Blue Construction, Orange Figures
Bill Traylor American
Born into enslavement in rural Alabama, Traylor—one of the most distinctive Black artists of the twentieth century—experienced dramatic historical change in the United States firsthand, including emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, and the Great Migration. About 1939, at the age of eighty-six, Traylor began drawing urban life around him in Montgomery, Alabama, and revisiting events from his own past. Working with a strong sense of design and storytelling, his renderings are striking in their disregard for spatial depth and proportion. Traylor would create more than one thousand pencil drawings and gouache paintings on pieces of found cardboard, including this engaging composition with a dog, bird, and two human figures, one teetering from a tall central construction.
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