Jimmy Lee Sudduth

Jimmy Lee Sudduth (March 10, 1910 - September 2, 2007) was a folk artist from Fayette, Alabama who was best known for his use of mud, mixed with sugar, molasses, or Pepsi to make it stick, and other natural products in his painting. He always used paint if he had it, but preferred grasses, berries, soot, anything to get a tint, not to mention multiple shades of dirt, all of it applied with his finger rather than a brush. When he got too old to gather such supplies he used acrylic paint and a single shade of mud, applied with a foam rubber brush as well as with his fingers.

Sudduth’s work is in the collections of the African American Museum (Dallas), the American Folk Art Museum (New York), the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Fayette Art Museum and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (Alabama), the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Mississippi Museum of Art (Jackson), the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C.), and the New Orleans Museum of Art.