Exceptional Works: Bill Traylor

Alabama artist Bill Traylor working under a shade tree in a Montgomery neighborhood, 1946. Photo courtesy of the Alabama State Council on the Arts

The artist Bill Traylor (c. 1853–1949) is widely recognized for his distinctive imagery that mixes subjects and iconography from the American South with a strong formalistic treatment of color, shape, and surface. Born enslaved, Traylor spent much of his life after the 1865 Union victory and 13th Amendment working as a farm laborer in rural Alabama and moved to Montgomery in the late 1920s. About a decade later, at approximately the age of 86 and having never studied art in any formal way, Traylor began making works on paper and cardboard using pencil and other media.

Untitled (Drinker Chicken Charlie) is a powerful example of Traylor’s work, testifying to his ability to abstract and distill the world as he experienced it into evocative displays of daily life that are at times filled with joy and exuberance and at others with tension and terror. Part of a rich, unique registry of the artist’s experience through images, this painting reflects Roberta Smith’s observation of Traylor’s work as “At once modern and archaic, … proof of Jung’s collective unconscious but also of an indelible individual talent.”

Bill Traylor

Untitled (Drinker Chicken Charlie), c. 1939-1942

Poster paint and pencil on cardboard

10 7/8 x 13 7/8 inches
27.6 x 35.2 cm
Framed: 21 3/4 x 23 3/4 inches
55.2 x 60.3 cm

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“Traylor’s pictures stamp themselves on your eye and mind.”

—Peter Schjeldahl

Above: an excerpt from the forthcoming documentary Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts . Produced and Directed by Jeffrey Wolf.
Written by Fred Barron.

Bill Traylor, Untitled (Drinker Chicken Charlie), c. 1939-1942 (detail)

Untitled (Drinker Chicken Charlie) depicts a figure bent over on all fours with notably long arms and exaggerated pointed fingers. The title of the work references “Chicken Charlies,” slang for people in the South who ran chicken fights. While Traylor’s figures usually reflect different types of people he encountered in his daily life, he did on occasion depict specific individuals that he knew. In another painting of a “Chicken Charlie,” Traylor identified the man as a local by the name of Charlie Rhodes, who may have played a role in teaching Traylor how to sign or draw his name on his artworks.

A spread from Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor, 2018

A spread from Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor , 2018

“Since Traylor said so little about his motives, who really knows what his overall objectives were? In most cases the drawings and paintings, sure and direct, speak for themselves.”

—Kerry James Marshall

In 2018–2019 the Smithsonian American Art Museum organized Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor , an overarching retrospective of the artist’s life and work, accompanied by a major monograph.

“It’s interesting to consider Traylor’s cast of characters at length, many of which recur throughout his body of work. Overall, I would say that Traylor usually—possibly always—depicted people he knew or encountered; both his imagery and some of the comments he made substantiate this. Traylor’s work drew on memories and possibly dreams, which further bolsters the notion that the people he focused on played a role in his life or made some significant impression upon him. There are no persuasive indicators to suggest that Traylor thought in terms of composite characters or archetypes—although it is entirely possible that some of those he portrayed could step easily in and out of such roles in the community. Because, more often than not, we lack Traylor’s identification of who these people were, they visually sort into character types more than they might if we knew the significance of their individuality.”

—Leslie Umberger, curator of folk and self-taught art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and curator of Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor (2018–2019)

In 2019, David Zwirner presented Bill Traylor , in collaboration with the William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation

Traylor’s work is included in the collections of notable museums and public institutions including the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; The Menil Collection, Houston; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.

Untitled (Drinker Chicken Charlie) comes from the collection of the William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation. In 2015, the Foundation announced its intention to donate proceeds to the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) when it sells works from its collection. Established in the 1990s, HCZ is a pioneering nonprofit that has created a cradle-to-college-to-career network of programs designed to tackle all the problems that keep children from achieving self-sufficiency and the American dream.

Bill Traylor, Untitled (Drinker Chicken Charlie), c. 1939-1942 (detail)

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