Working with often thin, odd-shaped pieces of limestone, Edmondson was able to convey character through the genius of his carving, as in “Schoolteacher. 

William Edmondson (1874‱951), the illiterate son of freed slaves, was the first African American to become the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. That display, in 1937, brought to national attention the powerful, direct carving of this self-taught, visionary stonecutter and sculptor.

Edmondson did not begin carving objects until he was well into his 50s. Working exclusively in limestone, his intuitive approach to sculpture produced minimalist, compact works that convey a sense of monumentality and express a high degree of design.

Over the course of the remaining 17 years of his career, he advanced from creating tombstones to garden ornaments, animals and finally figures drawn from his neighborhood and the Bible. As preeminent African American art historian David C. Driskell has observed, “An affectionate warmth of feeling, almost humor, often characterizes his unpretentious and charming sculpture.”

Edmondson used the tools at hand: a railroad spike and then a chisel, a short-handled hammer and a file. Stingy by necessity, Edmondson used small, irregular pieces of limestone he bought cheaply from a nearby quarry or scavenged from demolished buildings, streets and sidewalks. The dimensions of these multishaped stone pieces dictated the compact size of his works.

Although he was in a sense a folk Modernist, Edmondson proclaimed, “I am just doing the Lord’s work. I ain’t got much style; God don’t want much style, but He gives wisdom and sends you along.”

Since he was born and died in the Nashville area, it is fitting that the Cheekwood Art Museum has the largest collection of his work, and has organized “William Edmondson: The Hand and the Spirit,” on view through January 3. Drawn from the museum’s permanent collection, it comprises 11 representative works of the great self-taught sculptor.

Having worked on a farm in his youth, Edmondson was familiar with the stately posture, prominent horns and solidity of a “Ram,†circa 1930s. In spite of minimal details, one knows immediately what animal it is.

Edmondson was born just outside Nashville and raised on a former plantation where he worked as a hired hand before the family moved into the city. He never attended school or learned to read or write. His widowed mother’s emphasis on respect, frugality and honest simplicity characterized his life and sculpture. Since boyhood, he said he experienced visions in which he heard God speaking to him, revelations that continued throughout his life.

In Nashville, Edmondson labored in the city sewer works, as a racetrack groom, on the railroad, for 25 years as a janitor and orderly at the Women’s Hospital and, finally, as a stonemason’s helper. In the latter job, he mixed mortar and helped cut and place stone, igniting his interest in stone carving.

He never married, living for years with his sister in a tiny story-and-a-half red brick cottage with a deep, 50-foot-wide lot, where he had a sizable garden.

When masonry slumped as the Depression deepened, Edmondson gathered in his yard limestone curbstones that a city project was replacing with cement. Around 1931, when he was 57, Edmondson said, “I was out in the driveway with some old pieces 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.” Squaring up rough-cut curbstones with railroad spikes and chisels, he shaped them into tombstones that he sold for a few dollars to friends and neighbors in the black community.

Among his many garden adornments, Edmondson carved a variety of interesting birdbaths. In this example, “Birdbath,†1938, he sought to carve his name into the base, but misjudged the space and was forced to leave the “E†out of his last name.

His studio was a long, three-sided shed with one end open to the weather †as well as family members, neighbors and passersby. In cold weather, he worked next to a coal stove. Finished pieces joined a lively congregation in the yard.

He hung out a hand lettered sign to attract customers: “Tomb-Stones; For Sale; Garden Ornaments; Stone Work Wm Edmondson.”

In his tombstones, Edmondson hand carved names and dates from cards lettered by purchasers. The more he cut and the more proficient he became, the more he enjoyed it. Before long, he was carving traditional tombstone figures †lambs and doves. He made no preliminary drawings or maquettes, but simply cut his figures directly out of stone, chip by chip, slow, hard work that required great physical strength and patience.

In this lengthy, lonely work, Edmondson fantasized about the subjects he cut from stone, embellished with his sense of play, humor and biblical lore. He gradually extended his range beyond lambs and doves to eagles, rams, squirrels, horses †and “critters” and “varmints” of all kinds. Finally, he took on human figures †preachers holding aloft Bibles; Little Orphan Annie; boxers like Jack Johnson and Joe Louis; public figures, such as First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and squat twosomes ranging from neighbors to “Adam and Eve.”

When folks praised his abilities, he said it was “the Lord’s gift.” Eventually, he put it this way: “First, He tol’ me to make tombstones, then He tol’ me to cut the figures. He gave me them two things.” As Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson observed in their important history of African American artists, “Edmondson knew what people expected a black man to say.”

His work appealed to a wide range of people because of its straightforward simplicity and subtle emotional and humorous undertones. “His direct carving method and the basic shallowness of the curbstones gave them a certain stiffness,” wrote Bearden and Henderson, “but the directness of his approach and his economical cutting created sharp, expressive characterizations that seemed to defy the material in which they were cut.”

Art writer N.F. Karlins complimented the sculptor’s oeuvre when he observed that “Edmondson can best be compared with Constantin Brancusi in his use of direct carving in stone, his development of a unique, abstract style from folk roots, and his integration of base and sculpture into a single work of art.”

Edmondson’s animals, especially “Horse,” “Ram,” circa 1930s, and “Eagle,” strike characteristic poses with balance and grace. From leftover building materials Edmondson skillfully removed just enough stone from blocks to make forms emerge, as in “Critter.” It was carved so economically that the basic shape remains, merely suggesting the abstract form of his mysterious creature.

Edmondson’s ability to capture personality with few details is suggested by “Girl with Cape,†which relies on strong form and stylized, minimally worked features for its aesthetic quality. Like all his work, it is made of limestone.

