Afro-American art includes painting, sculpture, graphic arts, crafts, architecture, and other visual productions of blacks in the Americas. Art “played a central role in birth, life, and death” (Driskell, 1995, p. 7) among Africans from slavery to freedom. They invented human and animal figures in wood and metal to honor tribal ancestors and gods or to celebrate religious rituals. Carvings of plants and weapons in ivory and bone honored nature or tribal warriors. African pottery, weaving, and surface designs in line and color reinvented ancient decorative traditions, which influenced slave and free black artisans in America. Black builders, cabinet-makers, ironsmiths, painters, sculptors, and printmakers composed artworks utilizing West and Central African forms. They built plantation mansions showing Africanist balconies and porches of iron supports and ornaments. Black sign painters, portrait limners, and engravers also produced work using Western European motifs and styles. Free-born Joshua Johnston, based in Baltimore, painted highly regarded portraits of white patrons. Johnston, the first black painter to gain public recognition, was followed by New York freeman and engraver Patrick Reason, whose stills were acclaimed.

Others gained wide respect, if not justice, after emancipation in 1865. Seeking refuge from the antiblack racism of the post-Reconstruction era, Henry Ossawa Tanner moved to Paris, where he earned international acclaim for paintings of biblical scenes. He painted mostly Euro-American subjects, unlike his famous “The Banjo Lesson” (1893). The latter portrays an old black man teaching a boy how to play the banjo, an African instrument. This memorable image appears in sidebars of history books. Black sculptress Metta Vaux Warrick Fuller depicted “the hopes and sufferings of her people.” Her most important work, “The Awakening of Ethiopia” (ca. 1914), shows an Egyptian woman freeing herself from mummy-like bandages and standing up, foreshadowing the “New Negro Arts Movement.”

That movement, also called the Harlem Renaissance and fed by a mass out-migration of rural southern blacks, ushered in the modern, urban period in black artistic expression. Woodcut printer, illustrator, and muralist Aaron Douglas was easily Harlem's major artist. Using stylized silhouettes, earth colors, and sharp angles, he fashioned evocative images of the Afro-American past and jazz music.