William Edmondson (1874 - 1951) was an African-American folk art sculptor. In 1937 Edmondson was the first African-American artist to be given a one-person show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

William Edmondson was born in 1874 in Davidson County, Tennessee. He did not know the exact year of his birth because of a fire that destroyed the family Bible. Recent research into census records indicates that he was born in December, 1874. He was one of six children of freed slaves Orange and Jane Edmondson. He grew up in what was then a rural part Davidson County on the Compton plantation where his mother and father had been enslaved and now worked as sharecroppers. He had little or no formal education, and it was repor...