Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts

“Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts,” is an illuminating 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 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. His 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. [2020, US, 75 min, Rated: NR]. Jerry Saltz of “New York Magazing, exclaims “In Traylor, we can see the power of individual voice… the work is transcendent and essential.” “Southern Poverty Law Center” writes, “A celebration of art and the best of humanity transcending poverty, racism and despair.” Venue: Rehoboth Beach Film Society.