• BillraylorUntitledManBlueBrown
    Untitled (Man in Blue and Brown) from the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Margaret Z. Robson Collection, Gift of John E. And Douglas O. Robson @1994 Bill Traylor Family Trust.
Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts—a film about a man who was born into slavery, and whose works became sensations in the art world—will premiere Friday, April 16, in local virtual cinemas of Music Box Theatre and Facets.

This 75-minute documentary explores the life of a unique artist. Bill Traylor was born into slavery in 1853 on a cotton plantation in rural Alabama. After the Civil War, Traylor continued to farm the land as a sharecropper until the late 1920s. In his late 80s, Traylor became homeless and started to draw and paint—both memories from plantation days and scenes of a radically changing urban culture.

Having witnessed profound social and political change during a life spanning slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, and the Great Migration, Traylor devised his own visual language.

See http://musicboxtheatre.com/ and http://kinomarquee.com/film/bill-traylor-chasing-ghosts/604f8e7e9392d90001c8a93a/facets.