Bill Traylor [1853-1949], The Charles E. & Eugenia C. Shannon Trust
BILL TRAYLOR
(1854-1949)
October 29 – December 6, 2014
Opening: Wednesday, October 29th 6 – 8 PM
15 Rivington Street, New York, NY 10002
Betty Cuningham Gallery is pleased to present its first exhibition of the work of Bill Traylor, opening on Wednesday, October 29th from 6 – 8 PM. On view will be twenty-eight works from the collection of Charles and Eugenia Shannon, dating from 1939 – 42.
Bill Traylor was born a slave in 1854, on the George Traylor family’s plantation in Benton, Alabama. Following Emancipation, Bill Traylor continued to work for George Traylor and later for his son, Marion Traylor, as a farm laborer and then as a tenant farmer. In 1910, after 56 years, Bill Traylor left the George Traylor plantation and moved to Montgomery County where he continued to farm for another 17 years. By 1928, at age 74, Bill Traylor had moved to the city of Montgomery, where he briefly worked in a shoe factory until he became crippled by arthritis. In 1936, homeless and on relief, Bill Traylor was sleeping in the back room of a funeral parlor in downtown Montgomery.
In 1939, Charles Shannon, an aspiring young artist, encountered the 85-year-old Bill Traylor, seated in front of a blacksmith shop on Monroe Street in Montgomery, Alabama. He describes Traylor as having a pencil stub in hand and appearing to be drawing for the first time. Intrigued, Shannon provided Traylor with encouragement and art supplies over the following three years. During this period, Shannon purchased, for modest prices, over 1200 works from Traylor.
Fascinated by the endless inventiveness and aesthetic beauty of Bill Traylor’s work, Charles Shannon organized Traylor’s first exhibition in 1940 at New South – an arts center in Montgomery founded by Shannon and others. Traylor’s next exhibition, the first in New York, was at the Fieldston School in 1942. Bill Traylor’s work would not be shown again until 1979-80 at R. H. Oosterom Gallery in New York. Since 1980 there have been numerous exhibitions. Particularly noteworthy are 1994 – 95 - Lively Times and Events: The Drawings of Bill Traylor, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, AL (and travelling); 1998-99 - Bill Traylor (1854 -1949) Deep Blue, Kunstmuseum, Bern, Switzerland and Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany (and travelling); and recently in 2013 – Bill Traylor, Drawings from the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY (and travelling) and Traylor in Motion, Wonders from New York Collections, American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY.
Traylor’s work can today be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, the Menil Collection, Houston, TX, the Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA and the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, among others.
The exhibition will remain on view through Saturday, December 6, 2014.
Click below for full press release.
The market may have cooled but there’s still plenty to see at New York’s art fairs – not least a concerted turnout for African art at the Armory and a grown-up, but still fresh, Independent
The Art Show, organized by the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) at the Park Avenue Armory, has the fair theme down to a science. Rather than fatigue-inducing roundups of mixed artists, most galleries here are devoting their booths to solo presentations. There is a strong African-American presence this year, many historical shows and a number of concept exhibitions. Alongside these are what might be called the post-retrospective reminder: a gathering of works that follow on the heels of an important museum show. Here are highlights from the 72 exhibitors.
Today the heavy, wooden doors to the Park Avenue Armory opened to New York’s venerable Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) fair — called the Art Show, for short — with more than 70 galleries touting wares from the 19th century to the present. Among all the events this week, the dealers here appear most posed to place their work upon the grand art-historical mantle, peddling canonical, though thoroughly market-tested artists.
‘Outsider’ work is finally being welcomed into major institutions, but the sense of difference with which we used to approach it might offer valuable lessons in how to look at all art.
The list has a total of 407 artists and groups, and includes a fairly thrilling range of people, from Bill Traylor to Florine Stettheimer to Jordan Wolfson. Asco? The Whitney’s got it.
His graphite seems enchanted: the simultaneous embrace of two-dimensionality and rejection of linear perspective unfolds sentiment without sentimentality; the merest quaver of a line conjures up droll hens and truculent couples, while poster paint explodes across the cardboard canvases in puffs of citrine and Prussian blue.
Bill Traylor’s talent surfaced suddenly in 1939 when he was 85 and had 10 years to live. By then he had left the plantation in southern Alabama where he had been born a slave in 1854, and, after Emancipation, scratched out a living as a sharecropper. He moved to Montgomery, the state capital, where he slept on a pallet in the back room of a funeral parlor and spent his days sitting on a wood box watching the world go by on Monroe Street, the center of the city’s lively black district.
