Oversized book edited and annotated by Alain Locke about "negro[s] and the negro theme In art." Contents primarily composed of images of artworks with sectional critical commentary, illustrations, and biographical indexes of artists in three parts: "The Negro as Artist," "The Negro in Art," and "The Ancestral Arts." Artists include Juan Pareja, Sebastian Gomez, Joshua Johnston, Robert S. Duncanson, Edward M. Bannister, Edmonia Lewis, William Simpson, Henry Ossawa Tanner, William A. Harper, Edwin A. Harleston, Wm. Edouard Scott, William M. Farrow, Paston Argudin y Pedroso, Henry B. Jones, Meta Warrick Fuller, May Howard Jackson, Sargent Johnson, N. Elizabeth Prophet, Laura Wheeler Waring, John W. Hardrick, Archibald J. Motley, Palmer Hayden, William A. Cooper, Allan R. Freelon, Malvin Gray Johnson, Aaron Douglas, Hale A. Woodruff, Dox Thrash, Horace Pippin, William Edmondson, Leslie G. Bolling, Augusta Savage, Richard Barthé, Ronald Moody, Charles Alston, Francisco Lord, Teodoro Ramos-Blanco, Lillian Dorsey, Joseph Delaney, Ramon Loy, Albert Pena, Elton Fax, James A. Porter, Florence Purviance, Lois Mailou Jones, Robert S. Pious, Earle W. Richardson, Romare Bearden, Rex Gorleigh, William H. Johnson, Allan R. Crite, Samuel J. Brown, James Lesesne Wells, Ernest Crichlow, Georgette Seabrook, Charles Sebree, Vertis Hayes, Gwendolyn Bennett, Charles Sallee, John C. Lutz, Ronald Joseph, Wm. Carter, Norman Lewis, Albert Wells, Earl Walker, Robert Blackburn, Charles Davis, Walter Ellison, Henry Avery, Eldzier Cortor, Elba Lightfoot, Samuel Countee, Robert Neal, Lamar Weaver, Wm. Hayden, Fred Flemister, John Carlis, Elizabeth Catlett, Wm. Artis, Joseph Kersey, Henry Bannarn, Elmer Simms Campbell, Bernard Goss, Wilmer Jennings, Ernest Crichlow, Hughie Lee-Smith, Charles White, Marvin Smith, Wm. Carter, Hale Woodruff, Charles Lawson, William E. Smith, Charles Lee-Smith, and Jacob Lawrence. Publication additionally includes works by non-Black artists depicting Black, by Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Thomas Gainsborough, Theodore Gericault, Winslow Homer, Thomas H. Benton, Reginald Marsh, Diego Rivera, and many others. Publication concludes with ethnographic works and related works by Modernists such as Picasso, Modigliani, Lipchitz, and others.

The Negro's career in the fine arts is little known either to the general public or the racial public. There are two reasons for this. There are two reasons for this. One, which this book seeks to help correct, is the comparative inaccessibility of the materials. The other is a prevalent impression that the fine arts, with their more formalized techniques, are a less characteristic and less congenial mode of expression for the Negro's admitted artistic genius than the more spontaneous arts of music, dance, drama, or poetry. Such views ignore the fact that, although the interpretive, emotional arts have been the Negro's special forte in America, his dominant arts in the African homeland were the decorative and craft arts. These,— sculpture in wood, bone and ivory, metal-working, weaving, pottery, combined with skillful surface decoration in line and color, involve every skill in the category of the European fine arts, even if not in specific terms of the European traditions of easel painting, marble sculpture, engraving and etching. The Western world knows today, belatedly, that the Negro was a master artist in the idioms of his original culture, and that the characteristic African virtuosity was in decoration and design. It also admits and admires the vitality and originality of this African art, and judges it almost without peer among the primitive art traditions of the world." -- from book's introduction.