Bill Traylor, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

Bill Traylor

American artist and sharecropper

Date of Birth: 01-Apr-1854

Place of Birth: Benton, Alabama, United States

Date of Death: 23-Oct-1949

Profession: artist, painter, drawer, sharecropper, gouache painter, folk artist

Nationality: United States

Zodiac Sign: Aries

William "Bill" Traylor (April 1, c.?1853 – October 23, 1949) was an African-American self-taught artist from Lowndes County, Alabama.
Born into slavery, Traylor spent the majority of his life after emancipation as a sharecropper.
It was only after 1939, following his move to Montgomery, Alabama that Traylor began to draw.
At the age of 85, he took up a pencil and a scrap of cardboard to document his recollections and observations.
From 1939 to 1942, while working on the sidewalks of Montgomery, Traylor produced nearly 1,500 pieces of art. While Traylor received his first public exhibition in 1940, it wasn’t until the late 1970s, thirty years after his death, that his work finally began to receive broader attention.
Recent acceptance of Traylor as a significant figure of American folk and modern art has been founded on the efforts of Charles Shannon, as well as the evolving tastes of the art world.
Shannon, who first encountered Traylor's work in 1940, brought Traylor to the attention of the larger art world.
Since then, public and scholarly perception of Bill Traylor's life and work has been in constant evolution.
First held up as an example of "primitive" or "outsider" art, Traylor now holds a central position in the fields of "self-taught" and modern art.