Press preview for the exhibition “Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor”

Bill Traylor (ca. 1853–1949) is among the most important American artists of the 20th century. Born in antebellum 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. In the late 1930s, a decade after leaving plantation life and moving to the city of Montgomery, Alabama, Traylor took up pencil and paintbrush and created a visual autobiography—images on discarded cardboard extracted from his memories and experiences. When he died in 1949, Traylor left behind more than 1,000 works of art, the only known person born enslaved, and entirely self-taught, to create an extensive body of graphic artworks.

“Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor” brings together 155 drawings and paintings to provide the most encompassing and in-depth study of the artist to date. This major retrospective presents a comprehensive picture of Traylor’s stylistic development and artistic themes, explored in the context of the profoundly different worlds Traylor’s life bridged: rural and urban, black and white, old and new.

“Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor” will be on view at the museum Sept. 28 through March 17, 2019. Organized by Leslie Umberger, curator of folk and self-taught art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the exhibition will be accompanied by a groundbreaking monograph in which Umberger thoroughly reassesses the known facts of Traylor’s life and family, his creative trajectory and the art world’s discovery of him and positions him within the broader context of American art. The museum is the sole venue for this exhibition.

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SI-440-2018