Traylor has been represented in the museum’s collection since 1983 when collectors Chuck and Jan Rosenak donated “Untitled (Pig),” an opaque watercolor painting on paperboard. His imagery embodies the crossroads of multiple worlds: black and white, rural and urban, old and new. He left behind more than 1,000 drawings and paintings on discarded cardboard boxes and advertising cards. Around 1930, Traylor moved to segregated Montgomery, where he lived the rest of his life, homeless and increasingly disabled. Traylor (born Benton, Ala., 1853–54 died Montgomery, Ala., 1949) was born on a cotton plantation where he worked as a sharecropper after Emancipation.

These works offer a rare perspective to the larger story of America, and the forthcoming retrospective will bring his work to new and wide-ranging audiences.” “Traylor’s works balance narration and abstraction and reflect both personal vision and black culture of his time. “Bill Traylor is among America’s most important artists and the Smithsonian American Art Museum is the ideal place to foster his artistic and historical legacy,” Umberger said. The exhibition will be the first retrospective for an artist born into slavery. Leslie Umberger, the museum’s curator of folk and self-taught art, began planning the exhibition “Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor” soon after she joined the museum’s staff in 2012. These works will be featured in a major Traylor exhibition opening in Washington, D.C., March 16, 2018. collection became the cornerstone of the museum’s holdings in this area. This combination purchase and gift from the Saslow Collection is the museum’s most significant acquisition of folk and self-taught art since 1986, when more than 500 works from the Herbert Waide Hemphill Jr. The addition of six of Traylor’s works to the collection doubles the museum’s holdings by this artist.

The group is valued at more than $1 million.

The group, from the collection of Judy Saslow in Chicago, includes the early “Untitled (Yellow and Blue House with Figures and Dog)” and “Untitled (Dog Fight with Writing)” from about 1939–40 and Traylor’s largest extant painting, “Untitled (Radio)” from about 1942. Each represents key themes and characters that recur in Traylor’s brief but prolific artistic career. The Smithsonian American Art Museum announced today the acquisition of six masterpieces by the self-taught American artist Bill Traylor. Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, African Art.

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