In the early years of the twentieth century, African and African American artists, regardless of the medium in which they were working, had to confront at least three issues within the established non-black art world. First, their artworks were viewed as having neither place nor value in the non-black academy. Work created by black artists and writers, at least in the United States, was considered inferior to that created by white artists. Second, black artists who made their life experiences the subject of their art met with racism in the white art community, which granted little if any artistic merit to their work. Third, and sometimes contradictorily, the art of Africans and African Americans was commodified, and seen as a niche market. The production and marketing of ‘race records’ throughout the twentieth century, for example, illustrates some of the distinctions made between white art and black art. In the early twentieth century, black scholars, including W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke, debated the role of the artist, and particularly, as Leonard Harris shows, of literature, in the vindication of black humanity. It seems clear that now, as part of that same debate, a similar question about other forms of art can be raised. That question is: ‘What is the role of the black artist and art in advancing the status of black people?’ It is a question with political, social and aesthetic dimensions.