Untitled (Brown Pig)

Bill Traylor was part of the first generation of black people to become American citizens. Born into an enslaved family in rural 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 culture in the South. In his late years, Traylor put down a lifetime of memories, dreams, stories, and scenes. His images reflect on seven long decades of farm labor and an evolving black citizenry in urban Montgomery. Some of his works are serene, others reflect the violent atmosphere of his time and place. Animals depicted alone on found cardboard are among Traylor's most easily recognizable works. He portrayed them as individuals, creatures he knew well, unique in shape and character in ways that went far beyond their species.

Having lived on farms surrounded by waterways and wilderness for most of his life, Traylor knew animals as fellow laborers, food sources, companions, and foes. Animals were among Traylor’s foremost topics, and he was able to depict their forms and characters with exceptional specificity. He was fond of using their images as stand-ins for people in allegorical scenes, but Traylor also depicted creatures as individual beings, be it a beast he knew from the farm or a less familiar one encountered in the wild.

(We Are Made of Stories: Self-Taught Artists in the Robson Family Collection, 2022)