Film

Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts

2021 · 1h 15m · Documentary

IMDb

7.0

Rotten Tomatoes

100%

Metacritic

80

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.

• Jeffrey WolfDirector

Release date

April 16, 2021

Status

Released

Original language

English

Runtime

1h 15m

Revenue

$4,504

Genres

Documentary