Search Film, Company, People...

BILL TRAYLOR: CHASING GHOSTS

FILM FORUM - as DISTR / CONS

Documentary - Completed 2020

Bill Traylor, born into a family of slaves in rural Alabama, endures a long life of extreme hardships during an era of racial indignities to become one of America's most prominent artists, exhibited in galleries and collections worldwide.

- Year of production
- 2020
- Genres
- Documentary
- Countries
- USA
- Languages
- ENGLISH
- Duration
- 75 mn
- Synopsis
- 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. Having witnessed profound social and political change during a life spanning slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, and the Great Migration, Traylor devised his own visual language to translate an oral culture into something original, powerful, and culturally rooted. He made well over a thousand drawings and paintings between 1939-1942.