Artworks

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Bill Traylor (1853-1949) 

Although emancipated as a boy, Bill Traylor continued to labor until 1908 on a neighboring plantation in Benton, Alabama—near the plantation where he was born into slavery.
It was only when he was in his eighties, and no longer able to do physical work, that he started making art with materials that lay to hand. From 1939 to 1942, Traylor produced more than 1,200 drawings that are of crucial significance in American art and social history.
The artist’s posthumous recognition has expanded steadily ever since his death in 1949, and today his work is in important private and museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, the High Museum of Art (Atlanta), The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Museum (Washington D.C.).