as his own personal one. However, after he only offered one or two dollars for each Traylor’s piece, the deal quickly fell through. From 1942 to 1945, Traylor lived with his children and other relatives in Detroit, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. After losing his leg to gangrene, Traylor moved back to Montgomery to live with his daughter, Sarah (Sally) Traylor Howard. On October 23, 1949, he died at Oak Street Hospital in Montgomery. He was later buried at Mount Moriah Cemetery. Subject matter As a collection, Traylor’s drawings depict his experiences and observations from rural and urban life in pared down repeated symbols, shapes, and figures. His visual lexicon includes images of people, plants, animals, and local landmarks. While some pieces focus on a single animal, like a dog or snake, other paintings offer composed scenes of individuals gathering by a fountain or working on a farm. His works range from simple single-figured depictions to more compositionally complicated pieces of multiple silhouetted figures. Shannon remarked that the evolution reflected Traylor’s own maturation as an artist. The pieces from Traylor's last year of work "brought together many of the visual themes he had developed by this time: strong abstract forms, combination plant-animal and abstract forms, people in various 'states' ranging from serenity to hysteria, thieves and drinks and devilish kids". Exhibition history Traylor's work finally caught the attention of the broader art world in the late 1970s and 1980s. In 1974, Shannon and his wife brought Traylor's entire oeuvre out from storage and began to sort through it. Resistant to titling Traylor's pieces, Shannon originally categorized the collection according to subject matter. In 1975, he further divided the collection into 25 categories of shared imagery and three additional categories: earliest works, extra large works, and special works. As an organized collection, Traylor's works finally began to evoke interest among art enthusiasts. In 1979 Richard H. Oosterom agreed to hold a solo exhibit featuring Bill Traylor's pieces. From December 13, 1979 to January 12, 1980, R.H. Oosterom, Inc. mounted the show Bill Traylor 1854–1974, Works on Paper. The exhibit also led to the first institutional acquisition of Traylor's drawings. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture purchased Traylor's "Man on Mule". It wasn’t until Traylor's 1982 debut at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. that the audiences started to note the significance of his work. Curators