Elijah Pierce.
(1892-1984, Mississippi and Ohio)
Horse Race.1980.
Signed and dated verso.
Carved wood with paint and glitter accents.
Carving is 14.25"w x 9"h.
Original artist-made frame is 17.5"w x 12"h.
Provenance: Deaccessioned from the Columbus (Ohio) Museum of Art, their label verso.
The Mike Dale Collection.
Est. $3,000-$5,000.
Ship: $55

Elijah Pierce was born on March 5, 1892, in a log cabin on a farm in Baldwyn, Mississippi, into a devoutly religious family. His father, a former slave sold away from his mother at age four, was an ordained Baptist deacon for forty years, and his mother required her children to read the Bible daily. Pierce began carving at the age of seven when he received his first pocketknife, carving simple farm animals. As a teenager, he realized that the farming life was not for him. He began to be a fixture at the local barbershop and learned the skill of barbering, a talent that would provide him with a job, independence, and income for the rest of his life.

In his early twenties, Pierce married his first wife Zetta Palm, who died shortly after giving birth to their son. In 1920, Pierce received his preacher's license from his home church of Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Baldwyn. Pierce said, "I was called to preach when I was a young man, but I never wanted to preach. I didn't feel like I was fit and I didn't feel like I knew enough and I didn't feel like I could be obedient enough to preach the gospel to a people." Pierce would later overcome his fears and, through his carving, would spread his message to millions.

In 1923, Pierce became part of the Great Migration North, following Cornelia Houeston, who would soon become his second wife, to her hometown of Columbus, Ohio. A personal encounter with a life-threatening white mob in 1912 (which Pierce later captured in the carving Elijah Escapes the Mob) and the racist murder of his older brother in 1916 convinced Pierce that the Jim Crow South, and Mississippi in particular, was not where he wanted to be. During his years with Cornelia, Pierce worked at various barbershops in Columbus while also traveling across the Midwest and South as an itinerant preacher. Each summer, Pierce and Cornelia would load their car with his carvings and travel, displaying his work at fairs, shops, and churches. Pierce would use the carvings as visual aids to reinforce his preaching. "Every piece of work I got carved is a message, a sermon, you might say," he said. Cornelia died of cancer in 1948 at the age of 61. In 1951, Pierce became self-employed with the opening of his own barbershop at 483 E. Long Street. A year later he married his third wife, Estelle Greene, who was then forty-six. The couple thrived and Pierce's work as an artist and lay minister continued to grow. Pierce's barbershop on Long Street was a community gathering place where haircuts and opinions, on everything from sports to politics to civil rights, were readily dispensed. His barbershop had two rooms, and when business was slack, he would retreat to the back room to work on his carvings. His secular works, like the Horse Race offered here, show that he had broad interests beyond religion, including baseball, boxing, movies, politics (he was not fond of Richard Nixon), patriotism, and American heroes who fought for liberty and justice. Pierce considered The Book of Wood, completed in 1932, his greatest creation. Seven carved pages, each two feet by two feet, contained thirty-three Bible scenes centered around the life of Christ. He sold many carvings over the years, but Pierce kept The Book of Wood in his barbershop until he died. Pierce did not become well known outside the local community until the early 1970s, when Boris Gruenwald, a sculptor and grad student at Ohio State University, saw Pierce's carvings in a Columbus YMCA exhibition. The two became great friends, and Gruenwald arranged for Pierce's work to be exhibited at Ohio State in 1971. Within a few years, Pierce's fame as a traditional folk carver spread, and he was honored to participate in exhibitions at the Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, Illinois; the Phyllis Kind Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; and the National Museum of American Art and the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C. In 1982, his carvings were included in the monumental exhibition Black Folk Art in America 1930-1980, organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, considered a major milestone in the ascendance of contemporary black folk art. That same year, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded Pierce a National Heritage Fellowship as one of 15 master traditional artists. Pierce's work is included in every major museum with an interest in folk art, including the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the American Folk Art Museum, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the New Orleans Museum of Art; and the National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C., to name a few. Pierce died of a heart attack in Columbus in 1984 at the age of 92. The Columbus Museum of Art, through arrangement with Pierce's family, has kept together the majority of works that Pierce exhibited at his barbershop/museum and has added to that assemblage, now boasting the largest (over 300 pieces) and most significant collection of Pierce's work in the country.