MS01.01.03.B01.F13.005

classified as crafts, thus he fitted readily into the flourishing artisan-related industry that was soon to get underway in Colonial America. We know that he aided the master potter at Williamsburg, Virginia and other colonial cities leaving behind a record of ceramic forms that are known as "Grotesque Jugs." He became the skilled iron-smither in New Orleans, forging the handsome balconies and grill work that adorned many of Lousiana's most prominent public and domestic buildings. He was a furniture maker - par excellence - having brought with him the skills of the carver from West Africa during the period of slavery. Numerous accounts could be given of his participation in the making of a stable visual culture in America replacing the provincial and accepted pattern of relying so very heavily on European importation.

The Afro-American's influence in the minor arts was taken for granted for many years since many of the skills associated with the making of crafts were often equated with specialized labor. The art of architecture, in which the slave also participated called for labor which suggests a functional ethos, and an acceptable design capable of fitting the limited materials on hand for building purposes. Perhaps the most highly symbolic presence of the survival of certain African types in art came not in the crafts or the painterly arts, but indeed in architecture. When left alone to design as he wished, a skilled slave often reached back to the continent of his birth and borrowed a functional concept in building which revealed the dynamic spirituality