Arnett exhibited works from these collections and delivered lectures at over 100 museums and educational institutions in the United States and abroad.
He collected the ritual arts from West and Central Africa, particularly the numerous cultures of Nigeria, Benin (formerly Dahomey), the Cameroon Grassfields, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
In 1994, he donated a significant portion of his extensive collection of African art to the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University,[5] then under the direction of Maxwell Anderson.
By the mid-1990s Arnett's efforts resulted in an ambitious project to survey the visual tradition of the African American South: an exhibition and two-volume book, titled Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South, which was ultimately presented at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta and remains the most in-depth, scholarly examination of this phenomenon.
[6] Subsequently, Arnett developed a series of related publications, including several books on the quilts created by women living in Gee's Bend, Alabama.
[10] He spent years gathering extensive documentation and amassing a near-definitive collection of work crucial to the understanding of this cultural phenomenon.