10/18/2026
Bill Traylor lay in an unmarked grave while his drawings sold for thousands. He had been born into slavery in Alabama, and he did not start drawing until he was an old man with nowhere to live. He made most of them sitting out on a city sidewalk.
So how did the man who made them end up with nothing marking his grave?
The drawing started on that sidewalk, with a pencil in his right hand. In his left hand he held a straightedge, a flat stick for ruling lines, and a pocketknife to sharpen the pencil.
The sidewalk was on Monroe Street in Montgomery, Alabama, the heart of the Black side of downtown. The year was 1939, and Bill Traylor was about eighty-six years old.
So where did Bill Traylor go at night? He slept in the back room of the Ross-Clayton Funeral Home.
By day he drew the street in front of him and the farm life he came from. He drew mules and dogs, men in hats and drinking parties, and the barnyard animals he had worked beside most of his life.
Many of the pictures carry a threat of violence. Leslie Umberger is the Smithsonian curator who spent seven years researching his life. She says some push the edge of what was safe for a Black man in segregated Alabama to put on paper.
He worked on scraps of cardboard, often torn into odd shapes. He built the ragged edges right into the picture.
He could not read or write. When he finished a drawing he hung it on the fence behind him, and now and then somebody walking by bought one.
That fence was his whole gallery.
Back in the 1860s, Bill Traylor was a boy on a cotton plantation, and his parents were enslaved on the same place. In 1865 he saw Union soldiers, the Northern army in the Civil War, plunder and burn it. He still remembered it in his old age.
Slavery ended when he was about twelve. He stayed on the land as a laborer and a sharecropper, farming for a share of the crop. In all, he worked other people's fields for more than seven decades.
He married, and late in life he said he had raised "twenty-odd children." Around 1927, with his wife dead and most of his grown children gone north, he left the farm and moved into Montgomery alone. Nobody should have to start over in his seventies.
Back on Monroe Street in 1939, Bill Traylor had been in the city for more than ten years. He had worked in a shoe factory until rheumatism, a painful swelling of the joints, stopped him.
Now he lived on a small government relief check.
That year a young white painter named Charles Shannon noticed the old man drawing near a blacksmith shop. Shannon was twenty-five and had helped found a Montgomery artists' group called the New South.
Shannon kept coming back to watch Traylor work. Shannon brought him paper, poster paint, pens and crayons, and bought some of the drawings.
Years later Shannon wrote that Traylor was beautiful to watch at work, "so right with himself and at peace."
In February 1940 the New South group's gallery hung about a hundred drawings, in a show called Bill Traylor: People's Artist. The local papers wrote it up.
Not one drawing sold.
A hundred pictures on a gallery wall, and Traylor still slept in the back of a funeral home. Shannon took the drawings north to New York.
A private school in the Bronx hung them. The director of the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr, wanted some for the museum and some for himself.
By the account most often told, Barr offered a dollar for each small drawing and two dollars for each large one. Shannon found the offer insulting and turned it down.
A dollar, for a drawing by a man near ninety.
The Museum of Modern Art would not own a Traylor until 1995. By then Traylor had been dead for more than forty-five years.
In 1942, World War II took Shannon into the Army. Traylor left Montgomery to live with one of his daughters in Detroit, then with other relatives in the North.
By then Shannon had about twelve hundred of the drawings. The record shows Shannon buying some and supplying the paint, but not exactly how the rest came into his hands. They stayed with Shannon until the late 1970s, when he began selling them.
Traylor came home to Montgomery in 1946, after an infection called gangrene cost him his left leg.
Shannon came home from the Army that year and saw the pictures Traylor was making now. Shannon did not collect them, judging them weaker than the early ones.
That same year, a national magazine called Collier's ran a story on Bill Traylor. The story treated Traylor as a living relic, a man somehow left over from thousands of years in the past.
Bill Traylor was not a relic. Traylor was a working artist who had sat right there on Monroe Street, drawing his own world on scraps of cardboard.
He spent most of his last years with his daughter Sarah Howard, who lived in Montgomery. He kept drawing until shortly before he died there on October 23, 1949, at about ninety-six.
Leslie Umberger has never found a single one of those late pictures, the ones Traylor made from 1942 to 1949.
Whatever Traylor drew in those years is lost, as far as anyone knows. Bill Traylor was buried at Mount Moriah Cemetery in Montgomery, at the foot of the plot Sarah Howard had saved for herself.
In 1982 the Corcoran Gallery of Art put thirty-six Traylor drawings in a show of self-taught Black artists called Black Folk Art in America. After that show, the prices for a Traylor began to climb fast.
That same year, Shannon sold about thirty of the drawings he held to an art museum for $10,000. That came to about $333 a drawing.
So who did the drawings belong to?
In November 1992, Traylor's family sued Shannon, saying he had not properly come by them. The case settled in 1993, and Shannon handed the family a dozen drawings, valued then at $10,000 to $25,000 apiece.
Both sides put out a joint statement recognizing what Shannon had done to make Traylor known.
On March 27, 2018, about eighty-five people gathered at Mount Moriah Cemetery to unveil a headstone over Traylor's grave. A Montgomery art dealer had spent more than twenty-five years trying to find that grave.
A tip finally sent her to the right cemetery. There the dealer found it at the foot of Sarah Howard's grave, just as one of Traylor's granddaughters had described it.
The new headstone had a photograph of Bill Traylor etched on one side and one of his paintings etched on the other. Sixty-eight years after he died, Bill Traylor's face finally went over his own grave.
In a documentary made that year, one of his great-granddaughters said she was glad he was finally "getting his reward."
That fall, the Smithsonian American Art Museum opened the largest show of his work ever, 155 pieces. Umberger organized it. The museum calls his surviving work the only large body of drawings and paintings known from a man enslaved from birth.
In the show's book, the painter Kerry James Marshall wrote that Traylor "has always been the property of a White collecting class." Marshall meant that white people owned Traylor himself when he was a child, and white collectors have owned his art since.
In January 2020, one Traylor drawing, painted on both sides, sold at auction in New York for $507,000.
Bill Traylor made those pictures with a pencil stub, a straightedge and a pocketknife. Traylor died poor, and none of the money they bring today ever reached him. Every label beside one of them owes Bill Traylor the whole story: who drew it, where he slept, and how little he was paid.
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