How a Man Born Into Slavery Became an Art History Legend

How a Man Born Into Slavery Became an Art History Legend By the time the Union army arrived in Dallas County, Ala., in 1865, Bill Traylor had already been enslaved for about 12 years, ever since he was born on a cotton plantation around 1853. After his emancipation, Traylor spent the majority of his life as a tenant farmer near Montgomery, until he picked up drawing […] READ: How a Man Born Into Slavery Became an Art History Legend

Art Aug 12, 2025 0 0 Add to Reading List

How a Man Born Into Slavery Became an Art History Legend

By the time the Union army arrived in Dallas County, Ala., in 1865, Bill Traylor had already been enslaved for about 12 years, ever since he was born on a cotton plantation around 1853. After his emancipation, Traylor spent the majority of his life as a tenant farmer near Montgomery, until he picked up drawing in 1939. At that point, he was 86 years old and experiencing homelessness, but still he would draw and paint while perched on the streets of Montgomery’s segregated Black neighborhood. Between 1939 and 1942, he produced nearly 1,500 pieces of art, mostly on discarded cardboard.

Much of Traylor’s art may have been lost to time had Charles Shannon befriended him in 1939. The leader of the city’s progressive group of young white artists, New South, Shannon offered Traylor money and materials, all while collecting the vast majority of the artist’s output. In February 1940, New South even mounted an exhibition of Traylor’s art in Montgomery, but nothing managed to sell. Once World War II fully exploded in the United States, in 1942, New South’s support slowly waned. Although there’s evidence that Traylor continued to create in the years leading up to his death, none of his subsequent work seems to have survived. In 1949, Traylor died, buried in a pauper’s grave and forgotten by history.

It was only in 1982 that Traylor resurfaced, thanks to Corcoran Gallery’s traveling exhibition Black Folk Art in America. Here, Traylor’s vision finally came into focus: magnetic, minimalist illustrations that captured one of the most fraught and painful moments in American history. His compositions span everything from wild dogs and yellow chickens; animated, contorted men donning tophats; black silhouettes chasing one another; strange yet vibrant houses; and horses dragging equipment behind them.

“[His] works are kinetic in their appeal: athletic and choreographic,” Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker’s longtime art critic, wrote about the artist. “Gravity tugs at some elements and ignores others. You can’t know what’s happening, but, at a glance, you are in on it.”

In 2018, Traylor finally received a sweeping and long-overdue retrospective, titled Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor. Staged at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the exhibition offered an intimate account not only of Traylor’s life and perspective as an emancipated slave, but of Black culture as it existed and evolved around him.

“His images attest to his existence and point of view,” the museum writes of Traylor’s art. “They describe his memories of a hard, rural, racially fraught past, as well as the evolving African American urban culture that was taking shape before his eyes.”

Aside from their singular aesthetic, Traylor’s drawings and paintings are remarkable in that no one else managed to catalog the “complex, drawn-out moment between slavery and civil rights.” His is the only substantial surviving body of artwork by a man born into American slavery.

“For Traylor, charting his life and memories in pictures was an indelible and validating testament of selfhood,” the museum continues, “and in their very creation are subversive works.”