Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts

Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts is an eyeopening documentary that 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 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, devising his own visual language to depict his memories of slavery and scenes of a radically changing urban culture. He made well over a thousand drawings and paintings between 1939-1942, which reflect the profound social and political change he experienced during his life spanning slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, and the Great Migration. Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts is a revelatory examination of one of America’s most essential artists.