black art

American  

noun

1. witchcraft; magic.

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black art British  

noun

1. another name for black magic

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Etymology

Origin of black art

First recorded in 1580–90

Example Sentences

Strictly speaking, these galleries—limited by gaps in the DIA’s holdings and by space—provide only an abbreviated history of black art.

From The Wall Street Journal • Jan. 17, 2026

While William Mariwi became a highly praised artist of religious iconography and Richard Rachidi the first qualified black art teacher in his home country, Malawi.

From BBC • Oct. 1, 2022

These streets of mud, in which the dead were laid out, also swarmed with “a wicked generation of pretenders to magic, to the black art, as they called it.”

From New York Times • May 10, 2021

It is home to one of the city’s most enviable collections of 19th and 20th-century black art, at the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum.

From Washington Times • Sep. 26, 2020

Here the reality that cyclotroneering was still very much a black art reasserted itself.

From "Big Science" by Michael Hiltzik