Who was the first African American ex-slave and ex share cropper who choose to draw what he saw around him that the modern world knows of, thanks to his mentor Charles Shannon who collected his work to preserve it. With the help of Charales Shannon Bill Traylor held two exhibitions in America, the second in New York in 1942, before his death in 1949. Nearly thirty years later Traylor's time came and his primitive drawings on scraps of paper that nobody cared about at the time found their own audience and adherents as recollections of a vibrant black culture that it seems could only be fleetingly captured if it was going to be captured atall.
Nowadays anyone looking at the images would be tempted to take the ghosts of shapes he commited to paper, and animate them. To give the images the imitation of life. I would suggest that there are better ways of representing the times and spaces he lived through.....
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