Jimmie Lee Sudduth 1910-2007
A speech given by Marcia Weber at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts follows below:
Jimmie Lee was well known for many years in Alabama--native of Fayette, Alabama - Caine's Ridge community in particular. He is considered one of the pioneers in black folk art in America. His paintings are distinctive; each original one of a kind work was created, at first only with various earth ochres, usually mud that he dug from the earth. He experimented and added various sweet liquids to act as a binder to make his "sweet mud" stick to a variety of surfaces. He most commonly used wood to paint on but he did use tin as well. He loved to experiment and added a variety of items for color through the years. Among these items were berries, poke salad leaves, soot and even axle grease! Over time he also added various paints and often mixed paint and rubbed these various items into his wet mud on the surface of his paintings as he worked.
It was a privilege to have known Jimmie Lee and to have a gallery for the last 18 years where I exhibited his work from California to Chicago to New York to enthusiastic responses. As a person, he was a pleasure to know and to visit. He had a love for life that was infectious. His joy and his genuine interest in his fellow man spilled over into his paintings, which are honest, powerful expressions of his appreciation for life. He painted thousands of paintings in his 97 years and he painted everyday until he was 95. I visited him on his 95th birthday and he had a lot of fun planting some plants and he even painted a painting while I was there that day.
He painted all sorts of subjects...often of memories from his life--farm scenes, animals, flowers (especially in the spring) or people, often inspired by a current event, a visitor or something he saw on TV. He painted self portraits, always showing himself in a hat and overalls with his hands on his hips. Two of his favorite subjects were his dog, Toto and a variety of buildings. Jimmie Lee truly loved architecture!
I most often visited Jimmie Lee at his home but once his cousin, O.C., drove him to Montgomery where he visited my Lexington Road home in Cloverdale. There are Victorian Gothic homes on that 3 block street with multi-gabled roofs. As soon as Jimmie Lee got out of the van, he began to exclaim about the houses on my street and wanted to walk up and down the street taking Polaroid photos of the houses, saying, "I'm gonna paint that house!" He obviously paid attention to many architectural details. I began to see paintings that resembled the houses on my street. He loved cities and painting cityscapes as well.
Jimmie Lee had numerous opportunities to travel to cities and these found their way into his paintings...New Orleans, New York and Washington in particular. In 1976 during the Bicentennial Festivities, he represented Alabama in the folk life arena where he demonstrated his painting and enthralled hundreds of people. It was there that he connected with NBC who later in 1980 featured him on the Today Show. Once the world knew about Jimmie Lee and his art, people from far and wide beat a path to his door to meet him and to take back home a ray of Alabama sunshine and beautiful paintings of Alabama mud.
I did numerous interviews with Jimmie Lee through the years and was charmed by his simple explanations and astounded by his astute memory. I am convinced that illiteracy must enhance memory! I would review notes from a former interview and ask the same questions again a year or so later and over time, the details he gave were consistent. When asked how and when he painted his first painting, he told me several times about how he was taken to the woods at the age of 3 to look for medicine plants with his Mother, who was a "medicine lady" for a small band of Choctaw Indians still in those parts 100 years ago. While there he had mixed honey with the surrounding dirt and painted a picture on the stump of a cut tree. He was scolded for wasting the honey but later when they came back to collect some more plants, his painting was still there on the tree stump. This, his mother saw as a "sign" that Jimmie Lee would be a great painter and from that time on, encouraged him to continue painting. He painted a number of homages to Indians....many Indian Girls and Indian Chiefs.
Jimmie Lee was the gardner for many fine homes in Fayette through the years. He also had worked at a gristmill and at Brown's Lumber Company in Fayette, often painting and giving his works away to co-workers and customers. It was after his retirement from his everyday jobs that he began to paint full time. Starting in 1969 Jimmie Lee was included in numerous exhibitions--some important ones, like Passionate Visions from the American South traveled through the country for two years. His work was included in galleries from coast to coast and even in France, Switzerland and Germany.
His career was jumpstarted and assisted by a dear man, Jack Black, the local newspaper editor of his town. They had been backdoor neighbors for almost 30 years prior to 1984 when the house where Jimmie Lee and his wife, Ethel, had lived burned .
Many of his early works from his personal collection were destroyed in this fire. Jimmie Lee and his family then moved to a little white house that had a railroad track running right behind it. He found this entertaining and of course he painted trains. When I asked once about the title for a train painting, he replied, "That's the 7:14" as though he knew it very well. This house was fortunately right down the road from his cousin, O. C. Sudduth, who was 12 years younger than Jimmie Lee. It was here that Ethel had a stroke and was lovingly cared for by Jimmie Lee for several years before she died. Over time, O.C. cared for Jimmie Lee along with Dorothy, who lived next door to Jimmie Lee, as his health declined with diabetes, heart disease and many bouts with pneumonia. O. C. had a nice brick home built for Jimmie Lee that sat on the hill behind the white house which was then torn down. Jimmie Lee said of his new house, "It's a palace, Miss Marcia, it's a palace!" This new house Jimmie Lee promptly gave to Dorothy, his nurse, and she and O.C. took excellent care of Jimmie Lee. He died at 97 leaving behind an unparallel legacy in American Folk art.
Jimmie Lee was quite an entertainer. He loved music and performing for visitors and for cameras. He most often played the "mouth harp" as he would call it.- a harmonica. He had a great deal of fun creating dialogs with himself while playing his "mouth harp" that were as spontaneous as his paintings. I took this video of Jimmie Lee in October of 1992 at his little white house (video and images to be added at a later date, check back)
Available works by Jimmie Lee Sudduth can be seen here.
