Black Art, Divine Witness

By Theresa Rézeau

Every year, Black History Month offers a sacred pause. It is a time to remember, to honour, and to imagine. First established in the United States in 1926 as “Negro History Week” by historian Carter G. Woodson, and later expanded into a full month, it was created to correct the deliberate silences of history. Too many contributions by Black people had been ignored, erased, or dismissed. Woodson believed that history, when truthfully told, could liberate the imagination and empower communities. Black History Month ignites a global reckoning, honoring epic legacies of struggle and triumph, urging us to amplify Black voices and shape a just future.

In the United Kingdom, Black History Month is observed in October, a reminder that this is not only an American story but a global one. Across continents, the histories of Black people are histories of displacement and survival, oppression and resistance, silence and song. But Black History Month is not only about recalling past struggles, it is also about celebrating resilience, beauty, and creativity as forces that carry divine meaning.

Art plays a vital role in this work of remembrance. For centuries, artists of African descent have carved visions of faith and freedom into canvas, marble, wood, and sound. Their works are not simply cultural artefacts but sacred gestures, acts of testimony that speak to God’s presence in history and humanity’s search for dignity. Black art is, in many ways, a form of theology, a wrestling with questions of suffering and hope, exile and belonging, despair and resurrection.

Two nineteenth-century pioneers, Henry Ossawa Tanner and Edmonia Lewis, remind us that art can be both a form of prayer and a declaration of justice. And alongside them, contemporary artists such as Zanele Muholi, Kehinde Wiley, and Jean-Michel Basquiat show how this sacred witness continues, often in complex, fractured, and profoundly inclusive ways.

Henry Ossawa Tanner, the first African American painter to gain international recognition, grew up in a household steeped in faith. His father was a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, his mother an escaped slave who found freedom through the Underground Railroad. Faith and liberation shaped Tanner’s life and vision. One of his most beloved works, The Banjo Lesson (1893), depicts an elderly man teaching a young boy to play music. The scene is intimate and tender, brown tones envelop the pair in warm light, the banjo cradled like a sacred vessel. In a society that caricatured Black life, Tanner painted dignity, memory, and continuity. The work is theological not because it quotes scripture, but because it reveals covenantal love, a glimpse of the divine in the everyday.

Tanner also turned to biblical subjects, most famously The Annunciation (1898). Mary is not gilded or idealised but a modest young woman in a simple blue robe, seated on a rough wooden bed, bathed in a vertical shaft of white light. The room’s ochre walls glow with holy radiance. Nearby, in The Resurrection of Lazarus (1896), Tanner presents Christ’s miracle not as spectacle but as the trembling astonishment of a community confronting divine power.

Henry Ossawa Tanner ( 1859 - 1937), The Resurrection of Lazarus (1896). Medium: Oil on Canvas. Location: Musée d'Orsay.

Taken together, these works reframe theology. Holiness is not in empire or dominance, but in humanity itself, in a mother’s obedience, in a family’s resilience, in the overlooked. For a people systematically denied dignity, Tanner’s canvases were visual sermons of hope.

If Tanner found theology in brushstrokes, Edmonia Lewis carved it into stone. Born to a free African American father and a Native American mother, she faced racism and exclusion from an early age, but against the odds, she became one of the first Black women to achieve international recognition as a sculptor. Her Forever Free (1867) commemorates the abolition of slavery. Two figures rise from marble, a man upright, arm lifted in triumph, and a woman kneeling at his side, chains falling from his wrist. The polished surface glows in light, turning cold stone into a hymn of liberation. 

Edmonia Lewis (1844 - 1907), Forever Free (1867). Medium: Marble . Location: Howard University Gallery of Art.

It is Exodus in marble, God’s power to deliver embodied in Black form. In Hagar in the Wilderness (1875), Lewis sculpted the biblical outcast, hands clasped in despair yet poised for divine encounter. For Lewis, Hagar embodied women who were both marginalised and chosen. The smooth folds of her robe and the solemn tilt of her head transform suffering into sacred endurance. Her sculptures were not neutral neoclassicism. They were theological protest, asserting that God’s story belongs to the oppressed as much as to the powerful.

Beyond Tanner and Lewis, the sacred witness of Black artistry spans the globe. Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series narrates the exodus of African Americans from the rural South, each panel a modern psalm of survival. Faith Ringgold’s quilts stitch together biblical echoes of Exodus with ancestral memory.

Across Africa, El Anatsui turns discarded bottle caps into shimmering altarpieces of renewal, while Esther Mahlangu encodes Ndebele spiritual traditions into vibrant patterns as radiant as stained glass. In South Africa, Zanele Muholi’s Somnyama Ngonyama series of photographic self-portraits confronts viewers with piercing gazes, their skin darkened through contrast, adorned with everyday objects that become ritual crowns. Muholi’s work insists that Black identity itself is sacred, unflinching and divine.

In the United States, Kehinde Wiley paints Black men and women in poses borrowed from Old Master paintings. In Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps (2005), a young Black man rides a rearing horse against a golden sky, surrounded by baroque flourishes. Wiley’s work rewrites the canon, declaring that holiness and heroism belong to every skin.

To call Black art inherently theological is not to say it is always Christian, or even religious in intention. Many artists engage the sacred obliquely, through ritual, memory, or protest. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (History of the Black People) (1983) layers African cosmology, Christian saints, and cryptic symbols of death and power. His jagged crowns and skeletal figures recall both martyrdom and resurrection, but always in fragments. For Basquiat, theology is not smooth dogma but rupture, an unfinished gospel scrawled in graffiti and pigment. Black art engages theology not only through church tradition but also through ancestral rituals, Afro-Caribbean cosmologies, and secular visions of justice. Its sacredness lies less in doctrinal clarity than in its refusal to separate humanity from divinity, justice from beauty, liberation from faith.

Though Tanner and Lewis lived over a century ago, their works remain profoundly relevant. Tanner’s The Annunciation still proclaims that holiness belongs to the humble, not the powerful. Lewis’s Forever Free still declares that emancipation is not only political but sacred. Muholi’s self-portraits and Wiley’s reimagined icons remind us that the struggle continues, and that Black bodies are still altars of revelation.

Black History Month calls us to remember, but also to act. It invites us to honour the past, confront the present, and shape the future. Through marble, canvas, lens, and paint, Black artists carry theology into culture, transforming creativity into testimony. As we stand before their works, paintings that glow with sacred light, sculptures that rise with freedom’s cry, photographs that stare back with unyielding presence, we are reminded of a truth as urgent now as it was then, God is with the oppressed. Through art, their witness continues.