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Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts

Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts

Documentary
2021, Movie, 1h 15min
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.
Country: United States
Director:
Jeffrey Wolf

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Jeffrey Wolf
Director

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"Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts" is a documentary that delves into the extraordinary life of a previously unknown artist, Bill Traylor, who was born into slavery in Alabama in 1853. The film chronicles Traylor's journey from a sharecropper to a homeless artist who creates vibrant, modernist paintings that capture the essence of a rapidly changing urban culture in the 1930s and 1940s. Despite facing numerous challenges, Traylor's remarkable talent and resilience ultimately lead him to be recognized as one of America's most important self-taught artists.

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Some movies that have similar genres and were produced around the same time as Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts include On Putin's Blacklist, The Search for Nicola Bulley, Weiner, The Three Kings, The Queen's Green Planet, Tickled.

 

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