BIOGRAPHY

"Bill Traylor was born around April 1, 1853, on the Alabama plantation of John Getson Traylor in Dallas County, near the towns of Pleasant Hill and Benton. Traylor and his siblings were born enslaved, as their parents had been…When Emancipation became a reality in the South two years later, Bill and his family remained on George Traylor's land as laborers…Except for brief stints with his grown children in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, before and during World War II, he remained in Montgomery until his death on October 23, 1949.

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"Traylor is known today through the large body of drawn and painted work he made during his years living in the Alabama state capital…His earliest extant drawings date to 1939 and were primarily done in pencil or colored pencil…Traylor drew and painted, mostly on discarded pieces of paperboard from the neighborhood, from around 1939 until shortly before his death in 1949. His images attest to his existence and point of view; they describe his memories of a hard, rural, racially fraught past, as well as the evolving African American urban culture that was taking shape before his eyes. Traylor never became literate, but his pictures became a language unto themselves. His visual depictions are steeped in a life of folkways: storytelling, singing, local healing, and survival. As these modes of expression are well known to do, Traylor's imagery often holds veiled meanings and lessons underneath the veneer of simplicity or hilarity. Traylor became adept at creating pliable narratives; he experimented with allegory and abstraction and was able to convey a volume of meaning in deceptively simple images.

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"Traylor's body of work is artistically unique, but its historical position is singular as well. No other artist captured the complex, drawn-out moment between slavery and civil rights. It remains the only substantial surviving body of drawings and paintings by a man born into the ruthless but then-dying system of American slavery."

–Smithsonian American Art Museum

 

Image: Bill Traylor (Frontal), 1939. Charles Shannon, Photograph- Charles E. and Eugenia C. Shannon Trust, courtesy Betty Cuningham Gallery.