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Between Worlds
The Art of Bill Traylor
n the late 1920s, Bill Traylor (ca. 1853–1949) left one lifetime behind and embarked on another. Born enslaved in Alabama, Traylor was an eyewitness to history: the Civil War, Emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, the Great Migration, and the steady rise of African American urban culture in the South. After seven decades of labor, his tethers to plantation life had all fallen away, so he traveled, alone, into the cityscape of segregated Montgomery.
Traylor would spend the next two decades in Montgomery, looking back at a hard, haunting agrarian past; looking ahead at a rapidly evolving world in the city. Traylor became an artist at a time and in a place where personal expression for black Americans posed great risk. Yet in his final decade, he took up pencil and paintbrush and attested to own his existence and point of view. In just a few years, Traylor put down a lifetime of memories, dreams, stories, and scenes in
over a thousand works of art.
Traylor's compelling imagery charts the crossroads of radically different worlds -- rural and urban, black and white, old and new -- and reveals how one man's visual record of African American life gives larger meaning to the story of his nation.
Curated by Leslie Umberger, curator of folk and self-taught art |