William Edmondson

 

 William Edmondson (1874–1951) was the first African-American folk art sculptor to be given a one-person show exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City
Edmondson entered the world of sculpture at the advanced age of about 60 years old in 1934. He reported that he received a vision from God, who told him to start sculpting: "I was out in the driveway with some old sculptures 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. I knowed it was God telling me what to do." He carved tombstones primarily from chunks of discarded limestone from demolished buildings, which were delivered to him by wrecking companies' trucks. A signature Edmondson tombstone reflects strong large lettering carved in the stone. He began his career by working on these tombstones, which he sold or gave to friends and family in the community. Wikipedia
"William Edmondson, son of Tennessee slaves, did not consider himself an artist when he began carving around 1932, after retiring from his job as a laborer. Inspired by a vision, he emphasized his divine calling, claiming, ​“Jesus has planted the seed of carving in me” and describing his works as ​“mirkels.” Edmondson carved gravestones, free-standing figurative sculpture, and garden ornaments, using discarded blocks of limestone and chisels fashioned from railroad spikes. Animals, biblical subjects, and secular figures like Eleanor Roosevelt and Nashville school teachers dominated his repertoire.
In several sculptures entitled Crucifixion, Edmondson celebrated Christ as the Savior, the most popular figure in the spiritual tradition of African-American art. The museum’s example  is an early version, once also called Baby Jesus. Its rectangular silhouette and upright frontality suggest the gravestone tablets that Edmondson saw in his original vision. Crucifixion retains a strong sense of the block’s shape and texture in its minimally articulated form and detail. Only the emphatic curves of the lower torso reveal Edmondson’s attempt to break away from the block, suggesting that he executed Crucifixion soon after he turned from carving gravestones to more imaginative, free-standing subjects. Compact and stylized, the sculpture conveys its spiritual message with the authority and immediacy of an archaic monument."(americanart.si.edu)

 

Frederick J. Brown

Frederick J. Brown (February 6, 1945 – May 5, 2012) was a Chicago-raised artist. His paintings draw on many sources, including his African-American, Seminole and Choctaw ancestry, his religious upbringing, and the folklore of the South. He referenced religious, historical and urban themes in his work, but was especially noted for his numerous portraits of jazz and blues artists. In 1988, Brown had the largest retrospective by a Western artist in the People's Republic of China, and he is the only Western artist to have had an exhibition at China's national museum in Tienanmen Square.Wikipedia

 "I think my heritage has a great significance to the images I produce, but you can limit people with a name or a title to only serve one group. When you see my work, you can tell it is done by someone who is Black. But, I want to provide as many beautiful things to the world as I possibly can." — Frederick Brown, quoted in Eve M. Ferguson, "Art Sings the Blues," The Washington Afro-American, 26 Oct. 1991.(americanart.si.edu)

 Brown's paintings of the early 1970s were large, bold abstractions based on the abstract expressionist tradition of the art department at Southern Illinois University. In 1975 Brown met the noted American painter, Willem de Kooning. De Kooning encouraged Brown and Brown still affectionately refers to de Kooning as his "artistic godfather." Brown's large gestural paintings attracted widespread attention and by the mid-1980s were exhibited at the prestigious Marlborough Gallery in New York.
By the late 1970s and into the early 1980s, Brown gradually included figural elements, a change that coincided with his creation of some landscape paintings reminiscent of folk art. An airplane motif also appeared in Brown's works—a motif that the artist says represents a marking of time.

In the mid-1980s Brown began a series of paintings that immortalized the friends, mentors, and colleagues who had exerted the greatest influence on his life. One of the first paintings in this series was a monumental Last Supper, completed in 1984, which portrays twelve men who had sustained Brown both personally and professionally. He painted several other religious subjects, including John the Baptist, David and Goliath, and The Ascension. In his portraits of this period, Brown attached photographs of his subjects' faces to the canvas to produce a collage effect. In addition to portraits of single figures, Brown painted large-scale canvases filled with numerous characters both real and fictional, often disparate in their references.(americanart.si.edu)