James “Buddy” Snipes

Buddy, one of twelve children, was born in Macon County Alabama in 1943. Living a hardscrabble life as a sickly child, he began to make his own toys out of anything he could find. School lasted only 3 or 4 years and as he got older he worked at a number of odd jobs – logger, farmhand and dishwasher. He soon found that he was good at fixing broken furniture and sagging doors and making wheelbarrows out of old lumber. While fixing things for other people to make his living, he began to make things that he liked from roots, limbs, vines, scrap lumber, road signs, tobacco cans, horse collars—anything he found that triggered his imagination. “I see something and it just comes to me…God put this in my head and I does it”.

His creations are rough, whimsical, chunky, and colorful, and have met with great interest by folk art collectors. His work has been shown at the Wiregrass Museum in Dothan Alabama, the Kentucky Folk Art Festival, and Celebrating the Vision: Self-Taught Artists of Alabama” 2000.

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