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From The Kentucky Encyclopedia -
Wolfe County woodcarver Edgar Tolson
inspired a lasting fascination and respect for unschooled art of the twentieth
century. He was born near Lee City on June 24, 1904, son of James Perry and
Rebecca (Maddox) Tolson. By turns a Baptist preacher,
chairmaker, carpenter, cobbler, and coal miner, Tolson suffered a stroke in
1957. He then concentrated on carving wooden figures to entertain his children
and repay his neighbors.
Workers in the federal War on
Poverty met Tolson in the mid-1960s. Subsequently, his carvings appeared at the
Smithsonian Institution Museum Shop and the Kentucky Guild of Artists and
Craftsmen's fair. John Tuska and Michael Hall, art faculty members at the University of Kentucky ,
admired Tolson's "dolls," and Hall drew Tolson to the attention of a
national audience. Tolson took part in the 1968 and 1973 Smithsonian festivals
of folklife. He was also represented in the 1973 Whitney Museum Biennial of
American Art. Tolson did carve secular subjects but is best known for
renderings of Adam and Eve, depicting them variously in paradisal happiness,
tempted by the snake, and expelled from the garden. Most of his pieces are of
unpainted poplar.
Tolson's works have been collected
by the National Museum of American Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the
Museum of American Folk Art. In 1981 he received an artist's fellowship from
the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1925 Tolson married Lilly Smith of Breathitt County and
raised four children. Hulda Patton became his second wife in 1942; their
marriage produced fourteen children. Edgar Tolson died September 7, 1984, in Manchester and lies buried
in a family cemetery north of Campton.
JULIE ARDERY,
Entry Author
Selected
Sources from UK Libraries:
The temptation : Edgar
Tolson and the genesis of
twentieth-century folk art / Julia S. Ardery.
NK9798.T65 A93 1998, Special Collections
Research Center
Edgar
Tolson : Kentucky gothic :
[exhibition] / organized by Priscilla Colt.
N40.1.T65 C70, Fine Arts Library
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