High Museum to feature folk artist Bill Traylor

ATLANTA — A new exhibition set to open at Atlanta's High Museum of Art showcases the work of Bill Traylor, who was born into slavery in Alabama and became a highly respected self-taught artist after he began drawing while sitting on the sidewalks of Montgomery as an old man.

The exhibition, which opens Saturday, features 65 of Traylor's drawings pulled from the collections of the High and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in Alabama. The images were made in pencil, poster paint, charcoal and crayon, mostly on discarded pieces of cardboard. They feature animals and people, sometimes alone and other times in complex interactions in both rural and urban settings.

"There's nothing harder to do than simple," said High curator of folk art Susan Crawley. "His drawings are so eloquent and so evocative, and he used such simple materials."

Traylor was born into slavery on a plantation near Benton, Ala., in the mid-1850s. He was freed by emancipation in 1863, but he stayed on the plantation and worked as a field hand for more than 50 years. His whereabouts in the early 20th century aren't entirely clear, but he had settled in Montgomery by 1928. There is no indication that Traylor began drawing before he arrived in Montgomery in his mid-70s.

He spent his days in the state's capital sitting on city sidewalks drawing, sometimes selling his work to passers-by for a token amount. Over a decade, he produced more than 1,200 drawings of scenes from his everyday life in the city and from his memories of rural life — images of cats, dogs and pigs, but also people and buildings in busy, active scenes. He never drew backgrounds or anchored his subjects with ground lines, so they appear to float on their irregularly shaped pieces of cardboard.

Charles Shannon noticed Traylor drawing on Monroe Avenue in 1939. A young art student and teacher, Shannon realized he was seeing something remarkable, Crawley said. Shannon brought Traylor colored pencils and poster paints to supplement the graphite pencils he had been using. Shannon also brought him clean pieces of cardboard to draw on, but Traylor preferred cast off pieces of cardboard and would often leave the fresh new pieces to the side to "ripen," but he rarely incorporated stains or smudges on the cardboard into his drawings, Crawley said.

"(Traylor) was beautiful to see — so right with himself and at peace — as the rich imagery of his long life welled up into his drawings and paintings," Shannon said in 1985, according to the exhibition's catalog.