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"African-American Art and the Biographical Imperative: The Case of William Edmondson, Stone Carver" with Professor Jennifer Marshall, University of Minnesota's Art History Department

In art history and criticism, African-American artists have been treated more consistently through the lens of their life story than through close, serious attention to their work—disproportionately so, when compared with treatment of white artists. What’s more, if art historians and critics have focused perhaps too much on what the lives of black artists represent (either in an effort to maintain a racist status quo or to subvert it), this “conscription” into representational service often spills over into similar expectations for black art. Writers look at art made by black artists to see what it reveals about race, in other words, not what it achieves artistically on its own.

The life and work of William Edmondson is an instructive case study in this problem. His hand-carved stone sculptures came to the attention of the white art world in the 1930s and became nationally famous, specifically through constant retellings of his life story: a biographical narrative that has been told again and again the same way, both during Edmondson’s lifetime and in his art historical canonization thereafter.

This talk will focus on two major facets of the biographical fashioning of William Edmondson: (1) his close generational proximity to slavery and its end (“born to former slaves”), and (2) the trumped up claims of his functional illiteracy (“he could read little and write less”). These two biographemes were closely linked, of course, serving to underscore the low social rung Edmondson occupied in American culture and social class. On the one hand, the narrative showed that black social striving and advancement was a component of Edmondson’s biography. After all, he was one generation “up from slavery,” and managed to own his own home and become an artist. On the other hand, the narrative always insisted that advancement was an incomplete project for Edmondson. No longer enslaved, but born to slaves and not yet literate. So it was that these tropes combined to produce a picture of Edmondson as “incompletely released from slavery.” This is a biographical status of compromised freedom that has consistently endeared him to whites, while rendering him suspect to blacks. It is a biographical status that rhymes nicely with the formal effects of his artworks: figures only minimally released from the stone. And it is a biographical status that ironically reflects the genre of biography itself: a field of story telling in which individual genius is celebrated, but in a highly conservative narrative form, prizing predictable tropes and oft-repeated episodes.
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Jennifer Marshall is Assistant Professor of North American Art in the Art History Department at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where she holds a McKnight Land-Grant Professorship (2010-12). She specializes in the art and visual/material culture of the United States (colonial period to 1960s).