{"id":567,"date":"2021-04-20T08:05:08","date_gmt":"2021-04-20T00:05:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/?p=567"},"modified":"2021-04-19T12:13:28","modified_gmt":"2021-04-19T04:13:28","slug":"new-documentary-showcases-bill-traylors-bracing-visions-of-the-past-and-the-present","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/artist\/new-documentary-showcases-bill-traylors-bracing-visions-of-the-past-and-the-present\/","title":{"rendered":"New Documentary Showcases Bill Traylor\u2019s Bracing Visions of the Past and the Present"},"content":{"rendered":"

Although\u00a0Bill Traylor<\/a>\u00a0is now coming to be considered a major figure in 20th century U.S. art history, little is known about his life. The facts are these: Traylor was born in 1853 into slavery, and he died in 1949. A Black man in Montgomery, Alabama, he spent the majority of his life enduring Jim Crow oppression. He came to art-making late in his career, working with charcoal, paint, crayon, paper, and other materials when he was already in his 80s. Historians are aware of various details throughout, but there are still a number of gaps, leaving questions about who Traylor really was.<\/p>\n

The reason many have remained fascinated in Traylor, though, is not the lacunas in his biography, but the explosive creativity that can be seen in his art. His output was so singular, it seems that it was always just waiting below the surface, ready for Traylor to create. Now, his artistic vision is the subject of a touchingly poignant documentary,\u00a0Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts<\/em>, directed by\u00a0Jeffrey Wolf<\/a>. (Sam Pollard, who directed the recent\u00a0HBO documentary\u00a0Black Art: In the Absence of Light<\/em><\/a>, served as an executive producer.)<\/p>\n

In the film\u2019s opening moments, Leslie Umberger, a curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum who organized a 2018 survey of Traylor\u2019s work, says, \u201cHe put down this entire oral history in the language that was available to him, which was the language of pictures.\u201d In other words, Traylor may not have left behind an autobiography or an oral history, the way many artists have done throughout the centuries, but the art we still have by him\u2014much of it is presumed to be lost\u2014offer a sense of the lives he and others in his community lived. It\u2019s up to us to piece it all together.<\/p>\n

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\"Bill<\/div>\n<\/div>
Bill Traylor,\u00a0Untitled (Pig with Corkscrew Tail)<\/em>, n.d.<\/span>\u00a91994 BILL TRAYLOR FAMILY TRUST\/SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM<\/p>\n

<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Wolf\u2019s approach to narrating Traylor\u2019s story and journey as an artist is unconventional and experimental. There are the traditional interviews one expects of an artist documentary, but there are also archival photographs and films of Black life during Traylor\u2019s lifetime, as well as readings from texts by Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, and even an excerpt from Theodore Rosengarten\u2019s biography on African American tenant farmer Nate Shaw. There is a varied score that ranges from blues to jazz, and even a tap dance performance by Jason Samuels Smith and voiceover that sounds more like a spoken word performance than your average documentary narration. Ultimately, all this helps to give contours to Traylor\u2019s life story, parts of which have been lost to time.<\/p>\n

Traylor\u2019s was a life of farming. He worked first as an enslaved person picking cotton for the Traylor family, then after the Civil War as a day wage farmer, and then after that renting land as a tenant farmer. There were ups and downs amid all this. His moments of joy\u2014wives, children, living off his land\u2014were punctuated by the realities of a racist era in which Black men were lynched with shocking degrees of regularity, at particularly high levels in Alabama\u2019s Lowndes County. Among those lynched was Traylor\u2019s own son Willie, who was killed in 1928.<\/p>\n

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\"Bill<\/div>\n<\/div>
Bill Traylor,\u00a0Untitled (Yellow and Blue House with Figures and Dog)<\/em>, n.d.<\/span>\u00a91994 BILL TRAYLOR FAMILY TRUST\/SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

The loss devastated Traylor, and it was around this time that he moved to Montgomery, became houseless, and took up drawing, working on Monroe Street, a busy thoroughfare in a Black neighborhood. Richard J. Powell, a professor of art and art history at Duke University, speaks of \u201cthe meta-narratives of confrontation, of collusion\u201d that Traylor must have experienced while \u201ccreating this work in front of white people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chasing Ghosts<\/em>\u2019s strongest element is not the way it presents all this biographical information, but its in-depth and insightful analysis of his art. Often, his work took the form of small scenes typically done on discarded or worn paper, posters, and cardboard. These works include images of farm life, animals, people dancing, men and women arguing, men drinking, and much more. He intentionally chose to use discarded papers as his canvas that had marks, scuffs, and scratches, lending a history to them and serving as both artistic inspiration and metaphor.<\/p>\n

