"'Bill Traylor, William Edmondson, and the Modernist Impulse' is the first large-scale exhibition focusing on the works of two major figures in American and African American art history: Bill Traylor (1854-1949), a draftsman, and William Edmondson (1874-1951), a sculptor. Although Traylor and Edmondson are typically defined as "folk" or "outsider" artists whose works reflect the roots of African American culture, their work was discovered and first discussed in the broader context of modernism. Born a slave in 1854, Bill Traylor worked as a cotton laborer throughout much of his life. At the age of 85, while living on the streets in downtown Montgomery, Alabama, he picked up a pencil and began to draw. When he died ten years later, he had created more than 1,500 works of art that simultaneously pulse with the musical energy of the blues and reflect on the economic depression and race relations in Alabama during the 1930s and 1940s. William Edmondson was born into poverty in 1874, and in the early 1930s he began to gather discarded stones carving them into simple, but powerful tombstones. He died in 1951 leaving behind a body of work full of strongly abstract forms and divine inspiration. Paradoxically, Edmondson and Traylor were among the first African Americans to gain recognition from the official art world. In 1937 Edmondson was the first black artist to be exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Traylor's work was shown both in Montgomery and in New York in the 1940s. After World War II and the deaths of both artists (1949 and 1951), shifting priorities in institutional culture, politics, and taste, but especially the dominance of Greenbergian aesthetic dogmatism, removed artists like Traylor and Edmondson from a (by now much narrower) view of modern art. As a result, the work of both artists fell into oblivion for several decades. However, the civil rights movement and black cultural movements in the 1960s paved the way for a reevaluation and rediscovery. ... 'Bill Traylor, William Edmondson, and the Modernist Impulse' is the first exhibition, however, in which their work and careers will be discussed outside of the reductive framework of "self-taught" art -- namely, within the broader context of American and European culture of the first half of the twentieth century. The aesthetic language of the work of both Edmondson and Traylor, its simplicity, freshness, and independence -- in other words, its radical modernity -- made it so attractive for young artists, photographers, and curators who were part of the modernist movement in America in the 1930s. This exhibition and publication are part of a broader tendency to revisit the history of modernism in the United States and especially those exponents who have been excluded from the canon of modern art for several decades. It is time to discuss and recognize the role and place of Bill Traylor and William Edmondson and their work outside the ghetto of "outsider" and "self-taught" art. This exhibition and publication offer a vehicle to better understand the aesthetic language of this work and the larger framework of cultural and social impulses to which it is related. But most importantly, the exhibition positions Traylor and Edmondson within the aesthetic discourse and institutional framework of modern art, which since World War II has increasingly become a synonym for mainstream, established art."--

A sustained critical assessment of southern folk art and self-taught art and artists

Born into slavery on an Alabama plantation in 1853, Bill Traylor worked as a sharecropper for most of his life. But in 1928 he moved to Montgomery and changed his life, becoming a self-taught lyric painter of extraordinary ability and power. From 1936 to 1946, he sat on a street corner—old, ill, and homeless—and created well over 1,200 paintings. Collected and later promoted by Charles Shannon, a young Montgomery artist, his work received star placement in the Corcoran Gallery’s 1982 exhibition “Black Folk Art in America.” From then on, the spare and powerful “radical modernity” of Traylor’s work helped place him among the rising stars of twentieth-century American artists. Most critics and art historians who analyze Traylor’s paintings emphasize his extraordinary form and evaluate the content as either simple or enigmatic narratives of black life. In Painting a Hidden Life, historian Mechal Sobel’s trenchant analysis reveals a previously unrecognized central core of meaning in Traylor’s near-hidden symbolism—a call for retribution in response to acts of lynching and other violence toward blacks. Drawing on historical records and oral histories, Sobel carefully explores the relationship between Traylor’s life and his paintings and arrives at new interpretations of his art. From an interview with Traylor’s great-granddaughter, Sobel learned that Traylor believed the Birmingham policemen who killed his son in 1929 in fact lynched him—a story that neither Traylor nor his family had previously disclosed. The trauma of this event, Sobel explains, propelled Traylor to find a way to voice his rage and spurred the creation of his powerful, mysterious visual language. Traylor’s encoded paintings tell a vibrant, multilayered story of conjure power, sexual rivalry, and violence. Revealing an extraordinarily diverse visual universe, the symbols in Traylor’s paintings reflect the worlds he lived in between 1853 and 1949: the plantation conjure milieu into which he was born, the blues culture in which he matured, the world of Jim Crow he learned to secretly violate, and the Catholic values he adopted in his final years. From his African heritage, Traylor drew symbols not readily understood by whites. He mixed traditional African images with conjure signs, with symbols of black Baptists and Freemasons, and with images central to the hidden black protest movement—the cross and the lynching tree. In this groundbreaking examination of an extraordinary artist, Sobel uncovers the internalized pain of several generations and traces the paths African Americans blazed long before the march down the Selma–Montgomery highway.

