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Painting a Hidden Life: The Art of Bill Traylor (Hardcover, 2009)

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Born into slavery on an Alabama plantation in 1853, Bill Traylor worked as a sharecropper for most of his life. But in 1928 he moved to Montgomery and changed his life, becoming a self-taught lyric painter of extraordinary ability and power. From 1936 to 1946, he sat on a street corner- old, ill, and homeless- and created well over 1,200 paintings. Collected and later promoted by Charles Shannon, a young Montgomery artist, his work received star placement in the Corcoran Gallery's 1982 exhibition Black Folk Art in America. From then on, the spare and powerful radical modernity of Traylor's work helped place him among the rising stars of twentieth-century American artists. Most critics and art historians who analyze Traylor's paintings emphasize his extraordinary form and evaluate the content as either simple or enigmatic narratives of black life. In Painting a Hidden Life, historian Mechal Sobel's trenchant analysis reveals a previously unrecognized central core of meaning in Traylor's near-hidden symbolism- a call for retribution in response to acts of lynching and other violence toward blacks. Drawing on historical records and oral histories, Sobel carefully explores the relationship between Traylor's life and his paintings and arrives at new interpretations of his art. From an interview with Traylor's great-granddaughter, Sobel learned that Traylor believed the Birmingham policemen who killed his son in 1929 in fact lynched him- a story that neither Traylor nor his family had previously disclosed. The trauma of this event, Sobel explains, propelled Traylor to find a way to voice his rage and spurred the creation of his powerful, mysterious visual language. Traylor's encoded paintings tell a vibrant, multilayered story of conjure power, sexual rivalry, and violence. Revealing an extraordinarily diverse visual universe, the symbols in Traylor's paintings reflect the worlds he lived in between 1853 and 1949: the plantation conjure milieu into which he was born, the blues culture in which he matured, the world of Jim Crow he learned to secretly violate, and the Catholic values he adopted in his final years. From his African heritage, Traylor drew symbols not readily understood by whites. He mixed traditional African images with conjure signs, with symbols of black Baptists and Freemasons, and with images central to the hidden black protest movement- the cross and the lynching tree. In this groundbreaking examination of an extraordinary artist, Sobel uncovers the internalized pain of several generations and traces the paths African Americans blazed long before the march down the Selma- Montgomery highway.

Product Identifiers

Publisher
Louisiana State University Press
ISBN-13
9780807134016
eBay Product ID (ePID)
183999570

Product Key Features

Author
Not Available
Publication Name
Painting a Hidden Life: the Art of Bill Traylor
Format
Hardcover
Language
English
Subject
Social Sciences
Publication Year
2009
Type
Textbook
Number of Pages
248 Pages

Additional Product Features

Genre
Art & Culture
Country/Region of Manufacture
United States

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Painting a Hidden Life: The Art of Bill Traylor (Hardcover, 2009)

About this product

Product Information

Product Identifiers

Product Key Features

Additional Product Features

Best Selling in Adult Learning & University

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (Paperback, 2012)

Australian Native Bee Book: Keeping Stingless Bee Hives for Pets, Pollination and Sugarbag Honey by Tim Heard (Paperback, 2015)

A guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK guide) and the Standard for project management by Project Management Institute (Paperback, 2021)

The Weed Forager's Handbook: A Guide to Edible and Medicinal Weeds in Australia by Adam Grubb, Annie Raser-Rowland (2012, Paperback)

The Falsification of History: Our Distorted Reality by John Hamer (Paperback, 2013)

In-Basket Case Studies by Guy Adamson (Paperback, 1986)

Permaculture: A Designer's Manual by Bill Mollison (Hardcover, 1988)

Save on Adult Learning & University

Ford Falcon EF, EL/Fairlane NF, NL/LTD DF, DL 1994-1998 Haynes Workshop Manual

Netter Atlas of Human Anatomy: Classic Regional Approach

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