Surveying the Presence of Self-Taught African American Artists in American Museums

This chapter begins by examining how William Edmondson and other African American self-taught artists of the interwar period—including Horace Pippin and Bill Traylor—were positioned by both the black and white art establishments. Just months after the Edmondson exhibition, the museum opened Masters of Popular Painting: Modern Primitives of Europe and America, a large survey that presented contemporary self-taught artists as the heirs to historical folk artists. Museum of Modern Art's promotion of self-taught artists in the 1930s and early 1940s catalyzed the New York debuts of Edmondson and Pippin, but their reputations were also supported by the advances of the contemporaneous New Negro movement. In 1982, the Corcoran Gallery of Art organized a game-changing exhibition, Black Folk Art in America: 1930–1980, which revived the reputations of Edmondson and Bill Traylor, showing their art as part of a larger group of mostly living self-taught artists.