19 Facts About Elijah Pierce

Elijah Pierce began carving at a young age using a pocket knife.

Elijah Pierce first started carving animals because of his prior life of growing up on a farm.

Elijah Pierce was the youngest son in his family, born on a farm in Baldwyn, Mississippi, on March 5,1892.

Elijah Pierce's father was formerly enslaved, and was sold away from his mother by the age of four.

Elijah Pierce began woodcarving at the age of seven, when his father gave him his first pocketknife.

Elijah Pierce would give away his carvings to other children at his school.

Elijah Pierce began to hang out at the local barbershop, and this is where he found another passion of his.

Elijah Pierce left the South and worked itinerantly across the Mississippi River valley, settling in Columbus, Ohio, in 1923 to work as a barber.

The Book of Wood was the first type of carving Elijah Pierce ever made differing from his typical small sculptures.

Elijah Pierce would go on to make many more carvings similar to the Book of Wood, each with its own story and universal theme.

Elijah Pierce's work was discovered by the mainstream art world in the early 1970s, and was included in exhibitions at galleries such as the Krannert Art Museum, the Phyllis Kind Gallery of New York, the National Museum of American Art, and the Renwick Gallery.

Elijah Pierce's work is in the collection of the American Folk Art Museum, and in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

In 1973, Elijah Pierce won first prize in the International Meeting of Naive Art in Zagreb, Yugoslavia.

Elijah Pierce was a recipient of a 1982 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the United States government's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts.

Elijah Pierce is generally regarded and commemorated as one of the greatest and most influential woodcarvers from within the past few centuries.

Elijah Pierce married his first wife, Zetta Palm, and had a son with her.

In September 1923, Elijah Pierce would marry Cornelia Houeston, his second wife.

In 1949, Elijah Pierce would marry his third and final wife, Estelle Green.

Elijah Pierce died on May 7,1984, at St Anthony's Hospital in Columbus, of an apparent heart attack.