Bill Traylor facts for kids

William Traylor (born around April 1, 1853 – died October 23, 1949) was a talented African-American artist from Lowndes County, Alabama. He taught himself how to draw. Born into slavery, Traylor spent most of his life after slavery ended working as a sharecropper. This meant he farmed land owned by someone else and paid them with a share of his crops.

It wasn't until 1939, when he moved to Montgomery, Alabama, that Traylor began to draw. He was 85 years old when he picked up a pencil and a piece of cardboard to draw what he remembered and saw around him. From 1939 to 1942, while living on the streets of Montgomery, he created almost 1,500 pieces of art.

Traylor had his first public art show in 1940. But it wasn't until about 30 years after he passed away, in the late 1970s, that his artwork really started to get noticed. Today, many people see Traylor as a very important artist in American folk and modern art. This is thanks to the efforts of Charles Shannon, who first saw Traylor's work in 1940 and helped share it with the art world. Traylor is now a key figure in "self-taught" and modern art.

Life Story of Bill Traylor

Bill Traylor was born in April 1853, in Benton, Alabama. His parents, Sally and Bill Calloway, were enslaved people on a cotton farm owned by George Hartwell Traylor. Bill had five brothers and sisters.

The mid-1860s brought huge changes for young Traylor. In 1865, he saw the Confederacy lose the Civil War. This big social and political change happened around the same time his father died. Even though the war ended slavery, Traylor still faced tough economic times in the South due to Jim Crow laws. He continued to work on the farm, but now as a sharecropper.

It's hard to know all the details of Traylor's early life, but we know he had many children. He started a family with Larisa Dunklin in 1884, and they had several children together. Later, he also had children with other women, including a second wife named Laura Williams. Traylor once said he "raised twenty-odd children."

In 1909, Traylor was farming in Montgomery County. In 1928, he moved to the capital city of Montgomery. He later explained his move by saying, "My white folks had died and my children had scattered." It was a difficult new start for 75-year-old Traylor. He rented a room, then a small shack, and found work to support himself.

Several years after moving, he struggled to make enough money. After he got rheumatism, which made it hard to work at a shoe factory, Traylor ended up on the streets. He received a small amount of public help and became homeless. At night, he slept in the back room of a funeral home. During the day, he spent his time on Monroe Street.

How Bill Traylor Started Drawing

In June 1939, a young white artist named Charles Shannon noticed Traylor and his growing talent. Shannon was curious and started stopping by Traylor's spot often to watch him draw. Shannon later said that Traylor's art quickly got better. "He worked steadily... and it rapidly became evident that something remarkable was happening: his subjects became more complex, his shapes stronger, and the inner rhythm of his work began to assert itself."

Soon after, Shannon started giving Traylor poster paints, brushes, and drawing paper. They became friends. In February 1940, New South, a cultural center founded by Shannon, held an art show called Bill Traylor: People’s Artist. It featured a hundred of Traylor's drawings. Even though local newspapers wrote many good reviews, none of Traylor's artworks were sold. Still, this show was important because it was the only one Traylor saw during his lifetime.

In 1942, Traylor's art was shown in New York for the first time. From January 5 to January 19, a school in Riverdale, New York hosted Bill Traylor: American Primitive (Work of an old Negro). Victor E. D'Amico, who was the education director at The Museum of Modern Art, organized the show. This exhibit introduced Traylor’s work to the New York art community. However, no museums bought any of his pieces. The director of MoMA, Alfred Barr, offered to buy several drawings for just one or two dollars each, but the deal didn't happen.

From 1942 to 1945, Traylor lived with his children and other relatives in different cities like Detroit, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. After he lost his leg due to a health problem, Traylor moved back to Montgomery to live with his daughter, Sarah. He passed away on October 23, 1949, at Oak Street Hospital in Montgomery and was buried at Mount Moriah Cemetery.

What Bill Traylor Drew

Traylor's drawings show his experiences and observations from both country and city life. He used simple, repeated symbols, shapes, and figures. His art often featured people, plants, animals, and places he knew. Some drawings focused on a single animal, like a dog or a snake. Other paintings showed more complex scenes, like people gathering by a fountain or working on a farm.

