Bill Traylor |
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From slavery to being considered one of the most important American artists of the 20th century. And the artist who inspired our AW20 collection. |
Born into slavery, William “Bill” Traylor (ca. 1853–1949) spent much of his life after the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation working as a farmhand and sharecropper in rural Alabama. Few people knew anything of Traylor until 1982, when his work was the sensation of “Black Folk Art in America”, a show at the Corcoran Gallery, in Washington. His work has since then been the subject of many exhibitions, including a major retrospective at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, in 2018: "Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor". During the II WW years, Bill Traylor moved around the homes of his various children, who were scattered in Washington D.C., Detroit, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. During his time in Washington, he had a gangrenous leg amputated. He chose to return to Montgomery, preferring his life on Monroe Street, where he died in 1949 and was buried in a pauper’s grave. A handsome headstone was installed, by his descendants, in March 2018. Traylor’s vibrant imagery and colour palette inspire and compose the patterns created for our Autumn-Winter 2020 collection. |
