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The Treasure of Ulysses Davis glows at the American Folk Art Museum
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Frederick Douglass by Ulysses Davis. King-Tisdell Cottage Fdn
The sculptures of Ulysses Davis are as smooth and shiny as much-fingered talismans. Mahogany, pecan, cypress, black walnut—each piece of carved wood is polished until it gleams. Right now, they are sitting in elegant glass display cases at the American Folk Art Museum. But it’s not hard to imagine them as they must have looked on the shelves of the little barber shop Davis ran behind his house in Savannah, Georgia from the 1950s until he died in 1990.
Figures from the Bible, decorative boxes, imaginary creatures, portraits of the presidents of the United States, and American heroes like Bill Cosby, Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass, were once crowded together on shelves and even in the windows of the Ulysses Barber Shop, where neighborhood clients could admire them while they sat, getting their monthly trims.
Davis was born into a poor family near Savannah in 1914 and began whittling pieces of firewood when he was still a small boy. Most of his early efforts ended up on the fire to keep the family warm. Before he could complete high school, he had to quit, to work on the railroad as a blacksmith’s assistant. It wasn’t until the early 50s that Davis went into hair cutting and opened the barbershop that would double as a workshop and home for his carvings.
Even after Davis was “discovered” by artist and educator Virginia Kiah, he agreed to sell very few of his sculptures. “These things are very dear to me … They’re my treasure,” he said.
One of the few pieces he did agree to part with was the early and stunning “Jesus on the Cross,” (1946) which seems almost medieval in its simplicity and power. He sold it to Kiah, who displayed it in her Savannah home, where she ran a small museum.
Now about 100 of Davis’s carvings are included in “The Treasure of Ulysses Davis,” a traveling show organized by Atlanta’s High Museum of Art and currently in New York at the American Folk Art Museum. The pieces are beautifully installed in an intimate space on the third floor. Portraits of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, the almost abstracted planes of their faces evoking traditional African masks, are among the finest. But the wide variety of subjects and treatments—from historic figures to imaginary monsters to abstract objects Davis called “twinklets”—suggest just how complicated an artist he was.
A set of 40 small busts of the American presidents, from George Washington through George H. W. Bush, are particularly intriguing for their beautiful brown complexions and, often, for their African-looking features. Notes to the show say Davis based these portraits on the drawings from a school textbook, but the sculptures themselves suggest he was re-imagining American history in an African-American or mixed-race context.
Davis is generally considered a folk artist because he was self-taught—that is, he never attended art school. But the definition of folk artist is problematic—and increasingly controversial. Using the definition of “self taught,” many of history’s “fine artists” would need to be reclassified.
Offering another, very different definition, some have proposed that “folk art is rooted in traditions that come from community and culture.”
On the American Folk Art Museum’s website, senior curator Stacy C. Hollander avoids a definition altogether, arguing that "folk art is not a single art form, nor does it represent a school.”
When it comes to “The Treasures of Ulysses Davis,” it may not matter in the end. It is enough to enjoy the carvings for what they are—expressions of a unique consciousness, which are beautifully executed in wood.
American Folk Art Museum - 45 West 53rd Street – New York City - 212 265-1040
"The Treasures of Ulysses Davis" now through September 6, 2009
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