Bill Traylor [1853-1949], The Charles E. & Eugenia C. Shannon Trust
Bill Traylor
ADAA: The Art Show, Booth A11
March 2-6, 2016
Preview Gala: March 1, 2016
The works of Bill Traylor will be the focus of Betty Cuningham Gallery’s booth (A11) at the 28th annual Art Show, organized by the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA). The Art Show opens the evening of March 1 with a gala preview to benefit the Henry Street Settlement and it remains open to the public March 2 – 6, 2016 at the Park Avenue Armory, located at Park Avenue and 67th Street in New York City.
Bill Traylor was born a slave in 1854, on the George Traylor family’s plantation in Benton, Alabama. Following Emancipation, 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, he 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 slept in the back room of a funeral parlor in downtown Montgomery.
In 1939, Charles Shannon 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, as if he was drawing for the first time. Intrigued, Shannon provided Traylor with art supplies, encouragement and support (purchasing many works for modest prices) until Shannon was drafted in 1942.
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. Shannon continued to introduce the work to several museum curators, but the actual market for Traylor’s work did not blossom until the 1970’s. Since then, Traylor’s work has been shown and collected extensively throughout the United States. His most recent exhibitions include two shows at the American Folk Art Museum in New York (2013), inclusion in the inaugural show in The Whitney Museum of American Art’s new building (2015), as well as a planned retrospective at the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, opening in 2018. Traylor’s work can be found in New York in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of American Folk Art, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, and also in 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 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.
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.
