Where to watch · United States
via JustWatch · IP Geolocation by DB-IP
Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts (2021)
Directed by Jeffrey Wolf
Documentary · 1h 15m
This illuminating documentary explores the life of a unique American artist, a man with a remarkable and unlikely biography. 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. Aging and alone, he moved to Montgomery and worked odd jobs in the thriving segregated black neighborhood. A decade later, 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. He made well over a thousand drawings and paintings between 1939-1942. This colorful, strikingly modernist work eventually led him to be recognized as one of America’s greatest self-taught artists and the subject of a Smithsonian retrospective.
Crew
- Director
- Jeffrey Wolf
Details
- Release date
- 2021-04-16
- Runtime
- 1h 15m
- Genres
- Documentary
- Original language
- EN
- Countries
- United States of America
- Box office
- $4,504