Leslie Umberger is curator of folk and self-taught art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Stephanie Stebich is the Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Kerry James Marshall is an internationally renowned artist and 1997 MacArthur Fellow.
[A] groundbreaking monograph in which Umberger thoroughly reassesses the known facts of Traylor's life and family, his creative trajectory, and the art world's discovery of him and positions him within the broader context of American art. --ARTFIX daily [A] major undertaking. . . . [The book] includes chapters on the world in which [Traylor] lived, carefully documented by biographical details from surviving records, and discusses the emergence of his talent during an active period in late life while recounting how his preserved work captured the attention of the art world decades after his death. ---Karla Klein Albertson, Antiques and the Arts Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor discusses and illustrates 205 of Traylor's works, images that are powerfully backdropped by the times he lived in. ---Shannon Heupel, Montgomery Advertiser [A] remarkable catalogue, which exhaustively lays out what can be known of Traylor's life, in its historical context, and of the references in his art. ---Peter Schjeldahl, New Yorker