: Bill Traylor and William Edmondson never knew one another - one
lived in Alabama, the other in Tennessee; there was a 25-year age
difference, and, although both were artists, they worked in
vastly different media. Still, their differences are far less
profound than their commonalities. Each was illiterate, and while
each came to his art late in life, both were amazingly prolific.
They were the first African American artists to be recognized by
the so-called "conventional" art world, and both were keen
observers of the human condition.
The two self-taught artists, whose works are widely considered to
be at the pinnacle of "Outsider" art, are the subject of the
compelling exhibit "Bill Traylor, William Edmondson and the
Modernist Impulse." The exhibition is currently on view at the
Birmingham Museum of Art through April 3.
This exemplary show examines their art and their position in the
context of mainstream midcentury modernism. Without training or
any other outside artistic influences, these artists managed to
produce work that easily held and continues to hold its own on
the art scene. Each man, as his work evolved, tended toward the
same abstraction seen in the modern art movement from which they
were so culturally and geographically removed.
