ration to generation, and an understanding of art which
conceived of it as an integral part of the whole of life rather than as a
beautiful object set apart from mundane experience. Song and dance, for
example, were involved in the African's daily experience of work, play,
love, and worship. In sculpture, painting and pottery, the African used
his art to decorate the objects of his daily life rather than to make
art objects for their own sake. The African could not have imagined going
to an art gallery or to a musical concert. Art was produced by artisans
rather than by artists. This meant that slave artisans in America could
continue to produce decorative work, and slave laborers in the field
could continue to sing. Art and life could still be combined, though in a
restricted manner.

However, while the African brought his feeling for art with him, the
content of his art was actually changed as the result of his American
slave experience. The dominant African arts were sculpture,
metal-working, and weaving. In America, the Afro-American created song,
dance, music, and, later, poetry. The skills displayed in African art
were technical, rigid, control disciplined. They were characteristically
sober, restrained and heavily conventionalized.

In contrast, the Afro-American cultural spirit became emotional,
exuberant, and sentimental. This is to say the Afro-American
characteristics which have been generally thought of as being African and
primitive--his naivety, his exuberance and his spontaneity--are, in
reality, his response to his American experience and not a part of his
African heritage. They are to be understood as the African's emotional
reaction to his American ordeal of slavery. Out of this environmental
along with its suffering and deprivation, has evolved an Afro-American
culture.

LeRoi Jones, the contemporary poet, playwright, and jazz critic, points
out in "Blues People" that the earliest Negro contributions to formal art
did not reflect this genuine Afro-American culture. It was only with the
emergence of the "New Negro" and the Negro Renaissance that this folk
culture entered the mainstream of the art world. Previously, those
Negroes who had gained enough education to participate in literary
creation generally strove to join the American middle class, and tried to
disavow all connections with their lower class background. In doing
this, they were only following the same route as that pursued by othe