ABSTRACT
The prohibition of literacy for enslaved artisans and racist attitudes toward black makers has meant that official records of their labor are lost to time or only obliquely accessible. The impulse for racializing folk art can license sloppy scholarship, simplistic notions of identity, and most damagingly, marginalize other forms of black production as the debates around “black folk art” would show. The writer’s recognition of feeling, voice, and sincerity characterizes the sense of authenticity frequently ascribed to “the folk”—aspects that the Mexican muralists, whose modernism Sargent Johnson admired, linked with peasant and indigenous cultures. Between the political gains of the Civil Rights Movement and ascent of militant activism during the 1960s and 1970s, scholars of folk art and craft became increasingly interested in identifying retentions of memories, skill, and aesthetics from Africa that survived in handmade objects themselves.
