Afro-American Folk Art and Crafts
edited by William R. Ferris

This omnibus volume offers a unique look at a fascinating and evocative strain of art that has emerged chiefly in the rural American South and in the black cultural centers as blacks migrated across the continent. Pictorial quilts, sculpture and carvings, basketry, pottery, forged metal, musical instruments, and dwellings--these are among the forms that express this appealingly quaint yet powerful presence in American art and the African folk heritage from which this wonderful art springs. Celebrating its African folkroots and the individual artists whose lives are so closely intertwined with their art, this illuminating introduction collects writings by sixteen notable scholars of this rich and varied treasury of folk culture.

William R. Ferris is the former director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. He is currently the senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Among his many awards are the Charles Frankel Prize of the National Endowment for the Humanities.