Edmondson had a large audience in Edgehill as many of his figures were on display not only in his yard, but in that of neighbors' homes and gardens. A few years into Edmondson's sculpting career, Peabody College art enthusiast Sidney Hirsch wandered through Edgehill and came upon Edmondson's vast sculpture collection. This is widely documented as Edmondson's "discovery" by Sidney Mttron Hirsch. Hirsch himself was a collector of African, Middle Eastern, and East Asian art and became one of Edmondson's greatest supporters. With this exposure, friends of Hirsch's and other fellow members of Nashville's elite bought Edmondson's sculptures for their homes, gardens, and offices, many of which were later displayed in exhibits at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art. Of Hirsch's friends, Alfred and Elizabeth Starr, Alfred, a managing partner of a chain of movie theaters catering to the black community, and his wife Elizabeth, a painter, also became enthusiastic patrons and supporters of Edmondson's work. They introduced Edmondson to several artist friends, including Starr's boyhood friend Meyer (Mike) Wolfe and his wife Louise Dahl-Wolfe. Dahl-Wolfe was a photographer who had recently begun work for "Harper's Bazaar" fashion magazine in New York. She made over a hundred photographs of Edmondson's at work in his backyard shop, which she presented to the editor of "Harper's Bazaar". She attempted to publish his work but newspaper chain mogul William Randolph Hearst had a prejudice against showing Negro art as he saw them as nothing other than servants. She then brought Edmondson's work to the attention of fellow Tennessean Thomas Mabry and his boss Alfred Barr, the director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).