“That’s Miss Wootton. I put her on the pot!” grinned William Edmondson, his eyes twinkling with mischief. The sculptor was speaking with Mimi Cunningham, a former bookkeeper with Women’s Hospital of Tennessee, as they stood outside his backyard workshop and contemplated a limestone figure of a nude woman seated on a pedestal-like bench. He probably

December 30, 1941, seventy three years ago today: Photographer Edward Weston created a portrait of sculptor William Edmondson. Despite a vast gulf of class, race, culture, geography, Weston’s camera captured a moment of wordless communication and understanding between two visionary creators, two artists who shared an astute understanding of form and abstraction, two revealers of beauty and meaning.

William Edmondson talked with God. And God delivered a message: teach yourself to carve in limestone. Within five years, the old janitor from Nashville, Tennessee was a master sculptor, and in 1937 he became the first African American to be given a solo show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. What started as divine inspiration culminated in a kind of miracle.