A richly illustrated history of self-taught artists and how they changed American art Artists without formal training, who learned from family, community, and personal journeys, have long been a presence in American art. But it wasn’t until the 1980s, with the help of trailblazing advocates, that the collective force of their creative vision and bold self-definition permanently changed the mainstream art world. In We Are Made of Stories, Leslie Umberger traces the rise of self-taught artists in the twentieth century and examines how, despite wide-ranging societal, racial, and gender-based obstacles, they redefined who could be rightfully seen as an artist and revealed a much more diverse community of American makers. Lavishly illustrated throughout, We Are Made of Stories features more than one hundred drawings, paintings, and sculptures, ranging from the narrative to the abstract, by forty-three artists—including James Castle, Thornton Dial, William Edmondson, Howard Finster, Bessie Harvey, Dan Miller, Sister Gertrude Morgan, the Philadelphia Wireman, Nellie Mae Rowe, Judith Scott, and Bill Traylor. The book centralizes the personal stories behind the art, and explores enduring themes, including self-definition, cultural heritage, struggle and joy, and inequity and achievement. At the same time, it offers a sweeping history of self-taught artists, the critical debates surrounding their art, and how museums have gradually diversified their collections across lines of race, gender, class, and ability. Recasting American art history to embrace artists who have been excluded for too long, We Are Made of Stories vividly captures the power of art to show us the world through the eyes of another. Published in association with the Smithsonian American Art Museum Exhibition Schedule Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC July 1, 2022–March 26, 2023

This Companion authoritatively points to the main areas of enquiry within the subject of African American art history. The first section examines how African American art has been constructed over the course of a century of published scholarship. The second section studies how African American art is and has been taught and researched in academia. The third part focuses on how African American art has been reflected in art galleries and museums. The final section opens up understandings of what we mean when we speak of African American art. This book will be of interest to graduate students, researchers, and professors and may be used in American art, African American art, visual culture, and culture classes.

After World War I, artists without formal training “crashed the gates” of major museums in the United States, diversifying the art world across lines of race, ethnicity, class, ability, and gender. At the center of this fundamental reevaluation of who could be an artist in America were John Kane, Horace Pippin, and Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses. The stories of these three artists not only intertwine with the major critical debates of their period but also prefigure the call for inclusion in representations of American art today. In Gatecrashers, Katherine Jentleson offers a valuable corrective to the history of twentieth-century art by expanding narratives of interwar American modernism and providing an origin story for contemporary fascination with self-taught artists.

This book explores the major cultural forms of 1940s America - fiction and non-fiction; music and radio; film and theatre; serious and popular visual arts - and key texts, trends and figures, from Native Son to Citizen Kane, from Hiroshima to HUAC, and from Dr Seuss to Bob Hope. After discussing the dominant ideas that inform the 1940s the book culminates with a chapter on the 'culture of war'. Rather than splitting the decade at 1945, Jacqueline Foertsch argues persuasively that the 1940s should be taken as a whole, seeking out links between wartime and postwar American culture.