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Works by self-taught artists featured in Krannert Art Museum exhibition
Melissa
Mitchell, News Editor
217-333-5491, melissa@illinois.edu
10/8/2004
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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.
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“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.
