William Edmondson, the son of freed slaves, was born around 1874 in Davidson County, Tennessee. He was one of six children. He grew up in Nashville and went to work at sixteen years of age as a manual laborer, railroad man, farm hand, fireman, and hospital janitor. He never did learn to read and write. It was in 1929 that he received a vision from God, who told him to take up the sculptor's tools and to work on his behalf.
Edmondson salvaged rectangular chunks or native limestone from houses that had been demolished and curbs from city streets. He used a sledgehammer and fabricated crude chisels from railroad spikes. His first carving, as an apprentice stonemason, were tombstones for the black community.
As a member of the United Primitive Baptist Church, his work was influenced by its fundamentalist ideals. His carving of angels, Biblical characters, and animals like doves and rams that appear in religious contexts were strong and deceptively simple works that were God-inspired. Yet he was also a keen observer of nature and his culture. In addition to imaginary “varmints” and “critters, he sculpted American eagles and the blocky Dorset sheep with curlicued horns that were then indigenous to Middle Tennessee. He also shaped school teachers, nurses, preachers and popular figures like Eleanor Roosevelt and the black prize fighter Jack Johnson.
Though a plain and untutored man who sold the carving and vegetables he grew from his house in South Nashville, Edmondson went on to become, in 1937, the first black artist to have a one-man show at New York's Museum of Modern Art. He was also part of a major traveling exhibition, Black Folk in America, 1930-1980, originating at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in 1982. He has been at the heart of every important group show on folk art since.
