As the first independent African American religious denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church maintains a historic position as one of the oldest surviving African American institutions. Throughout the nineteenth century, this national religious community quickly expanded, requiring new structures and images to unify the denomination. Although the earliest art historical analyses of African American art include brief references to AME portraits, minimal scholarly consideration has been given to tracing the role of aesthetics, architecture and visual arts across the history of this institution. Patterns of Permanence: African Methodist Episcopal Architecture and Visual Culture examines the central role that aesthetic discourse, fine arts and architecture played in AME institutional intiatives across American politics, economics and culture.

The AME denomination, across its leaders and membership, established a cultural base of Black Formalist sensibilities rooted in uplift and cultural definition across architecture and visual arts. This aesthetic foundation provided communicative strategies for conveying equality and expressions of preclassical Black nationalism and classical Black nationalism. Across an introduction chapter, four content chapters and a concluding chapter, this book explores the following topics: the portraiture of the founding generation of African Methodism; the architectural and artistic development of Wilberforce University; the denominational project of Metropolitan AME Church as a national cathedral; and the development of a modern AME iconographic universe across denominational publications during the first half of the twentieth century. Recovering the aesthetic activity of this denomination illuminates broader patterns of African Americans actively shaping identity and community through image and placemaking practices.