BillTrayIor's channel

William "Bill" Traylor (April 1, 1854(?) -- October 23, 1949) is a self-taught artist born into slavery on a plantation near Benton, in Lowndes County, Alabama.

By 1939, he moved to Montgomery, where he slept in the back of a funeral home and in a shoemaker's shop. During the day, he sat on the sidewalk and drew images people he saw on the street and remembered scenes from life on the farm, hanging his works on the fence behind him.

That year, Charles Shannon, a painter, who, with his friends from the New South, brought Traylor art supplies and bought his drawings.

During the next four years, Traylor produced between 1200 and 1500 drawings. In February, 1940, the New South hosted an exhibition of Traylor drawings, and in 1942, the Fieldston School in Riverdale, New York, hosted an exhibition organized by Victor E. D'Amico. The shows produced no sales.

During World War II, while Shannon served in the South Pacific, Traylor moved north to live with relatives.

Returning to Montgomery in 1945, Bill lived on the street again until relief workers insisted that he move in with a daughter who lived in Montgomery. A requiem mass was held for Traylor at St. Jude Church after his death October 23, 1949.

In the late 1970s, Shannon, preserved Traylor's drawings, began to show them to art dealers and museum professionals. This time, the drawings proved popular with critics and the public; two 1979 exhibitions at the R.H. Oosterom Gallery in New York launched a succession of almost forty solo shows and hundreds of group.

Traylor is represented in public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, with thirty-one drawings, and the High Museum of Art, with thirty-five, currently hold the largest public collections of Traylor drawings.
The artist's work also forms a part of serious private collections of self-taught, contemporary, or Southern folk art.

Traylor is known for his pattern and flat color, sophisticated sense of space, and the simplified figures that give his work a modernist look. Using a stick for a straightedge, he created geometric silhouettes of human and animal figures which he then filled in with pencil, colored pencil, or poster paints. mysteriously shaped objects, usually referred to as "constructions," and the complex scenes he called "Exciting Events," depicting groups of people energetically engaged.

Traylor's Construction w/Figures and Animals was used for Joe Sample's album, The Pecan Tree.

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