About the artist
1910–2007, lived and worked in Fayette, AlabamaAs a toddler in Caines Ridge, Alabama, during a woodland visit to collect plants with his medicine-woman adoptive mother, Jimmy Lee Sudduth painted a picture, in mud, on a tree stump. Sudduth’s mother returned a few days later to find the image intact, and took it as a sign of her son’s calling. Thus began the career of an artist with a lifelong ardor and profound, peerless, connoisseurship of dirt. Sudduth’s scenes of the people and places of turn-of-the-century Fayette were first sketched with what he called a “dye rock,” a soft stone that, once dipped in water and pressed against a hard surface (predominantly locally manufactured plywood), acted as a pencil. He filled in the underpaintings, using his fingers, with an increasingly complex and refined suspension of pigment and medium. Flaking of the mud, once dry, was an early problem, and Sudduth experimented with an array of viscous materials—molasses, honey, sugar, Coca-Cola, sorghum—to achieve the necessary consistency. To then color his “sweet mud”, he built a catalogue of effects from innumerable organic sources: coffee grounds and instant coffee for blacks, brick dust and pork berries for reds, grass and ivy for greens, egg yolks and axle grease for yellows. A man who claimed he could locate 36 different shades of mud, Sudduth took considerable (and justified) pride in the breadth of his invented palette. Sudduth worked hard throughout his adult life, as a farmhand, a laborer at a grist mill and lumberyard, then, after moving to Fayette with his second wife, Ethel, in 1950, doing odd jobs and gardening. He was a prolific painter throughout, finishing up to six paintings a day, and his reputation expanded in the 1960s through displays at county fairs, where he often also performed blues harmonica. A solo exhibition at the Fayette Art Museum in 1971 led to his inclusion in the Smithsonian Institution’s Bicentennial Festival of American Folklife in 1976 and an appearance on the “Today” show in 1980. Sudduth continued to work in Fayette for the rest of his days, painting with mud sent to him by fans and, as age and infirmity made material-hunting more difficult, with acrylic paint. Sudduth’s paintings are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of American Folk Art, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Smithsonian, and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts.
—William Pym
Above: Photo of Jimmy Lee Sudduth, courtesy of Marcia Weber
Bibliography
Art Outsider et Folk Art des Collections de Chicago. Paris: Halle Saint Pierre, 1998.
Ashe: Improvisation & Recycling in African-American Visionary Art. Winston-Salem, NC: Winston-Salem State University/Diggs Gallery, 1993.
Black History and Artistry: Work by Self-Taught Painters and Sculptors from the Blanchard-Hill Collection. New York: Baruch College/CUNY, 1993.
Even the Deep Things of God: A Quality of Mind in Afro-Atlantic Traditional Art. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, 1990.
Hood, John. “Jimmy Lee Sudduth.” Folk Art 18, no. 4 (Winter 1994/1995): 47–51.
McEvilley, Thomas. “The Missing Tradition.” Art in America (May 1997): 78–85.
Not by Luck: Self Taught Artists in the American South. New Jersey: Lynne Ingram Southern Folk Art, 1993.
R.A. Miller and Jimmy Lee Sudduth. Prod. David Seehausen. Dir. David Seehausen. Frewsburg, NY: Seehausen TV, 1998. [videorecording]
Russell, Charles, ed. Self-Taught Art: The Culture and Aesthetics of American Vernacular Art. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001.
Selected Works from the Permanent Collection of American Folk Art. Orlando, FL: The Mennello Museum, 1999.
Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art from the South, Volume 1, edited by William Arnett and Paul Arnett. Atlanta, Georgia: Tinwood Books in association with Schomburg Center for Research in Black Cultures, New York, 2000.
Trechsel, Gail Andrews, ed. Pictured in My Mind: Contemporary American Self-taught Art from the Collection of Kurt Gitter and Alice Rae-Yelen. Birmingham, AL: Birmingham Museum of Art, in association with University Press of Mississippi, 1995.
Wood, Wilfrid. “Where That Good Muds At?” Raw Vision 19 (Summer 1997): 42–49.
Wrestling with History: A Celebration of African American Self-Taught Artists from the Collection of Ronald and June Shelp. New York: Baruch College/Sidney Mishkin Gallery, 1996.
Yelen, Alice Rae. Passionate Visions of the American South: Self-Taught Artists from 1940 to the Present. New Orleans: New Orleans Museum of Art in association with University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 1994.