Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts (2021)

This illuminating documentary explores the life of a unique American artist, a man with a remarkable and unlikely biography. Bill Traylor was born into slavery in 1853 on a cotton plantation in rural Alabama. After the Civil War, Traylor continued to farm the land as a sharecropper until the late 1920s. Aging and alone, he moved to Montgomery and worked odd jobs in the thriving segregated black neighborhood. A decade later, in his late 80s, Traylor became homeless and started to draw and paint, both memories from plantation days and scenes of a radically changing urban culture. He made well over a thousand drawings and paintings between 1939-1942. This colorful, strikingly modernist work eventually led him to be recognized as one of America’s greatest self-taught artists and the subject of a Smithsonian retrospective.

Released April 16, 2021 75 min None+

Genres: Documentary

Keywords: mdblist.fresh, imdb.artist, imdb.former-slave, imdb.african-american, soundmix.dolby-sr

Watch Providers: Kanopy, Hoopla, Kino Film Collection

Country: United States
Production Country: United States
Languages: English