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, he continued to farm the land as a sharecropper until the late 1920s and as he become older, he moved to Montgomery, working odd jobs in a segregated black neighborhood.

A decade later, in his late 80s, Traylor became homeless and started to draw and paint, inspired by memories from his plantation days as well as scenes of a radically changing urban culture. Having witnessed profound social and political change during a life spanning slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, and the Great Migration, Traylor devised his own visual language to translate an oral culture into something original, powerful, and culturally rooted. His images of mostly people and animals are at once playful and political, vibrant and mysterious. He made well over a thousand drawings and paintings between 1939–1942, and his colorful, strikingly modernist work was eventually discovered, as he finally became recognized as one of America’s greatest self-taught artists and the subject of the first major retrospective by an artist born into slavery, at the Smithsonian.

Using historical and cultural context, Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts combines archival photographs and found footage, insightful perspectives from his descendants, and Traylor’s striking drawings and paintings to reveal one of America’s most prominent artists to a wider and very grateful audience.

Jeffrey Wolf  |  USA  |  2019  |  75 mins.