An invaluable addition to our still-developing understanding of an artist whose fame raises thorny questions, Jeffrey Wolf’s Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts introduces a man whose distinctive drawings depict life during the final years of slavery and the decades that followed.
Drawing heavily on works from various fields — from Zora Neale Hurston’s writing to music and theater — Wolf succeeds in finding a wealth of meaning in Traylor’s deceptively simple pictures, even if he can’t answer all our questions about the man’s life.
Some of Wolf’s smartest choices, though, will be invisible to viewers unfamiliar with Traylor’s complicated, posthumous rise to art-world fame.
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