Bill Traylor’s Bull, 1940–1942 photo: Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts/Charles & Eugenia Shannon Bill Traylor, William Edmondson, and the Modernist Impulse The Studio Museum in Harlem 144 West 125th Street Through July 3 more art most popular most commented The Met's Century of Photography by Leslie Camhi W. Eugene Smith: Art, Not News Best in Show by R.C. Baker Edward Hopper, Lonely Guy Best in Show by R.C. Baker Philip Guston: Galumphing Master Best in Show by R.C. Baker Bill Wood's Better Commercial Pictures Took by Martha Schwendener Trash Talking With Harvey Weinstein by Tony Ortega Coming and Then Licking It Up. Is This a Gay Thing? Savage Love by Dan Savage At Home With Competitive Swallowers Crazy Legs and Eater X by Andy Kropa Gene Simmons and the Whores He Admires La Dolce Musto by Michael Musto Columbia's Knotty Noose Problem by Graham Rayman The 'W.' Stands for 'War Criminal' (17) Nat Hentoff Scientology's Crushing Defeat (15) Tony Ortega Runnin' Scared: From Brooklyn, a Rap Campaign Against Tight Clothes (9) Runnin' Scared: Arcynta Ali Childs Runnin' Scared: The City Pitted Kids Against Artists in the East Village (6) Runnin' Scared: Chloé A. Hilliard Savage Love: My Boyfriend Almost Fathered a Lesbian Couple's Baby?!? (5) Savage Love: Dan Savage

At age 59, handyman William Edmondson felt divinely inspired to start carving sculptures from damaged limestone windowsills, steps, and curbs. Born in Nashville in 1874, one year before Tennessee passed the nation's inaugural Jim Crow segregation laws, he became, in 1937, the first African American to have a solo show at MOMA. His Noah's ark is chiseled from four blocks—two rough-hewn, listing slabs inset with a smaller, leveled rectangle displaying shallowly carved windows and doors, capped by a peaked pilothouse—a touching evocation of God's upright vessel cutting through stormy seas.

Unknown to each other but bound by the common strictures of the segregated South, Traylor and Edmondson helped define an American modernism they were completely unaware of. Sometimes called "folk" or "outsider" artists, their passions transcend the most basic labels, a point illustrated by contemporary painter Kerry James Marshall's fascinating catalog essay, which quotes Edmondson referring to curators: "I didn't know I was no artist until them folks came and told me I was."