In Africa, skilled artisans reflect the ways of the community - working in gold, bronze, wood, ivory, and bead. They create beautiful and sacred objects to help the community practice its rituals and religion. African art embellishes the appearance of life's everyday objects - the geometric walls of mosques, the painted walls of huts, the villages, the sun baked houses create a street mosaic.

Blacks who arrived in the Atlantic seaboard colonies came from African cultures rich in artisanship. The first art, produced around 1619, took the form of fine handicrafts. For several decades some African artisans worked side by side with white artisans, trading techniques with their European colleagues and using time tested skills, like leather work, pottery, basketry and textile making and dyeing. But about 1650, many skilled black artisans were barred from exercising their craft work, as slavery became the norm for African arrivals. Most of the blacks who survived the ordeal of the middle passage were put to backbreaking labor in the fields and most of this ancient heritage was lost. Skills essential to the slaves everyday lives, such as basket weaving, sewing and woodcarving survived.

Slave owners came to realize in the colonies during the 18th century that a slave with a natural talent for some craft was worth far more as an artisan than as a field hand. And as the white population grew, so did the need for skilled black artisans.

Following the American revolution which placed limitations on imports, slave owners were forced to depend more heavily on goods produced by skilled black artisans. Some of our country's founding fathers put their slaves to the task of manufacturing; George Washington attempted to produce iron with slave labor at his Mount Vernon plantation; and Thomas Jefferson built a nail factory at his Virginia birthplace, the Shadwell plantation, with the help and services of several slaves.

From time to time, the highly valued slave artisans might also be allowed to hire out their services and keep a portion of the profit - one way some slaves were able to save money to buy their freedom. The practice of hiring out slave artisans spread beyond the plantations and into factories in the first half of the 19th century. Factory owners rented slave artisans at full factory wages, even provided them room and board; and in the late 1830's slave artisans came to dominate employment in the manufacture of rope and bagging in Kentucky and in the tobacco and salt processing factories of Virginia.

Today because of those slave artisans who have paved the way and kept the flame burning, an unbreakable thread of African American creative impulses reaches from the days of the first slaves, with their African-born crafts, through the 19th century. Since 1619, Africans in America have crafted, drawn, sculpted, painted and photographed in ways that reflect themselves and the world they lived in. The taut canvas created by black life in America has required not only that they use their emotions, intellect, and vision to enrich and redefine African American existence, but also that they put a triumphant black imprint on art in America.