About the Film

This feature high-definition documentary explores the visual arts sibling of jazz, the blues and gospel.

As the visual interpretation of life from America’s former slave culture, this improvisational style is a unique artistic view in American history—and one of America’s few very home-grown artistic styles.

This film seeks to address the following questions:  What is the meaning and history of this movement? Who are the artists and why do they create? Has Afro-American improvisational visual art been disregarded by the mainstream art world as less important?   Have terms such as “outsider”, “visionary,” “primitive,” “folk,” “self-taught,” and “naïve”—all of which have been applied to this particular style—downgraded the importance of  this art? 

Art historian and author Paul Arnett says that these are some of the only terms in the art world that describe the artists, and not the art.  Are these terms classist, or racist?  The current movement toward recognizing and elevating great  Southern African-American talents, such as Dial, is causing the artistic intelligentsia to reexamine its own prejudices. 

“I think that it would not be a controversial thing to say that there has been racism in the art world,” Dr. Jacquelyn Serwer, chief curator of the Corcoran Galley of Art, says. “There’s been racism in almost every sphere.”

Are works produced by artists who never received formal training equal in dollar value to pieces created by talent honed in art classes?  On a more fundamental level, what is art, where is it born, and who decides what is great art?

“It asks us all about genius,” curator Dr. Alvia Wardlaw says, “and where does it reside?"