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Time for something special! Today, we start our month with the American Folk Art Museum's collection. We start with an amazing piece included in the Self-Made: A Century of Inventing Artists exhibition that is open in the museum until September 13, 2026. Don't miss it while in New York!

Certain characters frequently recur throughout Bill Traylor’s oeuvre of approximately 1,200 artworks, often occupying domestic or family settings. In his compositions, historical events collide with imaginative projections and contemporary daily scenes from the Montgomery neighborhood, where he often spent time. His improvised outdoor working space, located in the heart of the city’s action, was central to his artmaking. As the art historian Peter Morrin has remarked, “Traylor took on a public identity in his sidewalk studio and positioned himself as a public commentator in an act of self-legitimation. A storyteller needs an audience.”

Occasionally, Traylor depicted himself among these “moving pictures.” The author Debra Purden has noted that the attributes he used to represent himself—including a pointed nose, beard, and hat—so strongly resemble a 1939 photograph of him that it is hard to miss his doppelgänger. In one work, he stands outside a speakeasy, peering in through an open door; in another, he reaches for a bottle of moonshine from a shelf and calmly sits behind a mysterious structure, seemingly unaware of the commotion around him. 

P.S. Want to deepen the way you experience powerful works like this? Join our free How to Look at Art online course and learn simple tools that will transform the way you see paintings. 

P.P.S. Meet 13 Black folk artists from the American South and their inspiring works!