Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor

Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor is the first retrospective ever organized for an artist born into slavery, and the most comprehensive look at Bill Traylor’s work to date.

Bill Traylor is one of the most celebrated American self-taught artists. His drawn and painted imagery embodies the crossroads of multiple worlds: black and white, rural and urban, old and new. His life—which spanned slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the Great Migration and foreshadowed the era of Civil Rights—offers a rare perspective to the larger story of America.

Traylor was born into slavery around 1853-54 on an Alabama cotton plantation near the town of Benton. He was around twelve when the Civil War ended, but he remained in service as a sharecropper for most of his life. Around 1930, Traylor moved to segregated Montgomery, where he lived the rest of his life, predominantly homeless and increasingly disabled. In his eighties, Traylor began to draw and paint—a life of plantation memories and a rising world of African American culture. He died in 1949 and left behind more than 1,000 drawings and paintings on discarded cardboard boxes and advertising cards.

Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor is the first retrospective ever organized for an artist born into slavery and the most comprehensive look at Traylor’s work to date. The exhibition, for the first time, will carefully assess Traylor’s stylistic development and interpret his scenes as ongoing narratives rather than isolated events. His layered messages blended common imagery with arcane symbolism and used ambiguity as a means to explore themes of freedom and struggle in the Jim Crow South. His work balances narration and abstraction and reflects both a personal vision and the black culture of his time.

The exhibition is organized by Leslie Umberger, curator of folk and self-taught art. The museum’s collection includes twelve works by Traylor, six recently acquired, which will be featured in the exhibition. 

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website 

Read more about Traylor and his art in this review by Joe Phelan.

Image 1:  Bill Traylor, Untitled (Woman with Umbrella and Man on Crutch), 1939, pencil and opaque watercolor on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr., 1991.96.7

Image 2:  Bill Traylor, House, c.1940-1942, watercolor and graphite on cardboard. Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama, Gift of Charles and Eugenia Shannon

Whether or not you go, the exhibition catalog, Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor, reveals one man’s visual record of African American life as a window into the overarching story of his nation.  This major new look at the work of one of America’s foremost self-taught artists is carefully-researched book and assesses Traylor’s biography and stylistic development. For the first time his scenes are interpreted as ongoing narratives, conveying enduring, interrelated themes.

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