Edmondson’s people were very human, at the same time pious and solemn, yet drolly humorous. “Bess and Joe,” circa 1930s, modeled after neighborhood friends, take on an air of grandeur with their stately posture and forward gaze, while conveying affection as he puts his arm around her. “Girl with Cape” demonstrates his ability to capture character and personality with minimal detail.

Of Edmondson’s human figures, Bearden and Henderson suggested that “Their postures, even their stony stiffness, always left something unsaid but felt, something profoundly suggestive of the inner feelings and outer pretenses of humans. They had a certain picturesqueness but were also impressive works of art.”

A lot of humanity is also apparent in his biblical figures, such as “Adam and Eve” and “Eve,” circa 1930s. The latter, an erect figure standing on a pedestal reflecting her role as mother, first woman and God’s creation, bears a solemn expression, as, perhaps, she listens to God speaking.

Edmondson’s garden objects are meticulously constructed assemblages in which the base, shaft and capital fit seamlessly together. His 1938 “Birdbath” bears an abstract shape in the shaft that echoes the shaft’s form. In an earlier, more elaborate birdbath, a squinched-down woman, arms folded, bears the weight of the trough, to which two birds have attached themselves.

Edmondson was “discovered” in the mid-1930s by poet Sidney Hirsch, who appreciated the artistic merit of Edmondson’s work and reveled in the sculptor’s stories of visions of God and how he came to make each piece. Not long after, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, a leading fashion photographer, took pictures of Edmondson at work and of the statues in his yard. These photos made their way to Alfred H. Barr Jr, director of the Museum of Modern Art, who was fascinated by the work of self-taught artists and decided that Edmondson should be the first African American to be given a solo show at the museum.

The 1937 exhibition was a critical and popular success, with pictures of Edmondson’s work widely reproduced. Barr, after noting that most “naïve artists&⁷ork in the easier medium of painting,” observed that “Edmondson&⁨as chosen to work in limestone, which he attacks with extraordinary courage and directness, to carve out simple, emphatic forms.”

Edmondson’s different “critters†ranged from this geometrically styled example to very naturalistic pieces. He carved this mysterious creature with such economy of means that it emerged as an abstract form.

In spite of favorable stories in The New York Times, Newsweek and Time , the show was not a big financial success. Edmondson’s sculptures sold for modest prices, sometimes for as little as $5 or $10. As he explained to a local reporter, “I got to do these things for my Heavenly Daddy, whether folks buys them or not. He ain’t never said nothin’ ’bout pay for it.”

In 1938, Edmondson was included in an exhibition in Paris at the Jeu de Paume, “Three Centuries of Art in the United States,” along with sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, George Gray Barnard and Jo Davidson.

When famed African American painter Aaron Douglas visited Edmondson in 1940, he described the sculptor as “a person with very little education and none at all from an art viewpoint. He worked from an instinctive point.”

After working in 1939 and 1941 for the WPA arts project, Edmondson finally had his first exhibition in Nashville in 1941. That same year, famed photographer Edward Weston visited and took numerous pictures. (Weston’s views of the sculptor in his milieu sell nowadays for $6/9,000.)

Stunningly elevated from obscure stonecutter to famous folk artist, Edmondson never strayed from his customary way of working, which he regarded as a sacred mission: “This here stone and all those out there in the yard,” he said, “come from God. It’s the work in Jesus speaking His mind in my mind. I must be one of His disciples. These here is miracles I can do. Can’t nobody do these but me. I can’t help carving. I just does it&‮Jesus has planted the seed of carving in me.”

By the late 1940s, Edmondson lacked the strength to lift heavy stones, so he worked on small figures in his shed.

He probably carved more than 300 sculptures between 1931 and 1948. Having often been cheated by visitors, his sales were managed by a local white man.

After dying of a heart attack, he was buried in Nashville’s Mount Ararat Cemetery. Like many gravestones there, his has disappeared and there are no records about its location.

In addition to the Cheekwood, Edmondson’s sculptures are now in the permanent collections of a number of prestigious museums. Six of his early, hand lettered tombstones remain in a small, hillside cemetery outside Nashville.

Edmondson’s reputation has fluctuated somewhat over the years since his death, but recently has held firm at a high level. “Edmondson’s appeal can undoubtedly be attributed to his work’s coincidence in style with that of Modernist sculptors, who, influenced by primitive, especially African, sculpture, chose to work as direct carvers,” says art historian Sheila F. Patton.

Edmondson’s farm experiences exposed him to the barrel-like bulk of heavy draft horses, their stances and their great pulling power. These qualities are reflected in “Horse. 

In spite of the fact that he worked his whole career on poor-quality stone in small sizes, Edmondson never ceased pursuing what Bearden and Henderson called “his fierce, hammering search of truth.” Among American self-taught artists, he is truly one of a kind.

Writing about Edmondson more than two decades ago, Bearden and Henderson suggested that the “emphasis on his story telling, his quaintness and his visions of God †all common survival techniques among black people †have prevented many people from seeing what he actually achieved and have denied Edmondson the recognition he deserves.”

On the other hand, folk art authority Robert Bishop has hailed him as “one of the outstanding folk carvers †if not the outstanding one †of the Twentieth Century.”

The Cheekwood collection demonstrates that Edmondson was a special artist inspired not just by his devout religious convictions, but by his community, African American folklore and popular culture. A remarkably skilled craftsman, his sculptures are a testament to one man’s ability to transform observation and imagination into objects of enduring interest and inspiration.

In the Twenty-First Century, with a decline in racial prejudice and a growing, sophisticated understanding of William Edmondson’s profound achievements, he is increasingly recognized as one of the great American self-taught artists, a man touched by God who imbued memorable sculpture with vision, faith and spirit.

The Cheekwood Museum of Art is at 1200 Forrest Park Drive. For information, 615-356-8000 or www.cheekwood.org .