Jimmy Lee Sudduth

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Jimmy Lee Sudduth (March 10, 1910 - September 2, 2007)[1] was a prominent outsider artist and blues musician from Fayette, Alabama (USA).

Sudduth was born and raised on a farm at Caines Ridge, near Fayette, Alabama. He began making art as a child, surrounding the porch of his parent's house with hand-carved wooden dolls and drawing in the dirt or on tree trunks outside. As his talents became known in the community he began collecting pigments from clay, earth, rocks and plants for use in his finger paintings. He used his fingers because "they never wore out." His numerous works were typically executed on found surfaces such as plywood, doors and boards from demolished buildings. He experimented with mixing his pigments with various binders to make them adhere better, including sugar, soft drinks, instant coffee and caulk.

Sudduth's first public art exhibition was held in 1968 at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa.^[1] A 1971 exhibit in his home town of Fayette earned regional attention and he became one of the featured artists at the annual Kentuck Festival of the Arts in Northport, Alabama beginning that year.^[2]

Sudduth was one of the early masters of southern self-taught art. Although the field is often lumped in with "outsider art," Sudduth demonstrates the limitations of that term. He was an active member of his community, and his work, though idiosyncratic, is firmly grounded in the African American culture of the rural South. Nor does it display the flights of imagination seen in true visionary art. He drew his subject matter from the world around him: people he knew (and celebrities), architecture, farm scenes, machinery, flowers, and animals of the woods and barnyard. Very rarely, he portrayed a religious figure such as Christ, Moses, or John the Baptist.^[3]

In 1976 he was invited to play harmonica and exhibit some of his painting at the Smithsonian Institution's Bicentennial Festival of American Folk Life. He appeared on the Today Show and 60 Minutes in 1980.

As his fame grew, dealers advised Sudduth on ways to make his works more permanent and more colorful, adding house paint as a base for the mixing of his naturally-obtained colors. His work is featured in many collections, including the Smithsonian Institution, the High Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery, the Birmingham Museum of Art and the House of Blues. He was honored with the Alabama Arts Award in 1995 and has served as an artist-in-residence at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

In the 1990s, Sudduth was no longer able to collect his own materials and began using commercially-sold acrylic paints, applied with sponge brushes onto wood panels prepared with a flat-black ground. He spent his last year in at the Fayette Nursing Home. Sudduth died at the Fayette Medical Center on September 2, 2007 at the age of 97.

[edit] Solo exhibitions

• Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama. Jan 15 - Mar 27, 2005, curated by Susan Mitchell Crawley

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• Crawley, Susan Mitchell, et al. The Life and Art of Jimmy Lee Sudduth. Montgomery, Alabama: Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts and River City Publishing, 2005. [ISBN 0892800453]