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Film society streaming ‘Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts’

April 14, 2021

Starting Friday, April 16, the Rehoboth Beach Film Society’s Cinema Art Theater will offer virtual cinema access to “Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts,” an illuminating documentary that explores the life of a unique American artist, a man with a remarkable and unlikely biography.

Bill Traylor was born into slavery in 1853 on a cotton plantation in rural Alabama. After the Civil War, Traylor continued to farm the land as a sharecropper until the late 1920s. Aging and alone, he moved to Montgomery and worked odd jobs in the thriving segregated black neighborhood. A decade later, in his late 80s, Traylor became homeless and started to draw and paint, depicting both memories from plantation days and scenes of a radically changing urban culture. His colorful, strikingly modernist work eventually led him to be recognized as one of America’s greatest self-taught artists and the subject of a Smithsonian retrospective.

Help keep the Cinema Art Theater’s screens lit by visiting rehobothfilm.com for streaming links to watch wonderful films at home. The distributor sets the fee, but if more than one person is watching, it is a bargain.

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