Featuring more than 60 drawings in pencil, charcoal, crayon and poster paint by Depression-era artist Bill Traylor, this visual autobiography places Traylor among the most important self-taught artists in the world.
February 9, 2013 – May 12, 2013
Mingei International Museum, San Diego, CA
June 11, 2013 – September 22, 2013
American Folk Art Museum, New York
Past Exhibition
Bill Traylor: Drawings from the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts
February 5 – April 15, 2012
Untitled, ca. 1939–1942
The nature of the interactions between Traylor’s figures is often open to interpretation. In this drawing, for example, the couple could be either brawling or dancing. The repeated triangular shapes formed by their limbs unify the composition and lead the eye to see them as a single unit, forever locked together in their encounter. Time seems to stop in Traylor’s drawings, as though he were able to freeze motion through his skillful depiction of human gestures.Poster paint, pencil, and colored pencil on cardboardHigh Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from Mrs. Lindsey Hopkins, Jr., Edith G. and Philip A. Rhodes, and the Members Guild, 1982.97
Untitled, ca. 1939–1942
One hallmark of Traylor’s drawings is their simplicity. He began with basic geometric shapes—triangles, rectangles, and semi-circles—which he then contoured and filled with pencil shading or paint. His compositional skill is evident in the way he placed figures on the field to suggest space and atmosphere. Here the man is positioned slightly higher on the sheet than the woman, suggesting that he is passing her on the street.Poster paint, colored pencil, and pencil on cardboardHigh Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from Mrs. Lindsey Hopkins, Jr., Edith G. and Philip A. Rhodes, and the Members Guild, 1982.112
Untitled, ca. 1939–1942
Traylor’s ability to make do with available materials is a trait common to people who grow up on farms. In their youth, he and his friends built a platform on the Alabama River, near the plantation, where they would spend hot summer days drinking and diving into the water. This lively drawing seems to be one of several in which the artist depicted that scene.Poster paint and pencil on cardboardHigh Museum of Art, Atlanta, T. Marshall Hahn Collection, 1997.114
Figures, Construction, ca. 1940–1942
The form of this unusual hollow construction, which appears in other Traylor drawings, resonates with that of the Klein and Son street clock that occupied a corner on Court Square a few blocks from where Traylor lived and worked, suggesting that—consciously or unconsciously—it may have influenced his design. The large, four-faced illuminated clock, embellished with a tiered finial and vertical panels that spring from the top of each face, was a prominent downtown Montgomery landmark when Traylor lived in the city.Graphite and ink on cardboardMontgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, gift of Charles and Eugenia Shannon, 1982.4.9
Untitled, ca. 1939–1942
Traylor possessed an acute visual memory. Decades after he left the plantation, his drawings reanimated the farm animals he had known. Each of Traylor’s anatomically accurate creatures displays an individual personality. This animal’s large ears, dainty hooves, and tufted tail mark it as a mule or a hinny.Pencil on cardboardHigh Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from Mrs. Lindsey Hopkins, Jr., Edith G. and Philip A. Rhodes, and the Members Guild, 1982.109
Untitled, ca. 1939–1942
Traylor’s birds, like his mammals, are the product of a life of careful observation. This turkey hen’s every muscle is tense as she snatches at a June bug. Traylor used the limits of the cardboard support to introduce a sense of urgency, with the insect seemingly about to escape off the edge of the board.Poster paint and pencil on cardboardHigh Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from Mrs. Lindsey Hopkins, Jr., Edith G. and Philip A. Rhodes, and the Members Guild, 1982.106
Untitled, ca. 1939–1942
Traylor typically drew on discarded cardboard. This is one of only two known examples of a Traylor drawing on wood. On the reverse is an unfinished drawing of a man holding an umbrella, executed in pencil and crayon.Pencil and crayon on woodHigh Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from Mrs. Lindsey Hopkins, Jr., Edith G. and Philip A. Rhodes, and the Members Guild, 1982.98
Untitled, ca. 1939–1942
Is this a depiction of a rambunctious party? Is it chicken-thieving? Is it a racial attack? The ambiguous activities in Traylor’s complex compositions have been interpreted in dramatically different ways, and he said little to clarify them.Poster paint, crayon, and pencil on cardboardHigh Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from Mrs. Lindsey Hopkins, Jr., Edith G. and Philip A. Rhodes, and the Members Guild, 1982.114
Bull, ca. 1940–1942
The irregularly shaped cardboard signs that Traylor saved from trash bins or the sidewalk were apparently some of his favorite materials. The drawings he made on these oddly shaped supports complement their contours. Here, the horns and hooves of the bull create gentle crescents that mirror the board’s curved edges. When seen from the reverse, this board reveals its previous existence as an advertisement for a brand of cigarettes called “Sensation.”Watercolor and graphite on cardboardMontgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, gift of Charles and Eugenia Shannon, 1982.4.17
Overview
Using modest materials, Bill Traylor created a visual autobiography in which he recorded events from his past as well as his observations of life in Montgomery. Traylor offered his drawings for sale to passersby, but he sold or gave most of his work to Charles Shannon (1914–1996), a local artist who met Traylor in a chance encounter on a Montgomery sidewalk in 1939. Shannon was immediately engrossed in watching Traylor work and began bringing him poster paint, brushes, drawing pencils, and clean poster board; other admirers brought him crayons and compressed charcoal. Traylor shunned the clean paper, however, because he responded creatively to the irregular shapes of the pieces of cast-off cardboard he found on the street and the smudges, stains, and marks that were deposited on them.
Preserved by Shannon for approximately forty years, the drawings were reintroduced to an enthusiastic public in the late 1970s and now rank among the most important examples of self-taught art ever created.
Artist Bio
Bill Traylor (1854?–1949) was born into slavery on a plantation in Alabama. After emancipation, he continued to live and work on the plantation until sometime before 1928, when he moved permanently to Montgomery. There he worked as a laborer and briefly in a shoe factory until he was physically unable to continue, then began receiving modest government assistance. Under the challenging conditions of Depression-era Alabama, Traylor survived on the streets in the then primarily black enclave of Monroe Avenue (now called Monroe Street). He slept first in the storage room of a funeral parlor, then in a shoe repair shop, and spent his days sitting on the sidewalks, creating the more than 1,200 drawings he is believed to have produced.