ウィリアムエドモンドソン（1874年生まれ、米国テネシー州デビッドソン郡-1951年2月7日、ナッシュビルで亡くなった）は、ニューヨーク市の近代美術館（1937）で初めてアフリカ系アメリカ人が個展を開いた独学の彫刻家（ MoMA）。
クイズ
有名なアメリカ人の顔：事実かフィクションか？
クラレンス・ダローは有名な19世紀の検察官でした。
解放された奴隷の息子であるエドモンドソンは、16歳のときに彼が生まれたプランテーションからナッシュビルに引っ越しました。ナッシュビルで鉄道に従事し、1907年に足を負傷した後、ナッシュビル女性病院の管理人になりました。数年以内に、エドモンドソンは自分の家を買う余裕があった。 1931年に病院が閉鎖され、石工の助手を含む一連の奇妙な仕事を続け、石灰岩の彫り方を学んだとき、彼は用務職を辞任しました。エドモンドソンは彫刻のための超自然的な才能を持っていたようです。アーティストによると、彼は天国から、その場しのぎの道具を使って彫刻するように指示する声を聞いたそうです。彼の家の後ろの庭はすぐに、石灰岩、墓石、彫刻のキャストオフブロックの驚異的な量を集め始めました。
Edmondson primarily used limestone of varying colours and textures to create his sculptures, or what he called “miracles.” The limestone usually came from demolition sites. Eventually, as he gained a reputation in Nashville, city workers would take limestone to him at no cost. By using augmented railroad spikes as chisels, the artist generated simple forms that measured from 1 to 3 feet (0.3 to 0.9 metre) tall. His minimalist works usually retained some impression of their original rectangular form and offered more of a suggestion of an actual figure—doves, lambs, preachers, angels, biblical figures, imaginary characters—than an exact rendering of it. Some works represented celebrities—African American boxer Jack Johnson and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt among them—whereas others were nearly abstract.
In 1935 Sidney Mttron Hirsch—who was Edmondson’s neighbour, a poet, and a professor at George Peabody College for Teachers (now part of Vanderbilt University)—recognized the sculptor’s talent. Hirsch ultimately persuaded Harper’s Bazaar fashion photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe to visit Edmondson’s home and photograph his work. As a result of that connection, Edmondson began to attract the attention of a growing public as an original folk, or “primitive,” artist, a category of art then enjoying a heyday. Though Harper’s Bazaar declined to publish Dahl-Wolfe’s photographs, the first director of MoMA, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., was enchanted by the images and deemed Edmondson’s work fit to be exhibited in his museum. Thus, in 1937 the Nashville artist’s sculptures were exhibited at MoMA, marking the first solo exhibition for an African American artist at the museum. In 1939 and 1941 Edmondson was supported by the Works Progress Administration division for sculpture. He also was featured in a 1944 exhibition, “American Negro Art: Contemporary Painting and Sculpture,” at the Newark Museum in New Jersey.
Edmondson’s art career lasted for a span of about 17 years. Illness and age forced him to retire from sculpting in the late1940s. Long after his death, his work was included in numerous exhibitions. In 2000 it was the subject of a major traveling retrospective organized by Nashville’s Cheekwood Museum of Art; the exhibition traveled to Rochester, New York; Atlanta; and Orlando, Florida.A 2014–15 exhibition at the Cheekwood Museum of Art, “William Edmondson and Friends: Breaking the Mold,” examined the sculptor’s extensive influence.
