"Published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name, on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, September 28, 2018-March 17, 2019"--Page after title page.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Bill Traylor (ca. 1853-1949) is regarded today as one of the most important American artists of the twentieth century. A black man born into slavery in Alabama, he was an eyewitness to history - the Civil War, Emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, the Great Migration, and the steady rise of African American urban culture in the South. Traylor would not live to see the civil rights movement, but he was among those who laid its foundation. Starting around 1939, Traylor - by then in his late eighties and living on the streets of Montgomery - took up pencil and paintbrush and attested to his existence and point of view. In keeping with this radical step, the paintings and drawings he made are visually striking and politically assertive; they include simple yet powerful distillations of tales and memories as well as spare, vibrantly colored abstractions. When Traylor died, he left behind more than one thousand works of art. In Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor, Leslie Umberger considers more than two hundred artworks to provide the most comprehensive and in-depth study of the artist to date; she examines his life, art, and powerful drive to bear witness through the means available to him, pictures. The author draws on a wealth of historical documents - including federal, state, and county census records, birth and death certificates, and slave schedules - plus interviews with family members and Montgomery locals to clarify the record of Traylor's personal history and family life. The story of his art opens in the late 1930s, when Traylor first received attention for his pencil drawings on found board, and it concludes with the posthumous success of his oeuvre. The simplified forms in Traylor's artwork belie the complexity of his world, creativity, and inspiring bid for self-definition in a dehumanizing segregated culture. Between Worlds situates Traylor as the only known artist enslaved at birth to make a significant body of drawn and painted work - one that offers a window into African American culture in that time and place. Umberger's account of Traylor's life and her careful interpretation of his imagery position the artist at the crossroads of profoundly different worlds: rural and urban, black and white, old and new. --,From dust jacket.

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