Miracles in Stone: The Curious Celebrity of God's Sculptor




The Object show

Summary: William Edmondson is a middle-aged laborer in Nashville, Tennessee, at the height of the Great Depression, when God tells him to carve a tombstone. Soon, he's the first African-American artist to have a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art. But his short-lived celebrity reveals the art world's problematic relationship with race. You can see one of his many sculptures of a ram, of the Dorset sheep variety local to Tennessee, in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art: https://collections.artsmia.org/art/118808/ram-william-edmondson