Answer to Question 1
African-American painters and sculptors made public the social concerns of black poets and writers. In picturing their experience, they drew on African folk idioms and colloquial forms of native expression; but they also absorbed the radically new styles of European modernism. Among these painters, there emerged a blues aesthetic that featured bold colors, angular forms, and rhythmic, stylized compositions. Many artists took inspiration from the improvisational phrasing and syncopated rhythms of jazz. The works of Romare Bearden, for example, feature abrupt shifts in scale and strident colors and use music itself as their subjects. The issue of racial equality is still explored today, by artists like Kara Walker. Knowing the liberation and racial freedom are ongoing processes, Walker brings to contemporary art a subtle and complex examination of the tangled relationships between white and black Americans.
Blues and jazz music are perhaps the most important contributions by African-Americans to world culture and serve as a good representation of the fight for racial equality. Truly an American art form, jazz is a combination of African and Afro-Caribbean rhythmic styles and European and African-American concepts of harmony, melody, and tone color. As a performance art, jazz depends on the interaction of the ensemble's members as they improvise, illustrating the ideal nature of harmony between people. As trumpeter Wynton Marsalis states, Jazz is more than the best expression there is of American culture; it is the most democratic of arts. Later in the century, African-Americans again revolutionized music with the emergence of hip-hop styles. A product of the inner-city American subculture, hip-hop brings together loud, percussive music, the spoken word, and street-dance, generating a raw vitality that captures the experiences of many African-Americans.
Answer to Question 2
B
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