Bill Traylor

How this work helped shape America

Born enslaved in Alabama around 1853, Bill Traylor spent decades as an agricultural laborer before beginning to draw late in life in Montgomery. Working primarily between 1939 and 1942, he created more than a thousand drawings of people, animals, work, conflict and everyday life. His surviving work provides a distinctive visual record shaped by slavery, emancipation and Black life in the twentieth-century South.