James Porter's research on African influences in African American art

What would an African influence look like in an American artwork? The opening tells us that James Porter identified those connections, but we still need to understand what he found.

His research gives us something concrete: walking sticks, jugs, and textiles made by African American craftspeople. These household items had characteristics linking them “iconographically” to West African artifacts. Think of recognizable imagery or symbols connecting the works. We aren't given the particular designs, so there's no need to invent them. The important discovery is that evidence of an African artistic heritage survived in objects made in the Americas.

Notice that Porter was both a painter and an art historian. The opening emphasizes his scholarship, but that doesn't mean he wasn't an artist himself. His own paintings will matter later.

The next paragraph gives us a different kind of discovery. Duncanson and Johnston were associated with the Hudson River school, but their works had been attributed to Euro-American artists. Porter established that both men had African ancestry. That changes our understanding of who produced those works and whose achievements belong in the history of African American art.

Keep the finding precise. Knowing an artist's ancestry doesn't, by itself, tell us which artistic traditions influenced a particular painting. We aren't told that Porter identified these men by spotting African symbols in their work. The earlier crafts example concerns connections between objects; this example establishes the identities of artists.

Porter published that finding and thousands of others in his 1943 book. Only two other books devoted exclusively to African American artists' accomplishments existed then, both by Alain LeRoy Locke. That's a small body of published work. It doesn't mean no one had ever cared about the subject, and it doesn't make Porter its first scholar in every respect.

So what did Porter add?

Locke had surveyed the field, but neither book examined the crucial question of earlier African influences (paragraph 2). Porter investigated those earlier African sources. This is the distinction to keep: studying African American art and studying its African connections aren't the same project. Locke had done the former; Porter made the latter central to his contribution.

The long sentence describing his book gives him credit for doing two things together. He placed African American art within the larger history of art in the Americas while preserving its distinctive connections to African artisanship. Broader context didn't require treating those African ties as unimportant. We should keep both parts of that description rather than lose one in the sentence's length.

His painting offers a possible reason for his sensitivity to those ties. He consciously maintained them in his own work, combining portrait painting with knowledge of African cultural history. That could make him especially alert to similar connections as a scholar. The word “may” matters: we're being offered a possible explanation, not a complete account of why he chose his career.

The final paragraph shows the research continuing. Porter added chapters and corrected findings, some necessarily based on incomplete evidence. He established Patrick Reason's birth year and identified Edmonia Lewis's grave. These are examples of the ongoing historical work, not separate main points we need to memorize.

His unfinished project widened the inquiry again: how had African art influenced the Western world more generally? That's broader than the African heritage of African American art alone. Don't confuse this new project's scope with the later revisions of his earlier book.

The account keeps returning to what made Porter's scholarship distinctive. Earlier writers had studied African American art, but he established its African connections and continued developing that history through discoveries, corrections, and plans for a wider investigation.