The Life and Art of Jimmy Lee Sudduth

Jimmy Lee Sudduth is one of the elder statesmen of Black folk art in America. A self-taught artist who has lived and worked in Fayette, Alabama, for most of his life, he is comfortably integrated into his West Alabama community. As he once said, “I’m easy to find. I’m in the center of the universe.” Sudduth is a gifted painter with remarkable formal skill. He has painted continuously and ecstatically since he was a child, and at ninety-five, he paints that way still. The best of his work reveals an exceptional visual talent coupled with an incomparable delight in the marvelous physical world around him. Jimmy Lee Sudduth is the story of Sudduth’s life and art, with color reproductions of some fifty of his finest paintings. An essay by Susan Mitchell Crawley, associate curator of folk art at the High Museum in Atlanta, Georgia, describes the artist’s subjects, materials, and techniques and captures the essence of his infinite creativity