In the late 1920s, Ohio barber Elijah Pierce carved a small wooden elephant for his wife; decades later, the Columbus Museum held more than 100 of his carvings

Elijah Pierce left home as a teenager, traveled around the country riding freight trains, and eventually set up a barber shop in Columbus, Ohio. During the late 1920s, he made a small elephant out of wood as a gift to his wife, and that single piece grew into one of the country's most significant folk-art collections. His wife loved it so much that he decided to make an entire zoo, and from then on, he carved sculptures anytime he had free time, according to the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Pierce began to create sculptures based on his memories of his religious upbringing. He felt he had been blessed with carving skills by God, so he decided his life purpose was to create ‘every sermon I never preached’, according to the museum. This is an incredibly simple answer to something many of us struggle with.

Small shop, big range


Pierce created sculptures on a variety of topics. Over 100 of his works were displayed in a 2020 exhibition at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. These included free-standing carvings, painted reliefs, and large-scale scenes. They were dated between 1923 and 1979 and covered a variety of allegorical works, political and pop culture reflections, as per a 2020 Smithsonian Magazine publication.

The Columbus Museum of Art notes that one of his works, The White House (1977), was a carved and painted relief made from wood, glitter, rhinestones, and corrugated cardboard. This demonstrated how involved Pierce was with political and social issues of the time. It doesn't always have to look like ‘fine art’.

A long time to be recognised

It took decades, but Pierce did live to see his work celebrated. The mainstream art world began to take notice of him in the early 1970s; he won first prize at the International Meeting of Naive Art in Zagreb, Yugoslavia in 1973, and in 1982 he received one of the very first National Heritage Fellowships ever awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts. He died in 1984, two years later, at age 92, by then, a nationally recognized artist, not an undiscovered one. Today, the Columbus Museum of Art holds the largest collection of Pierce's work anywhere: well over 300 pieces, the bulk of what he produced in his lifetime, and it was that collection the Barnes Foundation drew from for its 2020 retrospective.

What can we take from this?

There’s no guarantee Pierce would gain fame from his work. The sources suggest that he didn’t gain recognition until later in his life. However, it shows that we shouldn’t put off our ‘someday’ projects. Pierce didn’t wait until he had a studio or funding. He simply used whatever spare time he had around his work at the barber shop to create his art.

According to the museum, his work began as a gift for one person and is now studied and displayed in museums. It's worth putting ten minutes into the guitar in the corner tonight, it won't make anyone famous, but it's a reminder that even small personal projects can turn into something lasting, as one barber proved.