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PROLOGUE
The abolition of slavery in the United States was celebrated nationwide in 1940, the 75th anniversary of the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, and was the historical focus of African-Americans who were forging an identity that transcended denigration, assimilation, and emulation. These individuals envisioned a process of empowerment that involved art as a projection of their high expectations for a promising future as fully enfranchised American citizens. After 1940, African-American art was to transform many aspects of American culture. This transformation is documented in the images that the artists created.
The 1939 exhibit "Contemporary Negro Art" at the Baltimore Museum of Art showcased a thriving visual arts movement. That landmark exhibition, however, gave little indication of the innovative art emerging from the African and African-American folk tradition. Years later, an understanding of that tradition by art critics would make a whittler a wood sculptor and a quilt-maker a fabric artist. Anderson J. Pigatt, Corre Robinson, Elizabeth Talford Scott, and Paula Phillips are contemporary African-American artists who are inheritors of an elaborate legacy that provides the knowledge for challenging current social-political thought and conventional concepts of aesthetics.
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Born in Baltimore in 1928, Anderson ("Andy") J. Pigatt has become a legend in his home community thanks to his skill as a master wood-carver and his well-known reverence for the interactive elements of wood as "tree flesh." The exhibition of his sculpture at Baltimore's Maryland Art Place (MAP) in the fall of 1998 offered a fierce demonstration of the synthesis of African and American woodcarving folk traditions that continue to produce sculptures and totems today. At the same time, the show affirmed Pigatt's work as part of a tradition of resistance that both records and comments on urban African-American life. His sculpture explores new conceptual vistas that merge a vision of working-class folk with the larger struggles of the civil rights and human rights movements in the twentieth century.
Twenty-six-year-old Corre Robinson accepts the weight of the folk tradition and transmutes it into an unusual form of pastel impressionism that incorporates people as elements in a natural landscape, whether in a garden or on a corner in inner city Baltimore. His images of people who survive and thrive in their community environment and attend to...