Customer Reviews

Souls Grown Deep, Vol. 2: African American Vernacular Art

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Anyone that has Vol 1 needs to buy this Vol or even if you have an interest in some of the listed artists in this book and don't have Vol 1 buy this one. Vol 1 had a general history of African American Vernacular Art where as this volume has a more in depth look at particular artists and their enviroments. The essays are longer and you get many more examples of each artists work as well as many pictures of the artists in their environments or the art in the original environments or even in a few cases the artists working on pieces.

To see the art in it's original environment gives the proper perspective to understanding the nature of the art.

I think this book is definately the equal or if not better than the first and it is wonderful of the Arnetts to put two books together of such high quality at affordable prices. I dream of a third book.

When these books sell out people will be climbing over the top of each other to get them and the price of secondhand copies will skyrocket.
Don't miss out

To start with the positives: Every work is shown in full color. The well-chosen works of Thornton Dial and Ronald Lockett give you the full scope of these artists' work. But the hodgepodge of other artists--and the works illustrated--seem to have been picked at random, with no criteria whatsoever and still less discrimination.

Some familiar, popular artists are over-represented. For examples, Mary T. Smith gets 27 pages of lovely paintings that swiftly become repetitious. Purvis Young gets 39 pages; photos of his illustrated books take up way too much space. Mary Proctor is passed over in a twinkling, we get to see none of her vibrant, ecstatic pictures of women in religious rapture.

These mixed blessings aside, the book becomes a real dog's lunch. The reader must trudge through Pearl Fryar's site-specific topiary "sculptures" in the outdoors, and George Kornegay's hillside of used tires. Down through Emmer Sewell's old automobile tire surmounted by a plastic chair, and Asberry Davis's piles of junk overgrown with weeds: "I tie things up to my fences and my trees."

Then there's Dinah Young--whose many illustrated works include a pile of logs, a milk jug and old broom; dead branches piled at the foot of a tree; a branch atop of an upended 5-gallon paint can; and backyard graves for a baby possum and raccoon.

The clueless interviewer assumes that she's making a statement.

She disagrees: "How many times I got to tell you . . . I'm just piling up old junk. I'm doing not a damn thing else."

The interviewer will have none of that. He tries again: "Don't you care how they look?"

"I don't make no design of them. I don't be making ANYTHING." She is so right!

Worse yet, this tome is MASSIVE, with a trim size of 10.5" by 12.5" and a weight of more than 7 pounds. With half as many artists and only a third of the illustrations, this might have been a far, far better book and a real joy.

An eye-opening overview of the significant art happening in the USA in the second half of the twentieth century, far from the eyes of the New York tastemakers.