| Facts/Data
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Birth
1874 (Davidson County, Kentucky)
Death
1951 (Nashville, Tennessee)
Lived/Active
Tennessee
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Often Known For
sculptor-folk art, stone carver
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Categories of Interest
Black American Artists
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  The following, submitted January 2003, is is based on material provided by Allen Meadors, January 2003:
A native of Nashville and the son of former slaves, William Edmondson 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, the Cheekwood Museum of Art in Nashville organized a traveling exhibition to four other museum venues of about 40 pieces of his work in 2000-2001.
Special Periodical References are:
"The New York Times" (long feature story with photos), Sunday May 14, 2000 in Art/Architecture section.
"Folk Art Magazine" (feature story and front cover), Spring 2000.
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