Bill Traylor

Bill Traylor was born enslaved on a cotton plantation near Benton, Alabama, in about 1853; the exact year is not known. After emancipation he stayed in the same district as a farm labourer and sharecropper for more than sixty years, raising a large family and never learning to read or write. Around 1928, old and alone after his wife\'s death, he moved to Montgomery, worked in a shoe factory and then, crippled by rheumatism, slept in the back of a funeral parlour.

In 1939, sitting on the pavement of Monroe Street in the city\'s Black business district, he began to draw with a pencil stub on the cardboard that shops threw out. He drew what he had seen for eighty-five years: mules, dogs, snakes, fighting men, women in hats, drinkers, preachers and a tall top-hatted figure that may have been himself. The shapes were flat and silhouetted, often arranged around a house or a tree with people falling off it.

A young white artist, Charles Shannon, noticed him, bought him paints and paper and kept the drawings. There were about twelve hundred of them by 1942. Shannon got him one exhibition in Montgomery and one in New York; nothing sold. Traylor lost a leg to gangrene, lived with relatives in the north for a while and died in Montgomery in 1949.

The drawings sat in Shannon\'s storage for thirty years. They are now in the Smithsonian and the Metropolitan Museum, which gave him a retrospective in 2018.