Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts

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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.

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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