Jimmy Lee Sudduth

Jimmy Lee Sudduth (March 10, 1910 - September 2, 2007) was a prominent outsider artist and blues musician from Fayette, Alabama .

Sudduth was raised on a farm at Caines Ridge, near Fayette, Alabama. He began making art as a child, surrounding the porch of his parent's house with hand-carved wooden dolls and drawing in the dirt or on tree trunks outside. As his talents became known in the community he began collecting pigments from clay, earth, rocks and plants 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 sugar, soft drinks, instant coffee and caulk.

Sudduth's 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. He was honored with the Alabama Arts Award in 1995 and served as an artist-in-residence at the New Orleans Museum of Art. 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.

Sudduth 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. 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. 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 the woods and barn-yards.

Man with Guitar 16" X 27" wood cabinet door $650

We commissioned Jimmy to do this cabinet door for us many years back and it's been in storage for awhile. We will be happy to e-mail larger images of this as well