From Norman Lewis to Joe Overstreet, the Harlem Renaissance — derived
tradition of African - American abstract painting (which has historically had a primarily black audience) is intermingled with the
tradition of so - called self -
taught or outsider artists such as Bill Traylor and Bessie Harvey (whose audience has been
mostly in the rural south and
mostly black); the more recent wave of African - American conceptualism represented by Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, and others (whose work