A Foundation's Mission to Spotlight Self-Taught Southern Black Artists

In 2010, the art historian and collector William S. Arnett came to the realization that the self-taught artists from the Deep South that he was collecting and writing about for more than 40 years weren’t making it into major museum collections. To place the works nationwide, he established The Souls Grown Deep Foundation.

“The mission of the foundation is to document, preserve and promote the understanding of Southern African-American vernacular art,” says Paul Arnett, the Director of the Atlanta-based Souls Grown Deep Foundation. “It’s ultimately traceable to the ways my father began his collecting activities in this field in the 70s. He wanted to document not simply individual artists, or masterworks but to put together a panorama picture of an entire civilization in the Deep South that had not really been understood in a coherent way.” Paul adds, “He collected as an archivist would and not simply in the way a regular old art lover would.”

The foundation takes its name from Langston Hughes’ early 20th century poem, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, aiming to add Southern Black voices into the annals of art history. The mission belies the foundation’s larger goal of telling a more complete and complicated visual story of America. The foundation holds over 1,200 works by some 150 Southern Black artists. The collection includes works of painting, sculpture, assemblage and photographs that document site-specific works found throughout the rural areas of the American South.