Self-taught mixed-media sculptor Bessie Harvey was born October 11, 1929, in Dallas, Georgia. She left school after the fourth grade to start working as a domestic, married Charles Harvey at the age of fourteen, and then moved with her husband to Buena Vista, Georgia. Comparing her harsh childhood to the miniseries Roots (1977) and the film The Color Purple (1985), she said, made those fictional treatments look like fairy tales. After divorcing her husband in her early twenties, she and her five children relocated to Alcoa, Tennessee, where she married Cleve Jackson, with whom she had six additional children before the couple divorced. She worked as a domestic in Knoxville in the 1960s and became a housekeeper’s aide at Block Memorial Hospital in Alcoa from the late 1960s until 1983.
Harvey created her first tree sculptures—which she initially referred to as dolls—to manage her grief after her mother died in 1974, carving faces into the roots of trees, inspired by the spiritual presence she sensed in them. She subsequently began painting the carved wood and named the sculptures after Biblical figures and continental African royalty based on the specific spirits she identified within the roots. As her practice developed, she embellished her sculptures with flowers, shells, feathers, and other materials to render the personality of the spirit she sensed in the wood. “When I was a child I had these strange things I’d see and feel and now I’m puttin’ them in wood,” she explained, “. . . and just about everything I touch is Africa.”[1] She blended African American Christian traditions with African-derived spiritual practices to create her sculptures, the latter of which she viewed as “a life-affirming, strongly African religious system that acknowledged and respected natural forces.”[2] The first time Harvey showed her work was at the Block Memorial Hospital annual art show in 1977, after which the staff doctors introduced her to the directors of the Cavin-Morris Gallery in New York. Harvey continued sculpting until her death on August 12, 1994. Her work was posthumously included in New York’s Whitney Biennial in 1995.
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Notes
[1] Harvey quoted in Morris 1987, 46.
[2] Fitzpatrick 1999, 269.
References
“Bird and Spirit Root by Bessie Harvey.” Intuitive Eye. Accessed February 15, 2022. http://intuitiveeye.org/Bird-and-Spirit-Root-by-Bessie-Harvey.
Borum, Jenifer. 2000. “Bessie Harvey.” In Souls Grown Deep: African-American Vernacular Art of the South. Edited by Paul Arnett and William Arnett. Atlanta: Tinwood Books.
Congdon, Kristin G., and Kara Kelley Hallmark. S.v. "Harvey, Bessie." In American Folk Art: A Regional Reference, 1:200–202. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2012. Gale eBooks, accessed February 26, 2022. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX2531200102/GVRL?u=temple_main&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=8f512f13.
Fitzpatrick, Laurie. 1999. “Harvey, Bessie: American Sculptor.” In Contemporary Women Artists. Edited by Laurie Collier Hillstrom, Kevin Hillstrom, and Lucy R. Lippard. Detroit: St. James Press.
Harvey, Bessie. 2000. “God Is the Artist.” In Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South. Edited by Paul Arnett and William Arnett. Atlanta: Tinwood Books.
Morris, Shari Cavin. 1987. “Bessie Harvey: The Spirit in the Wood.” The Clarion (Spring/Summer), posted December 5, 2013. Accessed February 15, 2022. https://issuu.com/american_folk_art_museum/docs/clarion_12_3_spr-sum1987.
Perry, Paul Wardell. 2000. “Bessie Harvey’s Sculpture: The Beast in the Tree Trunk.” The Crisis (July–August). Accessed February 15, 2022. https://books.google.com/books?id=FEMEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA76#v=onepage&q&f=false.
Wertkin, Gerard C., and Lee Kogan. 2004. S.v., “Harvey, Bessie.” In Encyclopedia of American Folk Art. New York: Routledge.
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