CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – A new exhibition originating at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Krannert Art Museum seeks to reintroduce the public to the work of self-taught African-American artists Bill Traylor and William Edmondson by emancipating them from their “outsider” status and placing their art back in the context in which it was first discovered and acknowledged more than a half century ago.
The exhibition, “Bill Traylor, William Edmondson, and the Modernist Impulse,” on view at the U. of I. museum Oct. 23 through Jan. 2, includes more than 50 drawings and paintings by Traylor, 25 sculptures by Edmondson, and photographs of the artists by their contemporaries. Featured works are drawn from private and public collections from across the country.
“This is the first time the two artists have been paired together in an exhibition,” said curator Roxanne Stanulis, who added that work by both artists was included in an historic exhibition of black folk art at the Corcoran Museum of Art in 1982.
Bill Traylor, Figure / Construction with Blue Border (circa 1941), Poster paint on cardboard, American Folk Art Museum, New York
“The lives and work of Traylor and Edmondson share fascinating parallels despite a substantial age gap and the fact that the two never met,” Stanulis said. “Each was born into poverty in the South – Traylor was born a slave in rural Alabama in 1854, and Edmondson 20 years later near Nashville. Both men began creating art in the 1930s after working for decades as physical laborers. Traylor drew and painted his pictures at a busy street corner in downtown Montgomery, beginning at the age of 82. Edmondson gave up his job at the Nashville Women’s Hospital in 1931 and began carving.”
Both men, she said, were “discovered” by white artists and academics, who brought their talents to the attention of a broader American audience.
In 1937, Edmondson became the first African-American artist to have a one-man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; in 1941, Traylor’s work was featured in a one-man show in Alabama and in another in Riverdale, N.Y.
The Krannert show – which will travel to museums in Birmingham, Ala., New York and Houston in 2005 – was organized, in part, to explore the aesthetic connections present in both artists’ work, their artistic inspirations, and the cultural, social and political climate in which the art was created. Beyond that, however, Stanulis and co-curator Josef Helfenstein wanted to examine how Traylor and Edmondson’s work originally was interpreted within the art-historical context of modernism.
“By displaying their art together, we hope to expand the narrow definition of 20th century modernism by re-examining the initial reception of Traylor and Edmondson’s work,” Stanulis said.
Both Traylor and Edmondson earned their first 15 minutes of fame in the late 1930s and early ’40s when their work came to the attention of art-world denizens, who marveled over Traylor’s paintings and drawings and Edmondson’s hand-carved, limestone sculptures as pure, unadulterated and uniquely American examples of “modern art.”
“The abstract forms and simplified compositions in each of the artists’ work have a spontaneity and freshness – characteristics often associated with modern art,” Stanulis said. “Their work was discovered during a time when there was interest in art of African Americans and a multicultural view of modernism in the United States, in particular at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.”
But the spotlight faded fast for the artists, largely due to the rise of Abstract Expressionism and color-field painting, popularized by artists such as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock in the late 1940s. After brief brushes with fame – but none of the attendant fortune – Traylor and Edmondson died in relative obscurity.
“The reasons why the work of these two unknown artists was perceived and discussed in the context of the modernist movement are both coincidental and part of broader discussions that marked contemporary visual culture in the 1930s and early 1940s,” Helfenstein, director of The Menil Collection in Houston, writes in the catalog that accompanies the exhibition.
“This short period of reception and inclusion in the modernist discourse vanished quickly in the late 1940s, when both artists, labeled as ‘self-taught,’ were disqualified into the marginal status of ‘outsiders’ and disappeared from the discussions and institutions of visual culture in the United States. After being rediscovered in the early 1980s, the work of both artists has recently achieved a near-mythic status in American art history.”
In addition to Helfenstein’s essay, “From the Sidewalk to the Marketplace: Traylor, Edmondson, and the Modernist Impulse,” the exhibition catalog includes essays by Lowery Stokes Sims, executive director, The Studio Museum in Harlem; Margaret Lynne Ausfeld, curator, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts; Jordana Mendelson, U. of I. professor of art history; Kerry James Marshall, artist and professor of studio arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago; M. Cynthia Oliver, U. of I. professor of dance; Lisa Gaye Dixon, U. of I. professor of theater; and Nichole T. Rustin, U. of I. professor, Afro-American studies, and gender and women’s studies.
Following the exhibition’s debut at the Illinois museum, it travels to the Birmingham Museum of Art, Feb. 1 through April 3; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York City, April 20 through June 26; and to The Menil Collection, Houston, July 22 through Oct. 2.
More information about the show, related programming and about the Krannert Art Museum is available on the Web.
