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Bill Traylor, People’s Artist

March 11, 2016 By Victoria Robinson

I knew very little about Bill Traylor before I walked into the American Folk Art Museum in New York City to see an exhibition of his work. I knew he was a self-taught artist from the South—but that’s all I knew. When I learned from the gallery text that he didn’t start making art until he was in his mid-80s, I was awestruck. Embarking on anything in one’s 80s is rare. Ending up in a museum is radical.

It wasn’t just his age that was worth thinking about in relation to the art; it was his entire life. Traylor was born into slavery before the start of the Civil War. He had no formal education and could not even write his name. He worked on an Alabama cotton plantation for 60 years. After a lifetime of manual labor, he picked up a pencil stub one day and began drawing characters and creatures on scraps of found cardboard. Pencil led to paint. In the last decade of his life, Traylor created more than 1,200 drawings and paintings. Born a slave, he died an artist.

How did this happen? Biographical details are scarce and intensify the mystery rather than illuminate it. Records show that after emancipation, Traylor’s family stayed and sharecropped the land they had worked as slaves. Traylor married and had children. By the age of 75 he was homeless: “My white folks had died and my children scattered,” he explained to a friend years later.

Traylor moved to the capital, Montgomery, to look for work. There he found jobs as a laborer and in a shoe factory for several years until arthritis forced him to stop. At night he slept in the back room of an African American-owned funeral home. During the day, he sat on a crate on the sidewalk of a busy city street and began to draw, using a board across his lap as a drawing surface.

Traylor documented the hustle-bustle he saw around him. An early drawing of a woman holding a parasol looks like she sprouted, perfectly proportioned, from two stacked geometric shapes—one shape became her skirt and the other her torso. There’s a delicacy to the details of the handle, purse and shoes. Within a short time, Traylor taught himself to convey action with the figure of the body alone. His characters developed expressions, postures and contortions that read as if they are in motion. And there was lots of motion in the city: people in his world are smoking, drinking, fighting, dancing, swimming, hiding, running, chasing, climbing, falling, walking, pointing. He became deft at depicting dramatic scenes—which he called “Exciting Events”—scenes he either witnessed or remembered from his past that tell a coded story of African American experience in the 1940s.

He did not seem daunted by trying to capture in an image what he observed or lived; it was the physical world, after all, and his entire life was defined by the relentless and earthbound realities of labor, pain, poverty and discrimination. Drawing was a physical activity, a way to stay busy. We usually reserve the activity of art-making for the educated and the privileged. But Traylor’s unlikely drawings inspire awe. And they should.

Only a handful of photographs of Traylor exists. I like the one that opens this blog because it shows his whole body, his eyes and his artwork. It was taken around 1942, so he’s in his late 80s. In a few years he would lose his left leg to gangrene, but at this moment, he looks like he could be in his 70s. Strong, if world-weary.

Most of the photographs of Traylor were taken by a younger artist named Charles Shannon. Shannon stumbled upon Traylor’s open-air, public-sidewalk workspace in 1939 and stopped to chat. It’s because of that chance meeting that we know Traylor today: Shannon became a caretaker of Traylor’s work, stored it, visited Traylor regularly, brought him new paints and clean paper (which Traylor rejected in favor of used cardboard) and tried to pique collector interest. Shannon approached the Museum of Modern Art in New York but was offered so little money—a dollar per piece—that he rescinded the sale. In 1940 he mounted a local exhibit of 100 of Traylor’s drawings called “Bill Traylor: People’s Artist.” It was an apt title.

During World War II, Shannon shipped off to the South Pacific and Traylor moved—to Detroit, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and Washington, DC—to live with various children. After losing his leg, he moved back to Montgomery in 1945 to live with a daughter. According to his family, he went back to drawing after he healed from his surgery. This is probably the last photo ever taken of Traylor, sitting in a real chair in the shade of a tree, when he was in his 90s.

I have—we all have—an abundance of privileges and material comforts that Traylor never had. He didn’t have rights, a home, a bed. The county where he lived most of his life was 80 percent black, yet 86 white families owned 90 percent of the land. Union soldiers burned the plantation fields and the Ku Klux Klan murdered one of his sons. Traylor lived under Jim Crow laws and was never allowed to vote: because of a discriminatory state law in Alabama, blacks could not vote until 1965, long after his death in 1949. He died before the history-making Montgomery Bus Boycott, in the city where he first began to draw. He never even had his own name: Traylor was the plantation owner’s surname.

I was taught a segregated history in school, one in which white people did everything worth mentioning while black achievement was largely unacknowledged. It’s an education that made me ignorant, and I’m devoted in midlife to learning the history I was never taught. I’m moved by Traylor because there is a lesson in his life. Never let age, education or the limits of society’s imagination stop you.