William “Bill” Traylor

#FallenThroughTheCracks – William “Bill” Traylor was born on April 1, circa 1853. He was an African-American self-taught artist from Lowndes County, Alabama. At age 85, he found a pencil and a piece of cardboard and began to document his memories and observations. Between 1939 to 1942, he produced nearly 1,500 pieces of art while working on the sidewalks of Montgomery, AL.

Traylor drew and painted, mostly on discarded paper from the neighborhood. Traylor’s drawings express his experiences and observations from rural and urban life. His visual glossary includes images of people, symbols, animals, local landmarks, and more. Traylor’s complex and coded scenes evidence the balancing act that defined Black life during that period. He recorded these memories without drawing attention to himself for doing so. His work remains the only substantial surviving body of drawings and paintings by a man born into American slavery. No other artist captured the complex, drawn-out moment between slavery and civil rights. 

Today, Traylor has been regarded as one of the most prominent self-taught artists. Scholars who first labeled his work as “primitive” and “outsider” now regard him as a significant and prominent artist of the 20th century. Bill Traylor died on October 23, 1949, in Montgomery, AL.

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