NEW YORK, NY.- Bill Traylor, William Edmondson, and the Modernist Impulse just opened at The Studio Museum in Harlem. This traveling exhibition is organized by the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, curated by Josef Helfenstein, Director of the Menil Collection and Russell Bowman, former Director of the Milwaukee Art Museum. The exhibition features the works of two major figures in American and African-American art history: Bill Traylor (1854 – 1949), a draftsman from Alabama, and William Edmondson (1874 – 1951), a sculptor from Tennessee. Bill Traylor, William Edmondson, and the Modernist Impulse will be on view through July 3, 2005.

With approximately fifty drawings and also paintings by Traylor and twenty-five sculptures by Edmonson, the exhibition includes photographs of the artists taken by their contemporaries, gathered from private collections and museums across the country.

Although Traylor and Edmondson are typically defined as “folk” or “outsider” artists whose works reflect the roots of African-American culture, there are strong aesthetic connections between their works and the modernist works of the established or “official” avant-garde of the period.

After decades of little interest in their work, each of the artists has now achieved near mythical status, yet it is often forgotten that both artists were among the first selftaught African-Americans to gain early recognition from the official art world. In 1937, Edmondson was the first African-American to be exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Traylor’s work was first shown in New York in 1941. Their work was shown together for the first time in the landmark exhibition Black Folk Art in America, 1930 – 1980 at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. in 1982. Bill Traylor, William Edmondson, and the Modernist Impulse is the first exhibition to present the work of both artists in the context of not only their own communities, but also within the broader context of American and European culture of the first half of the twentieth century.

A full-color, 150-page catalogue, with essays by artist Kerry James Marshall, Josef Helfenstein, Lowery Stokes Sims, and other scholars will be accompanying the exhibition.

Bill Traylor, William Edmondson, and the Modernist Impulse is organized by Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and sponsored in part by Fox Development Corporation, Krannert Art Museum Council, Ruth and Bob Vogele, A.G. Edwards & Sons, Hickory Point Bank & Trust, Hampton Inn and the Illinois Arts Council.

Bill Traylor was born a slave in 1854, and worked as a cotton laborer throughout much of his life. At the age of 83 while living on the sidewalk in downtown Montgomery, Alabama he picked up a pencil and began to draw. When he died ten years later he had created over 1500 works of art that not only pulse with the musical energy of the blues, but also reflect on the economic depression and race relations in Alabama during the 1930s and 1940s.

William Edmondson was born in 1874 and lived most of his life as a handyman in Nashville, Tennessee. By the 1930s, his religious conversion compelled him to gather discarded stones and create simple, but powerful tombstones. He died in 1951, leaving behind a body of work full of strongly abstract forms and divine inspiration.