Bill Traylor

Bill Traylor (born April 1, 1854, in Dallas County, Alabama – died October 23, 1949) was an American artist whose drawing practice explored memory, movement, labor, race, and everyday life in the rural and urban South. Working primarily across drawing, painting, and mixed-media works on cardboard, Traylor examined animals, human figures, street life, and remembered scenes through distilled silhouettes, rhythmic line, and bold, economical compositions. Born into slavery, he began making art late in life, producing a remarkable body of work that has become central to the history of self-taught and American art.  Traylor was self-taught. After emancipation, he spent most of his life as a farm laborer and sharecropper before moving to Montgomery, Alabama, in the late 1920s. Around 1939, no longer able to do heavy physical labor, he began drawing on discarded cardboard while sitting on Monroe Street. His work often engages memory, social history, animal imagery, Black southern life, and the changing cityscape of Montgomery, using simplified forms, serial variation, and improvised materials to consider survival, observation, humor, and the visual experience of a racially stratified world.  His work has been exhibited at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the American Folk Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While he did not receive major awards during his lifetime, he is now widely recognized as one of the most important self-taught artists in American history. Bill Traylor lived and worked in Alabama, especially Montgomery.