In 2016, 65 years after the self-taught sculptor William Edmondson was buried in an unmarked grave, his work Boxer fetched $785,000 at Christie’s—breaking the sales record for a single piece of “outsider art.” Born in 1874 in Davidson County, Tennessee, the son of sharecroppers, Edmondson settled in Nashville, where late in life he carved gravestones for neighbors and made art for his community, fashioning biblical figures, animals, preachers, and teachers from limestone. “William Edmondson: A Monumental Vision”—now on at the Barnes Foundation, in Philadelphia—celebrates the artist with 66 of his works as well as photographs of his home, by Louise Dahl-Wolfe and Edward Weston.
The exhibition attempts to revise the way Edmondson’s story is told. Nancy Ireson, the deputy director for collections and exhibitions at the Barnes, says it is important to push back on the idea that white collectors “discovered” the artist. As the lore goes, Sidney Mttron Hirsch, a Jewish model and playwright with connections to the Vanderbilts and the magazine Harper’s Bazaar, convinced Dahl-Wolfe to photograph Edmondson’s work and show it to gallerists and curators in New York. This led to Edmondson’s becoming the first Black American artist to receive a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), in 1937.
