About the artist
1914–1990, born in Fitzgerald, Georgia; lived and worked in SavannahUlysses Davis learned metalworking from his father, a blacksmith, and began carving when he was eleven. He left school after the tenth grade to help support his family by working for the railroad. After being laid off in the early 1950s, he began barbering in a shop he built behind his home in Savannah, Georgia, carving figures from wood in his spare time. He decorated the outside of his barbershop, which he filled with his reliefs and freestanding carvings—rarely selling his work.
Davis created a diverse but unified body of highly refined sculpture that reflects his deep faith, humor, and dignity. His carvings were featured in the seminal exhibition, “Black Folk Art: 1930–1980” at the Corcoran Gallery. Because he wanted his work to stay together after he died, Davis rarely sold his sculpture. As a result, they have had little exposure outside Savannah, particularly since his death, and he is little known outside folk art circles. One notable exception was the curator J. Carter Brown’s inclusion of Davis’s portrait bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. in “Rings: Five Passions in World Art,”an exhibition at the High Museum of Art during the 1996 Summer Olympic Games; Davis was the only Georgia artist whose work was included in the show.
Davis’s sculptures, which range in height from six to over forty inches, can be divided into major categories: portraits of U.S. and African leaders; religious images; patriotism; works influenced by African forms; fantasy; flora and fauna; love; humor; and abstract decorative objects. Davis also carved utilitarian objects such as canes and furniture. Among the pieces owned by the King-Tisdell Cottage Foundation is a group regarded as his masterwork: a series of 40 carved busts of all the U.S. presidents through George H. W. Bush “In many ways, Ulysses Davis’s artwork is a paradox,” says Susan Crawley, the High’s Curator of Folk Art. “Its sources could range from prosaic advertising images to the artist’s extravagant imagination, its moods from whimsical fantasy to solemn dignity, its forms from lavishly ornamental to radically simplified. Yet despite these extremes, it is always recognizable as his. Davis’s work is widely esteemed but too rarely seen.”
Bibliography
Crawley, Susan Mitchell. The Treasure of Ulysses Davis: Sculpture from a Savannah Barbershop. Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 2008.
Kiah, Virginia. “Ulysses Davis: Savannah Folk Sculptor.” Southern Folklore Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 3 (1978): 271–285.
Outside the Mainstream: Folk Art in Our Time. Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 1988.