Jane Livingstone and John Beardsley included 36 of Traylor's pieces in the landmark exhibition Black Folk Art in America 1930-1980. Soon after, Shannon donated some of Traylor's works to the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, one of which the High Museum of Art later purchased. The year 1982 "inaugurated the larger public exposure, critical analysis, and publication through which Traylor’s work has become widely recognized." In 1995, the Metropolitan Museum of Art displayed Traylor's works. In 1996, six weeks after Shannon's death, MoMA included Traylor's drawings in the exhibition A Century of American Drawing from the Collection. More recently, Traylor has been accepted into national and international ranks of the most prominent self-taught artists. Scholars and curators have moved away from labeling him as a "primitive" or "outsider" artist, and have instead chose to focus on his prominence and significance within 20th-century American art. In 2005 the Studio Museum in Harlem launched the exhibit Bill Traylor, William Edmondson, and the Modernist Impulse. The traveling exhibit, which was curated by Josef Helfenstein, Director of the Menil Collection, and Russell Bowman, former Director of the Milwaukee Art Museum, featured 50 of Traylor's drawings and paintings. Looking past Traylor's position as a "folk" or "outsider" artist, the exhibit examined his work in relation to "the modernist works of the established or 'official' avant-garde of the period." The American Folk Art Museum continued this effort in 2013 with two exhibitions. From June 11 to September 22, the Museum hosted both Bill Traylor: Drawings From the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, a traveling exhibition, and Traylor in Motion: Wonders from New York Collections, an in-house exhibit. Stacy C. Hollander, the American Folk Art Museum's chief curator, and Valérie Rousseau, its curator of art of the self-taught art and art brut, organized Traylor in Motion. Together, the exhibits featured 104 of Traylor's drawings and paintings. Roberta Smith, from The New York Times, described the coupled exhibits as "offer(ing) total immersion in his late-life burst of genius." The largest exhibition of Traylor's work to date, Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor, was on display at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art from September 28, 2018 to April 7, 2019. It was the first retrospective ever presented for an artist born into slavery. The exhibition was organized by Leslie Umberger, curator of folk and self-taught art, who also