Elijah Pierce, Long Street, and the Barbershop That Was a Gallery

Elijah Pierce was born on March fifth, eighteen ninety-two, in Baldwyn, Mississippi. His father had been enslaved. Pierce began carving wood at seven years old with a pocketknife his father gave him, and he kept carving for the rest of his life.

He rode freight trains north as a young man. He became a barber. He eventually settled in Columbus, Ohio, where in nineteen fifty-one he opened his own shop on Long Street in the heart of the King-Lincoln Bronzeville neighborhood. He cut hair. He also filled every available surface of the shop with his carvings.

The work was figurative and dense. Biblical scenes. Moral parables. Portraits of boxers and political figures. Animals. Everyday life on the streets outside. Pierce was a lay preacher and his art had a preacher's urgency, the sense that every surface was an opportunity to say something true. His most celebrated single work was a seven-panel carving called the Book of Wood, completed in nineteen thirty-two, depicting the life of Christ in thirty-three carved scenes.

He was discovered by the broader art world in the nineteen sixties. In nineteen eighty-two, the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery mounted a solo show for him and the Corcoran included him in the landmark exhibition Black Folk Art in America, Nineteen Thirty to Nineteen Eighty. The National Endowment for the Arts gave him its highest folk arts honor, the National Heritage Fellowship, that same year.

One of the people who came regularly to sit in Pierce's barbershop and draw was a young woman from the neighborhood named Aminah Robinson. Pierce told her to make art with what the ancestors gave her. She spent the rest of her life doing exactly that.

He died in nineteen eighty-four. The Columbus Museum of Art now holds more than three hundred of his works.