Bill Traylor

About the artist

1854–1949, lived and worked in Montgomery, Alabama

Bill Traylor was born into slavery in 1854 on the plantation of George Hartwell Traylor, near Benton, Alabama. He received no formal education, and after his emancipation he chose to remain on the Traylors’s land as a farm hand with his wife and twenty-two children. He lived there until 1938, when he was eighty-four. Then, after his wife and the Traylors had passed away and his children had left, he moved to Montgomery, Alabama. He worked in a shoe factory until rheumatism effectively disabled him, allowing him to collect financial support from the government. Homeless and unable to work, Traylor spent nights in the storage room of a funeral parlor and days in a chair on the sidewalk in front of a pool hall or under a shed roof in Montgomery’s downtown street market. It was not until 1939, when Traylor was eighty-five, that he began to draw. “It just come to me,” he told a reporter. A master of line, he delineated geometric forms using a pencil and a straight-edge, filling them in with colored poster paint provided by Charles Shannon, a local artist, friend, and champion of his work. Traylor drew on whatever paper or cardboard (often shirt cardboard) that he could find, incorporating any distortions or attributes of the material into his compositions. Between 1939 and 1942, he produced approximately 1,500 works, many of which now reside in major private and public collections, including the American Folk Art Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 1942, World War II forced him to travel north to live with his children in Washington, D.C., and Detroit. Four years later, at the end of the war, Traylor returned to Montgomery and began to draw again. He died the following year, while living in a nursing home.

––Brendan Greaves

Above: Photo of Bill Traylor from the collection of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, Alabama 

Bibliography

Arnett, William, and Paul Arnett, eds. Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art from the South, Volume 1. Atlanta, Georgia: Tinwood Books in association with Schomburg Center for Research in Black Cultures, New York, 2000.

Bill Traylor. Little Rock, AR: Arkansas Arts Center, 1982.

Bill Traylor. Montgomery, AL: Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, 1982.

Bill Traylor. New York: Hirschl & Adler Modern, 1985.

Bill Traylor Drawings. Chicago: Chicago Public Library Cultural Center, 1988.

Bill Traylor Drawings from the Collection of Joe and Pat Wilkinson. New York: Sotheby’s, 1997.

Bill Traylor 1854-1947. New York: Hirschl & Adler Modern, 1988.

Bill Traylor: High Singing Blues. New York: Hirschl & Adler Modern, 1997.

Bill Traylor: Observing Life. New York: Ricco/Maresca Gallery, 1997.

Bill Traylor: People’s Artist. Montgomery, AL: New South, 1940.

Dream Singers, Story Tellers: An African-American Presence. Trenton, NJ: New Jersey State Museum, 1992.

Hartigan, Lynda Roscoe. “Going Urban: American Folk Art and the Great Migration,” American Art 14, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 26-51.

Helfenstein, Josef, and Roman Kurzmeyer, eds. Bill Traylor (1854-1949), Deep Blues. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

___________, and Roxanne Stanulis. Bill Traylor, William Edmondson and the Modernist Impulse. Champaign, IL: Krannert Art Museum, 2004.

Karlins, [N.F.] Nancy. “Bill Traylor.” Raw Vision 15 (Summer 1996): 28-35.

Livingston, Jane, and John Beardsley. Black Folk Art in America: 1930-1980. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi/Center for the Study of Southern Culture for the Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1982.

Rankin, Allen. “He Lost 10,000 Years.” Colliers (22 July 1946): 67.

Self-Taught Artists of the 20th Century: An American Anthology. New York: Museum of American Folk Art, in association with Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1998.

Stigliano, Phyllis, and Janice Parente. Bill Traylor. New York: Luise Ross Gallery, 1990.