On May 14, 2014, Jean-Michel Basquiat s The Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta sold at Sotheby s for a little under $24 million. It is a monumental work, a generous 15 feet long, covered in Basquiat s famous chicken-scratch writing and love of anatomy, made up of five separate canvas panels. Considered by Sotheby s as among Basquiat s most political works, the painting offers a personal grievance and celebration of a great tradition of art from the South, raw and untrained.Â
Parallel to Basquiat s own body of work, painters in the Mississippi Delta have been creating folk art for generations while making use of unconventional mediums and written inscriptions, creating rich personal accounts and intimate recreations of life in the South. As we consider Black history this month, it would be criminal to fail to acknowledge southern Black people s rich tradition of visual folk art, overlooked and undervalued by the art world but perhaps the most quintessentially American