JIMMY LEE SUDDUTH (1910 - 2007)

One of America's most famous folk/outsider artists, Jimmy Lee Sudduth was also a blues harp musician and a great story teller. Jimmy was born in Caines Ridge, Alabama, and worked as a farmhand for many years, and also worked as a gardener and on a highway crew. Jimmy Lee Sudduth generally painted on plywood, using natural materials such as "sweet mud"(a mixture of mud and sugar) as well as house paint. He began collecting pigments from earth, rocks, plants, foodstuffs, and industrial products for use in his finger paintings. His paintings depict city buildings, cabins, people, farm animals, the Statue of Liberty and his dog, Toto. By the 1990s he was forced to slow down because of poor health and he was no longer able to collect his own materials. He began using acrylic paints applied with sponge brushes on wood panels. Jimmy Lee passed away in 2007. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Fayette Art Museum, Alabama, Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama, New Orleans Museum of Art and the American Folk Art Museum, New York. Exhibitions: Passionate Visions of the American South, New Orleans Museum of Art (1993) Made in USA, Collection d'Art Brut, Lausanne, Switzerland (1994) Flying Free, 1997 Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama. Jan 15 - Mar 27, 2005, curated by Susan Mitchell Crawley What Carried Us Over: Gifts from the Gordon W. Bailey Collection Sep 13, 2019 - Apr 19, 2020. Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL Bibliography: Revelations: Alabama's Visionary Folk Artists (1994); Flying Free: Twentieth-Century Self-Taught Art from the Collection of Ellin and Baron Gordon, Gordon/ Luck/Patterson (1997); Contemporary American Folk Art, Chuck and Jan Rosenak (1996); Self Taught, Outsider and Folk Art, Betty-Carol Sellen (2000).

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