This year’s theme for Black History Month is Black Resistance. This month, we will focus on Black artists whose work challenges the status quo of being Black in this nation, and addresses issues ranging from civil rights, racial inequality, poverty, racism, and the everyday lives of African Americans.
Bill Traylor (1853 – 1949) started drawing and painting on discarded cardboard at the age of 85. He became a celebrated artist posthumously for the nearly 1,500 works he created on the city sidewalks during his years of living in the segregated part of Montgomery, Alabama.
Traylor was born enslaved on an Alabama plantation and lived much of his life as a sharecropper after Emancipation. He created works with unique vision to tell stories and memories of the hard life he experienced. At first glance, his images seem deceptively simple, but they reveal layers of complexity, reflecting his lived experience and the fraught history of slavery and Jim Crow South. In 1949, Traylor died impoverished in a segregated hospital.
“When Traylor started drawing, it was a radical act. He was among the first generation of blacks to become American citizens, but literacy and personal agency for African Americans were still touchy issues in Alabama--and personal expression poking at a racially fraught past was unequivocally dangerous. Social systems in the Jim Crow South--designed to impoverish and disenfranchise the formerly enslaved--were forceful and pervasive, and Traylor's existence was grounded in knowing the difference between white and black worlds and keeping his thoughts and personal views hidden. But for Traylor, charting his life and memories in pictures was an indelible and validating testament of selfhood, and in their very creation are subversive works.” (from Smithsonian Art Museum website)
Image 1: Front cover
Image 2: “Exciting Event: House with Figures,” 1939 – 1943, Poster pain and graphite on cardboard, 13 1/2”x 13 7/8”
Image 3: Left page: Left: “Four Men, Bottles on a Shelf,” 1939 – 1942, Crayon and graphite on cardboard, 13 1/2' x 7 1/2'. Right: “Man on Triangle Reaching for Bottle,” 1939 – 1942, Graphite and charcoal on cardboard, 12”x 8”, Right page: “Man Reaching for Bottles,” c. 1939 – 1942, Graphite on cardboard, 17”x 14”
Bill Traylor Rousseau, Valérie [author] Milan : 5 Continents, [2018] English, French HOLLIS number: 99153758042303941