His art ranged from simple pictures with one figure to more detailed pieces with many figures shown as silhouettes. Charles Shannon noted that Traylor's art improved over time. The pieces from Traylor's last year of work "brought together many of the visual themes he had developed by this time: strong abstract forms, combination plant-animal and abstract forms, people in various 'states' ranging from serenity to hysteria, thieves and drinks and devilish kids."

Exhibitions and Recognition

Traylor's art finally got the attention of the wider art world in the late 1970s and 1980s. In 1974, Charles Shannon and his wife took all of Traylor's art out of storage and started to organize it. Shannon didn't want to give titles to Traylor's pieces. Instead, he first grouped them by what they showed. In 1975, he divided the collection into 25 groups of similar images and three extra groups: earliest works, extra large works, and special works. Once organized, Traylor's art began to interest art lovers.

In 1979, an art dealer named Richard H. Oosterom agreed to hold a show just for Bill Traylor's pieces. From December 13, 1979, to January 12, 1980, R.H. Oosterom, Inc. presented Bill Traylor 1854–1974, Works on Paper. This show also led to the first time a museum bought one of Traylor's drawings. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture bought his "Man on Mule."

It wasn't until Traylor's art was shown at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. in 1982 that people truly started to see how important his work was. Curators Jane Livingstone and John Beardsley included 36 of Traylor's pieces in a famous exhibition called Black Folk Art in America 1930-1980. Soon after, Shannon gave some of Traylor's works to the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts.

The year 1982 "started the larger public exposure, critical analysis, and publication through which Traylor’s work has become widely recognized." In 1995, the Metropolitan Museum of Art showed Traylor's works. In 1996, the Museum of Modern Art included Traylor's drawings in an exhibition called A Century of American Drawing from the Collection.

More recently, Traylor has been recognized as one of the most important self-taught artists both in America and around the world. Experts and curators have stopped calling him a "primitive" or "outsider" artist. Instead, they focus on his importance in 20th-century American art. In 2005, the Studio Museum in Harlem launched a traveling exhibit called Bill Traylor, William Edmondson, and the Modernist Impulse. This show featured 50 of Traylor's drawings and paintings. It looked at his work in connection with "modernist works of the established or 'official' avant-garde of the period."

The American Folk Art Museum continued this effort in 2013 with two exhibitions. From June 11 to September 22, the Museum hosted Bill Traylor: Drawings From the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts and Traylor in Motion: Wonders from New York Collections. Together, these shows featured 104 of Traylor's drawings and paintings. A reviewer from The New York Times said the exhibits offered "total immersion in his late-life burst of genius."

The biggest exhibition of Traylor's work so far, Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor, was at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art from September 28, 2018, to April 7, 2019. It was the first time an artist born into slavery had such a large show dedicated to their work.

How People See Bill Traylor's Art

In 1942, when Traylor's first show was announced, local journalists described his art as "primitive" and "African." Other reviews followed this idea. One newspaper article was titled "The Enigma of Uncle Bill Traylor: Born A Slave, Untutored in Art, His Paintings Are Reminiscent of Cave Pictures – And Picasso." This way of looking at Traylor's work, often linked to his race, continued for most of the 20th century.

In 2013, the American Folk Art Museum held a full-day discussion called Bill Traylor: Beyond the Figure, to talk about his complex story and art.

Alana Shilling from The Brooklyn Rail warned against only looking at Traylor's art for its beauty. She said that ignoring his personal struggles "is to ignore what makes Traylor not only a noteworthy artist, but also an eloquent annalist of a nation’s history: its brutality."

Traylor's life and art were the subject of a children's book in 2012, called It Jes’ Happened: When Bill Traylor Started to Draw, written by Don Tate.

The Smithsonian Museum of American Art's big show, Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor, received a lot of public attention. It was featured in major newspapers like The New Yorker and The New York Times, and even on CBS News Sunday Morning.

In 2019, a discussion held with the Smithsonian show talked about how new information about Traylor's visual record of African-American life could help us understand the story of the United States.

In 2021, a documentary film about Bill Traylor's life, called Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts, was released by filmmaker Jeffrey Wolf.