Between worlds The art of Bill Traylor

Umberger (curator of folk and self-taught art, Smithsonian American Art Museum) celebrates an extraordinary American artist and the worlds he limned. An African American born in Alabama before the Civil War, Traylor (c.1853--1949) produced roughly 1,200 works on paper in the last decade of his life. In Between Worlds, the catalogue for an exhibition of the same name, Umberger poses the important question of who speaks for the artist and his work. She divides the text into two strands: first, she reconstructs Traylor's personal biography; second, she advances the interpretation and reception of Traylor's art into the present. Her research is impeccable and her narrative compelling. Umberger contextualizes Traylor and his art within an arc of southern history that progresses from antebellum slavery through the Great Depression and the ravages of Jim Crow. She ably grounds those big stories in the artist's biography and the worlds he evoked in pencil and paint from the late 1930s until the end of his life. Umberger is methodical in reconciling folklore, art history, social history, and visual culture within the creative imaginaries Traylor represented in his art. Magnificently illustrated, cogently argued, and meticulously annotated, Between Worlds is sophisticated, generous, and triumphant--and a commanding call to more expansive and inclusive histories of American art. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Bernard L. Herman, University of North Carolina

Artist Kerry James Marshall's introduction to this volume, accompanying a show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum references the "fetishiz[ing of] black culture" that perpetuates the view of the work of self-taught artists as the "expression of primitive souls"-and recognizes Smithsonian curator of folk and self-taught art Umberger's "assiduous" effort to correct that notion. The author's thorough examination of Bill Traylor's life (1853-1949) and art (1,000-plus works) frames them within his family background and the social/cultural history of individuals born into a life of enslavement, followed by more field labor, and later, migration to urban areas to find work. Traylor began to draw in his 80s, when he was homeless and in poor health, on the streets of Montgomery, AL. Between 1938 and 1942 his output, on scraps of paper and cardboard in pencil and paint, was prodigious. Figures, animals, tricksters, plants, and structures abound in scenes filled with humor and often, -violence. Through -204 color plates, Umberger traces the development of that extraordinary work, which draws on memory and tradition, in its increasing sophistication and narrative qualities, and its frequent enigmatic and/or coded imagery that veiled "profound issues of race and class." VERDICT A monumental, singular achievement on a remarkable artist.-Daryl Grabarek, School Library Journal © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.