Artworks

Turtle with Black Head was included in Bill Traylor's first exhibition in a former cotton sorting buiilding—headquarters of the New South Group. Photograph by Charles Shannon (Montgomery, Alabama, 1940)

"Early in 1939, a group of friends and I got together to try to start something that would alleviate the barrenness of our cultural landscape. We managed to generate some activities that lasted about a year. Whatever anyone wanted to try, we would. We got a meeting place and called it New South. It was a third-floor space in a downtown building consisting of several rooms originally used for cotton sampling.

Many skylights and windows down one side made for a beautiful light. The walls were predominantly a light blue but the scaling paint revealed many other colors. We held exhibitions of pottery and paintings by Southern artists ... It was here that we hung Bill Traylor's first show less than a year after he had begun to draw."

Image reproduced and text quoted from an interview with Charles Shannon in Ricco/Maresca's book Bill Traylor: His Art, His Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), the fist publication entirely devoted to the artist's work.