Jimmy Sudduth

Background

Jimmy Lee Sudduth was born on March 10, 1910.

Career

He was raised on a farm at Caines Ridge, near Fayette, Alabama. As his talents became known in the community he began collecting pigments from earth, rocks plants, foodstuffs, and industrial products 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 syrup, sugar, soft drinks, and caulk.

His first public art exhibition was held in 1968 at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa. A 1971 exhibition in his home town of Fayette earned regional attention and, beginning that year, he became a featured artist at the annual Kentuck Festival of the Arts in Northport, Alabama.

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.

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 one of the early masters of southern self-taught art Although the field is often conflated with "outsider art," Sudduth demonstrates the limitations of the latter term. 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 e woods and barnyard.

Very rarely, he portrayed a religious figure such as Christ, Moses, or John the Baptist. Although it is commonly believed that Sudduth"s early paintings were executed exclusively in mud and found pigments, such as motor oil or plant juices, in fact, his earliest known paintings contain large amounts of house paint.

Death

Having resisted leaving his home as long as he could, Sudduth spent his last year at the Fayette Nursing Home. He died at the Fayette Medical Center on September 2, 2007 at the age of 97.

Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama.

January 15 - March 27, 2005, curated by Susan Mitchell Crawley.

Achievements

• He was honored with the Alabama Arts Award in 1995 and served as an artist-in-residence at the New Orleans Museum of Artist

Membership

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.