Souls Grown Deep Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to documenting, preserving, and promoting the work of leading contemporary African American artists from the Southeastern United States. Its mission is to include their contributions in the canon of American art history through acquisitions from its collection by major museums, as well as through exhibitions, programs, and publications. The foundation derives its name from a 1921 poem by Langston Hughes titled "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," the last line of which is "My soul has grown deep like the rivers. The foundation is led by Maxwell L. Anderson, who serves as its president, and a member of its board of trustees. Anderson was previously director of the Dallas Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Collection
The Souls Grown Deep Foundation Collection contains over 1,100 works by more than 160 artists, two-thirds of whom are women. Ranging from large-scale assemblages to works on paper, the foundation is particularly strong in works dating from the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. to the end of the twentieth century. The roots of these works can be traced to slave cemeteries and secluded woods. Following the Civil War, when the southern agrarian economy collapsed and rural African American sharecroppers and tenant farmers were forced to migrate for survival to major population centers—particularly in and around Birmingham, Alabama, where iron and steel production created jobs—a new and more public language of quilts, funerary, and yard arts arose. Beyond painting, sculpture, assemblage, drawing, and textile-making, this tradition also included music, dance, oral literature, informal theater, culinary arts, and more. Much like jazz musicians, the artists of this tradition reflect the rich, symbolic world of the black rural South through highly charged works that address a wide range of revelatory social and political subjects. Among the artists represented are , , , , , , , , Joe Light, and the .
Origins
Souls Grown Deep Foundation was founded in 2010, but traces its roots to the mid-1980s, when William S. Arnett, an art historian and collector, began to collect the artworks of largely undiscovered African American artists across nine southeastern states. Developed outside of the structure of schools, galleries, and museums, these rich yet largely unknown African American visual art traditions present a distinct post–Civil Rights phenomenon that offers powerful insight and fresh perspectives into the most compelling political and social issues of our time. The majority of the works and ephemeral documents held by the foundation were compiled by Arnett and his sons over three decades, with the goal of creating a collection that could serve as a record and legacy of this culture. By the mid-1990s Arnett's efforts culminated in an ambitious survey exhibition of this tradition titled ', presented in conjunction with the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta and in partnership with the City of Atlanta and the Michael C. Carlos Museum of Emory University. The subsequent two-volume publication Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South, remains the most in-depth examination of the movement. Several exhibitions in recent years have drawn works primarily from the collection today in the care of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, including ', organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2002, which traveled to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, Chrysler Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, High Museum of Art, and four other museums; ' at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in 2006; ', organized by the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 2011, which traveled to the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Mint Museum, and the High Museum of Art; and , organized by the Ackland Art Museum in 2016, which traveled to the American Folk Art Museum and the High Museum of Art.
