IT JES’ HAPPENED: WHEN BILL TRAYLOR LEARNED TO DRAW: Art Curriculum
Best Users: Art Educators, Librarians, Classroom Teachers, Community Groups, Senior Groups
Best Audience: Grades 03-12
ABOUT THE ART CURRICULUM
How will Bill Traylor’s visual stories influence others in depicting their own?
The award‐winning picture book It Jes’ Happened: When Bill Traylor Started to Draw by Don Tate and illustrated by R. Gregory Christie (Lee & Low Books) describes the way that artist Bill Traylor (1854‐1949) discovered drawing, painting, and visual storytelling at eighty-five after a lifetime of sharecropping in Alabama.
This unit of three lessons encourages viewers of self‐taught artist Bill Traylor’s work to look deeply at the symbols, repetitive figures, and forms of his work or lexicon; to see how they are arranged to tell specific stories from the artist’s life; and to employ these methods to tell their own personal stories through pictures.
Pictographs served as the earliest form of writing, and similarities between ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, word symbols from Native American cultures, and the pictographs of the Maori people of New Zealand, can be found in the way Traylor constructs and tells his stories.
Lesson One: Bill Traylor Lexicon Discovery
The first lesson in this unit is a discovery activity to be conducted in conjunction with a display of Bill Traylor images either projected in the classroom, seen in the pages of monographs and exhibition catalogs, or viewed in an actual exhibit such as Bill Traylor: Drawings from the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts.
Lesson Two: Bill Traylor’s Story Constructions
In the second lesson, learners create their own stories “constructions” using stencils, visual prompts, and Traylor’s own working materials and methods.
Lesson Three: Pictograph Diary
In the third lesson, learners create a diary using found papers and cardboards to record their day‐to‐day life and memories through a lexicon of their own pictographs and writing.
Curriculum created by Art Educator Kelly McConnell. McConnell, an Art Educator professor at Maine College of Art, was awarded the 2007 “Excellence in Published Resources Award” by the American Association of Museum Standing Professional Committee on Education.
The Art Curriculum was first used by the American Folk Art Museum in New York during an exhibit of Bill Traylor’s work. The curriculum creator Kelly McConnell and Curious City ran the art event in partnership with author Don Tate and illustrator R. Gregory Christie.
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It Jes' Happened: Art Curriculum
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ABOUT THE BOOK
It Jes’ Happened: When Bill Traylor Started to Draw
By Don Tate
Illustrated by R. Gregory Christie
Published by Lee & Low Books, Inc.
ISBN-13: 9781600602603
Age Range: 8 Years+
Growing up as an enslaved boy on an Alabama cotton farm, Bill Traylor worked all day in the hot fields. When slavery ended, Bill’s family stayed on the farm as sharecroppers. There Bill grew to manhood, raised his own family, and cared for the land and his animals.
By 1935 Bill was eighty-one and all alone on his farm. So he packed his bag and moved to Montgomery, the capital of Alabama. Lonely and poor, he wandered the busy downtown streets. But deep within himself Bill had a reservoir of memories of working and living on the land, and soon those memories blossomed into pictures. Bill began to draw people, places, and animals from his earlier life, as well as scenes of the city around him.
Today Bill Traylor is considered to be one of the most important self-taught American folk artists. Winner of Lee & Low’s New Voices Award Honor, It Jes’ Happened is a lively tribute to this man who has enriched the world with more than twelve hundred warm, energetic, and often humorous pictures.
This biography explores Common Core English Language Arts Standards and Social Studies Standards.
– Booklist’s Top 10 Biographies for Youth (2012)
– NYPL Children’s Books: 100 Titles for Reading & Sharing (2012)
– Kirkus Best Children’s Books of 2012
– Booklist Editor’s Choice (2012)
– Booklist Top 10 Books for Youth: Arts (2012)
– Booklist Top 10 Black History Books for Youth (2013)
– Booklist Top 10 Books for Youth: Biography (2012)
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“Tate crafts prose that is clear and specific, the lively text sometimes surrounded by playful figures cavorting off the pages as Traylor draws them. An important picture-book biography that lovingly introduces this “outsider” artist to a new generation.”
—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
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“…the story of this man’s life is an introduction to a noted American folk artist of the 20th century, and a refreshing reminder that artistic talent is not limited by age or formal training.”
—School Library Journal (Starred Review)
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“Best known as an illustrator, Tate writes with an appealing rhythm and repetition, and with simple eloquence, he describes Traylor’s work: the “rectangles became bodies; circles became heads and eyes; lines became outstretched arms, hands, and legs.”
—Booklist (Starred Review)
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“In understated prose, Tate imagines the wellspring of memories that might have contributed to Traylor’s outpouring of art so late in life . . . in this thoughtful reflection on the nature of creative inspiration and a man who “has come to be regarded as one of the most important self-taught American folk artists.”
—Publisher’s Weekly
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Christie’s own flat primitive style is a perfect match for Traylor’s story …But the real artistry here is in Don Tate’s finely crafted account of Traylor’s first eighty years; the ordinary events in the life of an ordinary African American man are made notable by Tate’s repetition of the line: “Bill saved up memories of these times deep inside.” When these memories later burst into art, they are made all the more meaningful.”
—The Horn Book
