Eldren Bailey

Eldren "E. M." Bailey (1903–1987) was an African American artist best known for his large cement sculptures, which he often displayed in his front yard. Born in Flovilla, Georgia, Bailey spent most of his life and career in Atlanta, Georgia.

Bailey died in Atlanta in 1987 at age 83.

Career Settling into a stable life as a cement mason allowed Bailey to build a studio in his home in the Mechanicsville neighborhood of Southside Atlanta. Bailey's small outdoor sculpture Dancers inspired the poem "Dreaming We're E.M. Bailey's Dancers" by Carrie Meadows.

Bailey's more personal work, including small sculptures and paintings, were made inside his home out of the public eye. carved and painted mythological trickster figures with Masonic symbolism (Spider), and created work with overt political opinions (e.g. Ecumenical, and Politician's Funeral ).

His work has been shows at The Rockford Art Museum in Rockford, IL and in the exhibition ASHE: Improvisation & Recycling in African-American Visionary Art, which showed at the NC Diggs Gallery.

However, Bailey's constructions were not contained to sculptures and paintings alone. He also covered the interior of his home "in modeled concrete that resembled walls of a grotto. This "decor" conversed with Bailey's sense of the early Christian habitations of the catacombs of Rome (two plaster fish were sculpted into his laundry room's ceiling) and his interest in the legacies of those lost civilizations known only through their tombs or caves. Many of the utilitarian furnishings inside his home continued this theme. Lamps and planters assumed the forms of rock outcroppings, as if to emphasize Bailey's idea that the earth, repository of all things past, provides the assistance necessary for human life." The scholar and author Grey Gundaker argues that Bailey epitomizes this notion with a cast concrete polyptych, formerly embedded in his yard, of the suits in a deck of cards, wherein the diamond concrete cast held an inscription that read, "Remember to Die." have been preserved, his largest yard works have not been seen since. and the High Museum of Art.