God gives you a gift, you’ve got no right to neglect it*—a single-minded philosophy that’s driven many a man and woman, for better or worse, to great heights. Moses on Mount Sinai, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Michelle Bachmann on the steps of the Capitol. But how do you identify your gift? If you’re William Edmondson, a church-going hospital orderly in the South during Jim Crow, you have a vision from God: go sculpt. And so he did, using whatever stone was at hand and a railroad spike for a chisel.
Edmondson’s ram sculpture acquired late last year by the MIA, now on view in gallery G367.
It got him all the way to MOMA, in 1937—the museum’s first exhibition by an African-American artist. And now it’s taken him to the MIA, which recently acquired one of his sculptures of a ram, circa 1938 to 1942, apparently carved from a curbstone. The work is on view in gallery G367 and featured in the new issue of Verso, the MIA’s behind-the-scenes magazine for the iPad.
Edmondson’s “Crucifix” sculpture, circa 1940, from the “Bill Traylor, William Edmondson, and the Modernist Impulse” exhibition that traveled the country in 2004 and 2005.
City workers would drop off demolished chunks of limestone at Edmondson’s home in a segregated neighborhood of Nashville, like offerings, stoking the creative fire. This was the Lord’s work, and he never thought of it any differently. Never read any art books, never went to any lectures that weren’t from a pulpit. He carved Biblical characters, angels, eagles, rabbits, and other creatures—real and otherwise. Sold them along with the vegetables from his garden. Strangely enough, they embodied a lot of modernist art principles.
The famously irreverent MOMA director Alfred H. Barr, Jr. (his seminal undergraduate course on modern art required no reading aside from magazines like Vanity Fair and the New Yorker) admired this noble naivete. “He is pleased at praise, but as far as his work is concerned you can take it or leave it,” he said of Edmondson. “He scrupulously avoids all profanity, but he regards his work with a high good humor, and the doing of it pleases him mightily.”
One of Edward Weston’s images of Edmondson’s sculptures, from 1941, laid out in his Nashville yard.
Barr had come across Edmondson’s work in a series of photographs, including the portrait above, taken by Louise Dahl-Wolfe, a fashion photographer for Harper’s Bazaar. She had been introduced to the stone-carver through friends of a neighbor of Edmondson. (The MIA also recently acquired one of her photographs of Edmondson in his backyard studio.) The friends became collectors of Edmondson’s sculptures. Edward Weston, the great modernist photographer, came out to shoot him. But Edmondson only had one other exhibition during his lifetime, at a local Nashville gallery in 1941.
*A variation of Jacques Cousteau’s more secular charge (featured in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore): “When one man, for whatever reason, has the opportunity to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself.”