Bill Traylor: Last News

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.

Tom Grater International Film ReporterEXCLUSIVE: Kino Lorber has acquired North American rights to Jeffrey Wolf’s documentary Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts and is planning to release in Spring 2021.The doc captures the life of the titular Bill Traylor who, in his late 80s, living homeless on the street in the thriving segregated black neighborhood of Montgomery, produced a body of extraordinary art. Born into an enslaved family in 1853 on a cotton plantation in rural Alabama, he witnessed profound social and political change during his life spanning Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, and the Great Migration.In his later years, he poured out those memories from within, drawing and painting over 1,000 pieces of art from 1939 to 1942.