Brown Mule

Painted on the back of a poster announcing the 1940 "Dixie Classic: Tuskegee v. Bama State", Traylor's Brown Mule exhibits the spontaneous creativity of one of the most important 20th century Self-Taught artists. The subject was likely taken from memories of the majority of his life spent working on the Traylor plantation near Benton, Alabama, on which Traylor was born a slave in 1854. Little is known of Traylor's life before he arrived in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1929, where he worked as a day laborer. By the late 1930s, rheumatism left him crippled, unemployed and essentially homeless. It was at this time, in his mid-eighties, that Traylor first began to draw as he spent his days sitting outside a neighborhood pool hall. In 1939, he was discovered by Charles Shannon, a young artist who brought Traylor materials and purchased the majority of the older artists' prodigious output, which eventually totaled some 1,200 pieces completed between 1939 and 1942.

Traylor saw little recognition of his work before his death in 1949. In 1979, R. H. Oosterom, Inc., Gallery in New York City was contacted by Shannon and a solo exhibition entitled Bill Traylor 1854-1947 was subsequently mounted. Traylor's works were then featured prominently in the 1980 seminal exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery entitled Black Folk Art in America, 1930-1980, which exposed a larger public audience to Traylor's art. His simple, exuberant compositions, painted with little to no explanation as to their meaning, continue to spark audiences' imagination and remain some of the most eagerly sought-after works in this genre.