The Art of William Edmondson

by Cheekwood Museum of Art, John Wetenhall (Foreword)

A native of Nashville and the son of former slaves, William Edmondson (1872 - 1951) was the first African American artist to be featured in a solo show at New York's Museum of Modern Art (1937). For this exhibition MoMA director Alfred Barr remarked, "Usually the naïve artist works in the easier medium of painting. Edmondson, however, has chosen to work in limestone, which he attacks with extraordinary courage and directness, to carve out simple, emphatic forms." Robert Bishop, the late director of the Museum of American Folk Art, declared Edmondson to be "one of the outstanding folk carvers--if not the outstanding one--of the twentieth century." Edmondson's first works were memorial gravestones. Later he created animal, human, and celestial figures. His carvings were inspired by his faith, community, and culture. He told the story of how God spoke to him. "I was out in the driveway with some old pieces of stone when I heard a voice telling me to pick up my tools and start to work on a tombstone. I looked up in the sky and right there in the noon daylight He hung a tombstone out for me to make." Showcasing Edmondson's sculpture and placing it in the mainstream of American art for the first time, this lavishly illustrated volume accompanies a traveling exhibition organized by the Cheekwood Museum of Art in Nashville. In new interpretations that challenge long-held views about Edmondson's artistic naieveté, the essays emphasize his profound and intimate connection to his community and its traditions. Adding immeasurably to the understanding of Edmondson's art are photographs by Edward Weston, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, and Consuelo Kanaga that show the artist in his community and his workplace.

232 pages, Paperback

First published January 4, 2000

Reviews

[Diann Blakely]

America continues to be obsessed with folk or "outsider" art, much of which is created below the Mason-Dixon line. This obsession raises as many questions--about authenticity, consumerism, race, regional difference, and cultural politics--as the art itself. To varying degrees, such questions are addressed in several recent books that reveal the breadth of this hard-to-define genre, which encompasses everything from sculpture to drawing to photography.

These questions aren't, however, explored in this catalog; instead, the book's essays insist on narrow answers that betray their origins in scholarly agendas rather than in Edmondson himself. Robert Farris Thompson's view of the Nashville sculptor, who has been called "the greatest folk carver of the 20th century," achieves the best balance until Thompson tilts toward a false dichotomy "There is a Euro-American mainstream. There is an Afro-Atlantic mainstream. Edmondson's forte was to sail boats in both streams."

It's more generous and more precise to say that Edmondson conjoins the two streams in his work. In the case of his statue of Eleanor Roosevelt, the sculptor draws equally upon the actual and the archetypal: "Eleanor" surrounds its figure with a suggestion of the luxuriant, fur-collared coat the First Lady wore on her 1934 trip to Nashville, and yet the pose replicates one seen in Kongo art, as Thompson points out: arms akimbo, hands planted firmly on her hips. "Ready to meet the challenge" or "ready for confrontation," Thompson translates, alerting readers to the origin of the now stereotypical image of the sassy black woman.

Despite their problems, Thompson's essay and one or two others provide ample introduction to the sculptures themselves, which, even in photographed reproductions, make their power palpable and enduring.

(published originally in the NASHVILLE SCENE)