A Look at 'Outsiders' Bill Traylor & William Edmondson

BIRMINGHAM, ALA.

: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.