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.

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.

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.

[4] 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.