participate in refined society. Definitions of art are therefore highly political. They are major battlegrounds on which the struggle for human and social recognition is waged. A people can ill afford to let others control the definitions by which their arts are classified and evaluated. The history of black American art demonstrates the social consequences of such aesthetic control. During the first centuries of black experience in America, partly to support a social system grounded on the denial of the humanity of black people, whites generally refused to admit that blacks could make art at all. By the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, enough black artists had mastered the white Europeanized aesthetic tradition to argue that blacks had proved their civility and should be allowed the benefits of American democracy. No "people that has ever produced great literature and art," said James Weldon Johnson, "has ever been looked on by the world as distinctly inferior."' Yet to gain a measure of acceptance from the white art world and white society, black fine artists have often been forced to conform to artistic traditions and forms that denied their unique cultural heritage and the reality of their American experience. This was not true for all black artists, however. From the earliest years of their American captivity, blacks had practiced aspects of the traditional arts of Africa. Although these activities did not conform to white artistic definitions and so were not dignified with the name art, they did provide their makers and communities a sense of historical continuity, a method to help merge conflicting cultural forces into intelligible social patterns, and important support for human value in the face of a slave system bent on denying it. Long before black Americans learned European fine arts and were taught to be ashamed of their folk practices as evidence of slavery and barbarism, they had mastered these African-derived traditional art forms, the practice of which would continue to the present as a vibrant force in black American society. Despite the significance of folk art in black American culture, virtually no general studies of the history of American art take seriously black American contributions. In the rare instances when they are mentioned, it is usually only the works that have met the aesthetic standards of academic taste and "high culture." The few specialized exhibitions and books that have focused entirely on the work of black American artists have also generally adopted a high-cultural bias.2 A noEugene W. Metcalf is associate professor at the School of Interdisciplinary Studies, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. The author appreciates the comments of Judith Fryer, Curtis Ellison, Leonard Hochberg, John Vlach, Kenneth Ames, John Frase, and especially Alan Axelrod on earlier versions and dedicates this paper to Peter Clecak, with long-overdue thanks. 1 James Weldon Johnson, ed., The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922; 2d ed., New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931), p. 9. 2 An important exception to this is an exhibition, organized for the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1978 by John Michael Vlach, and its catalogue, The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts. It emphasizes the folk traditions in black American culture and art. o 1983 by The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum. All rights reserved. oo84-0416/83/1804-ooo3$o2.oo