Bill Traylor, “Untitled (Man with Cane on Construction, with Dog),” poster paint, pencil, and colored pencil on cardboard, 1939-42 (Louis-Dreyfus Family Collection)
American Folk Art Museum
2 Lincoln Square, Columbus Ave. at 66th St.
Sunday, September 22, suggested donation $5, 12 noon – 6:00 pm
212-595-9533
www.folkartmuseum.org
Today is the last day to see a pair of splendid exhibitions on self-taught superstar Bill Traylor at the American Folk Art Museum. “Bill Traylor: Drawings from the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts” and “Traylor in Motion: Wonders from New York Collections” together feature more than one hundred works by Traylor, who was born into slavery on an Alabama plantation in the mid-1850s, where he continued to work after being freed. The drawings date from 1939 to 1942, when he began looking back at his life after moving to Montgomery. He developed a unique visual style involving dark silhouetted figures on cardboard, with occasional blues and reds, that form a kind of memory dance of the black experience in America. They are both charming and frightening, evoking today a kind of mix of Jacob Lawrence and Kara Walker. Seeing so many of Traylor’s works filling the walls at the museum immerses you in his fascinating artistic world, which included between 1,200 and 1,500 drawings made in that whirlwind three-year period. Traylor died in 1949, but his reputation as a fine artist continues to grow, as ably shown by these two exemplary exhibitions.