As unnamed narrator puts it, \u201cThe transcendent surprise is that all the while as he lived what seemed to be a very small life, he was doing something very big. He was living and seeing and remembering a region and a people that America would largely ignore or forget and he was nurturing a remarkable gift that would not be expressed for decades, a gift that would bring the forgotten world and its marginalized people back to vibrant, vivid life.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"Review:<\/div>\n<\/div>
Bill Traylor, Untitled (Chase Scene), n.d.<\/span>\u00a91994 BILL TRAYLOR FAMILY TRUST\/SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

As images of Traylor\u2019s work flash across the screen, intercut with Samuels Smith\u2019s tap dancing and a reading of Hurston\u2019s \u201cA Theory of Negro Movement,\u201d we get a sense of how his work connects to blues, jazz, and dance as a way to explain all the complexities, intricacies, and subtleties that undergird Traylor\u2019s art. Writer Greg Tate sees Traylor\u2019s art as \u201cBlack expression and Black mysticism and Black spirituality,\u201d connecting it to the tradition of HooDoo, a form of spirituality based on the centuries-old traditions from Africa that was reasserted by Black Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries. \u201cThe iconography tells you he\u2019s the conjure-man of the work,\u201d Tate says. \u201cThese are all part of the Black Southern storytelling tradition and the Native American tradition that it formed a syncretism with as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

This connection is especially important when thinking of Traylor\u2019s influence on generations of artists, part of which might be owed to his inclusion in David C. Driskell\u2019s\u00a0groundbreaking 1976 traveling exhibition<\/a>\u00a0\u201cTwo Centuries of Black American Art,\u201d which plotted a historical lineage of Black art-making in the United States. Some of them also might be evinced in Franklin Sirman\u2019s landmark 2008 exhibition \u201cNeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith\u201d at MoMA PS1, which included artists like Mar\u00eda Magdalena Campos-Pons, David Hammons, Brian Jungen, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Betye Saar, Nari Ward, and Radcliffe Bailey.<\/p>\n

Bailey\u2019s voice provides some of the most impactful moments of\u00a0Chasing Ghosts<\/em>. It\u2019s clear how deeply important Traylor has been to him, an artistic mentor across time. \u201cWhen I see Bill Traylor\u2019s work, I see a yearning for a place that\u2019s beyond here, a place that\u2019s not tangible,\u201d Bailey says.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
\"Bill<\/div>\n<\/div>
Bill Traylor,\u00a0Untitled Man in Blue and Brown)<\/em>, n.d.<\/span>\u00a91994 BILL TRAYLOR FAMILY TRUST\/SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Bailey grew up with books showing Traylor\u2019s art, and his use of a deep blue is indebted to Traylor\u2019s influence, he says. (Critics have misinterpreted the connection to Yves Klein, Bailey explains.) Some might see agony in Traylor\u2019s work, but for Bailey, it\u2019s the opposite: a \u201cpill from the pain.\u201d Bailey adds, \u201cI want to walk to those places where he once lived. I want to know those places.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Traylor died in 1949, he was buried in an unmarked grave. Sarah, the daughter with whom he had lived in Montgomery at the end of his life, inherited the art he left behind. When she died in 1974, the realtor threw away all of her belongings, including a huge trove of Traylor\u2019s work. Toward the end of the film, we meet several of Traylor\u2019s descendants. One admits to having played tic-tac-toe on the back of some of Traylor\u2019s drawings as a kid, unaware that they were art.<\/p>\n

In the 1990s, the family won a lawsuit that allowed them to recover some of his drawings. Wolf doesn\u2019t go into too much detail on this part, which is the film\u2019s sole shortcoming. As is often the case for those whose families lost their history, whether due to time or conflict, or because ancestors didn\u2019t speak about the past, absences can be meaningful, even traumatic. The members of the Traylor family, like many of people of color in the U.S., probably know this all too well, and the film would have done well to explore that aspect further.<\/p>\n

Yet in this tender documentary, there is a sense that, even when discarded history is impossible to re-obtain, one can find substitutes for it in art, often in ways that go further than language can.\u00a0Chasing Ghosts<\/em>\u00a0ends with the installation of a tombstone for Traylor in 2018. It\u2019s a moving, tearful scene in which family and admirers gather together to celebrate an artistic pioneer. His tombstone reads, \u201cThrough his art he lives on.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Source\uff1ahttps:\/\/www.artnews.com\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Although\u00a0Bill Traylor\u00a0is now coming to be considered a major figure in 20th century U.S. art history, little is known about his life. The facts are these: Traylor was born in 1853 into slavery, and he died in 1949. A Black man in Montgomery, Alabama, he spent the majority of his life enduring Jim Crow oppression. 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