Review of Ashe to Amen: African Americans and Biblical Imagery

Abstract

From February of 2013 to January of 2014, the exhibit Ashe to Amen: African Americans and Biblical Imagery presented a vast array of artistic works that reflect the intercontinental and chronological rhythms and interventions that have influenced the ways in which African American people have engaged biblical texts. The exhibit included artifacts, textiles, paintings, mixed media projects, photography, sculpture, and film created by artists from West Africa, the Caribbean, and North America that speak to the ways in which people of African descent have appropriated the Bible to imagine new worlds that counter oppressive structures and ideologies.

Keywords:

• African American
• art
• biblical text
• Christian New Testament
• Hebrew Bible
• nkisi

Notes

Leslie King-Hammond, ed. “Introduction,” in From Ashe to Amen: African Americans and Biblical Imagery. (New York: Museum of Biblical Art, 2013), 7.

Press Release. Museum of Biblical Art, New York, NY, February 1, 2013.

See Vincent L. Wimbush, “Introduction,” in African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures. ed. Vincent L. Wimbush (New York: Continuum, 2001), 1–43 and “The Bible and African Americans: An Outline of an Interpretive History,” in Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation, ed. Cain Hope Felder (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1991), 81–97.

Theophus Smith, Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 6.

Richard Powell, Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 26.

A black community that existed from 1825 to 1857 in New York City until the community was forced to relocate to make room for Central Park.

See Wimbush, “Introduction.”

The heart-shaped fan also suggests the veve dedicated to Erzulie in Haitian Vodou.

Charles Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Aurora, CO: The Davies Group, 1995), 188.

Zora Neale Hurston, in The Sanctified Church (New York: Marlow, 1997), 70.