Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor

In the late 1920s, Bill Traylor (ca. 1853–1949) left one lifetime behind and embarked on another. After seven decades of farm labor, his tethers to plantation life had all fallen away, so he traveled, alone, into the cityscape of segregated Montgomery. Traylor would spend the next two decades in Montgomery, looking back at a hard, haunting agrarian past; looking ahead at a rapidly evolving world in the city.

It is uncertain when Bill Traylor began drawing, but his earliest known works—rudimentary drawings done in pencil—were made in early 1939, when he was around eighty-six. After decades of farm labor, the aged Traylor was spending days drawing near a blacksmith shop and lodging nightly at a funeral home in the segregated black business district of Montgomery. In these first drawings, Traylor takes stock of the world around him, documenting hand tools, objects, animals, and people, and learning how to organize pictures as records and tell stories. 

Traylor’s dogs convey a wide range of character types, from docile pets to lethal foes. His many depictions of fighting hounds suggest an ongoing desire to capture raw animal ferocity and the intense dynamic of mortal conflict. On plantations, canines were common farming and hunting aides, but they were also trained to hunt and kill humans. From the time of slavery, through the decades of Jim Crow segregation and into the present, dogs have been an effective tool for instilling terror. Often portraying the embattled beasts in different colors, Traylor subtly conveyed the notion of an interracial battle. 

Songs and stories have always been effective vehicles for communication. These modes carry tradition and history, but they may also transmit subversive allegories disguised as innocent animal tales. Some of Traylor’s earliest images narrate pursuit: the chaser and the chased. In the segregated South, overt depictions of racial confrontation would have been perilous for an African American man, yet Traylor shows an innate understanding of letting animals stand in for people. Rabbit is an iconic character in folklore—meek, but also clever and fast. For the enslaved and generations thereafter, Rabbit was heroic for outwitting his oppressors and surviving against the odds. Traylor often drew rabbits flying through the air, escaping, or simply running free. Sometimes their legs appear uncannily human-like, as if Traylor wanted to only thinly disguise its resemblance to a running man. 

Traylor’s drawings rarely have one clear meaning, yet his ability to convey a mood of unease was masterful. He adroitly captured emotion and encounter through pose, gaze, color, and a brilliant use of negative space that describes motion and force; his characters jump, point, tumble, and run; predators and prey stand locked in confrontation. Traylor’s creatures and characters enact wordless, open-ended stories of operatic drama. Birds squawk and take flight; serpents poise to strike, owls shriek. Wielded weapons, pointing fingers, and arcane hash marks capture our attention but keep their secrets. 

Men in fancy suits, tailcoats, and tall hats, accessorized with bags, canes, umbrellas, and cigars, are a central enigma in Traylor’s body of work. These striking figures have been explored variously as the personifications of Death, the Undertaker, and the Conjure Doctor—all powerful roles that Traylor’s characters may step in and out of. 

A number of Traylor’s drawings depict disembodied legs kicking about. The upended, boot-like feet often resemble a cast-iron cobbler’s anvil, which would have been among the tools Traylor used or saw regularly in the late 1920s while working at a shoe-repair shop or in 1940 when he was staying nights at another cobbler’s business. The spare forms create dynamic and elegant silhouettes, but they also transform the shape of a human foot into something threatening, hammer-like, and potentially cruel—objects that might propel dark dreams for one sleeping among their shadowy shapes.

Traylor’s creatures—both animals and people—sometimes exude an untamed or feral intensity. In Untitled (Man, Woman, and Dog), a couple dances with wild abandon. Although Traylor didn’t speak specifically about after-hours houses or “jook” joints—underground spots for drinking, gambling, and dancing—they surely existed all around him. In the 1930s the uninhibited dance styles that became popular with younger African Americans were held in mixed regard by community elders, who worried they were tools of the devil. Yet blues music encouraged ethnic solidarity and a bawdy, rebellious culture that utilized pleasure as an act of resistance, particularly for those born after Emancipation. 

In his somber silhouettes, Traylor compressed a universe of volume and feeling into the flattest of shapes. He effectively balanced positive and negative space, and reduced physicality and mood into stark, saturated images that distill subjects into succinct versions of their worldly forms. Inherently a minimalist with color, Traylor often rendered his images in solid tones of blue, brown, red, even yellow. But he turned most often to black for elegant translations that seem to perfectly fix a shadow.