Bill Traylor

Bill Traylor was born around 1853 on a plantation in rural Alabama. In the late 1920s, after seventy years of plantation and farm life, he moved, on his own, to Montgomery. Roughly 1,200 works of Traylor’s are extant, many of which came from Charles Shannon, a prominent white Montgomery artist, who met Traylor in 1939 and began to collect and save his work.

During the last decade of his life, Traylor’s art was featured in a handful of exhibitions in Montgomery and other locations, but it was not until the late 1970s that he began to achieve widespread recognition. Thirty-six of his works were included in Black Folk Art in America 1930–1980, a traveling exhibition that debuted in 1982 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and traveled to seven additional venues through 1984. Since then, Traylor’s art has been featured in solo exhibitions and significant thematic group shows at prominent museums including the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (1982 and 1994–1995); High Museum of Art, Atlanta (1983 and 2012); Randolph Gallery of the Chicago Public Library Cultural Center (1988); Ginza Art Space Tokyo (1991; traveled to Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1992); Kunstmuseum, Bern, Switzerland (1998; traveled to Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 1999); Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, Illinois (2004–2005); and the American Folk Art Museum, New York (2013), among others. In 2018, the Smithsonian American Art Museum organized Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor, an overarching retrospective of the artist’s life and work. From 2019 to 2023, works by Traylor were on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in the “Masters of Popular Painting” gallery as part of Collection 1880s–1940s, one of the inaugural exhibitions in the museum’s new spaces following its multi-year renovation.