OUTSIDER ARTIST BILL TRAYLOR GETS HIS DUE
Outsider artist Bill Traylor hits a sweet spot for documentary treatment. Those within the art world know and generally revere his work; he was the subject of a major solo show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2018-2019. But the average filmgoer has likely never heard of him or his remarkable story, which spans from the era of slavery to the years immediately following World War II.
His profile gets a deserved jolt with “Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts,” opening May 7 in Houston through the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s MFAH Virtual Cinema portal. Traylor was born into slavery in Lowndes County in Alabama, the same county where Stokely Carmichael would cut his teeth as an activist some hundred years later. Traylor drew and painted what seemed like rudimentary compositions on whatever material he could find (he was particularly fond of dirty cardboard and abandoned boxes). His figures, human and animal, are in constant motion, flying, fighting, climbing, running.
As the Smithsonian website puts it, “The paintings and drawings he made are visually striking and politically assertive; they include simple yet powerful distillations of tales and memories as well as spare, vibrantly colored abstractions. When Traylor died in 1949, he left behind more than one thousand works of art.” They are an expression of things observed and imagined, and of an ambition to assert individual identity during perpetually hard times.
The film, executive produced by “MLK/FBI” director Samuel D. Pollard, generally succeeds in finding a visual and verbal style to match Traylor’s iconoclastic vision. Dancer Jason Samuels Smith taps up a storm as editor Keith Reamer uses an almost subliminal rhythm to intercut images of the artist’s work. There are readings of Zora Neale Hurston’s “High John De Conquer” (“making a way out of no way”) and “Dust Tracks on a Road.” Cultural critic and musician Greg Tate speaks to the power of hoodoo (spiritual practices and beliefs brought by former slaves to the new world) and mystery in Traylor’s work, and his “desire to render the fantastic.”
Like most great artists, Traylor had a quality that transcended the conscious mind, and, as the film points out, he was about as unacademic as an artist can get. And, like most outsider artists, he had a key champion to bring his work to public recognition. A white artist named Charles Shannon noticed Traylor at work on Monroe Street, the main Black thoroughfare of Montgomery, Ala. The two became friends, and Shannon helped bring Traylor to the attention of the New York art world.
It was hardly a perfect union; Traylor’s family ended up suing Shannon in the ’90s, claiming Shannon exploited Traylor. (The case was settled out of court, with Traylor’s family coming to agree that Shannon helped rather than hindered the artist.) The case was a testament to Traylor’s posthumous ascendance in the art world, a process that continues with this film. Traylor is an outsider who made his way inside. One wonders what he might have thought were he alive to experience the journey.