Inez Nathaniel Walker (née Stedman) was a self-taught African American artist known for her portraits of women who represented her experiences while incarcerated. Born in 1911 in Sumter, South Carolina, she relocated to Philadelphia in the 1930s during the Great Migration, when African Americans from the rural South migrated to more industrialized and/or northern cities. Walker’s intent was to leave farming behind, and she began working in a Philadelphia pickle plant. In 1949 she moved further north, to Port Byron, New York, where she became a migrant farmer, employment that she deemed less arduous than her previous experiences with farming in the South. During this period, she also lived in Clyde, Savannah, and Geneva in upstate New York.[1]
In 1971 Walker began serving time at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility (formerly known as Westfield State Farm) in New York for manslaughter of an abusive male acquaintance. She began drawing during her first year and participated in a prison art program. In her works, she started with the eyes, depicting great detail, and then fanned out to the head and body. Walker anonymously left seventy-nine drawings on the chair of Elizabeth Bayley, an English teacher at the prison, who upon discovering that Walker had drawn them “was struck by their originality, their humor, and their amazing attention to detail.”[2] Bayley went on to purchase those works and contributed the money to Walker’s prison commissary account.
After Walker’s release from prison in 1972, Bayley introduced her to Pat Parsons, a local folk art dealer. Parsons secured art supplies for Walker that allowed her to create works for exhibition in her first solo show. She created at least three hundred and possibly as many as four hundred drawings during her lifetime. In the 1980s Walker withdrew from society, was in and out of a psychiatric facility from 1986–90, and died in 1990 in Willard, New York, at the Willard Psychiatric Center.[3]
PMA Collection
PMA Library
Notes
[1] Gordon et al. 1997; Walker n.d.
[2] Bayley quoted in Walker n.d.
[3] Gordon et al. 1997; Walker n.d.
References
Gordon, Ellin; Barbara R. Luck; Tom Patterson, and Laura E. Pass. 1997. Flying Free: Twentieth-Century Self-Taught Art from the Collection of Ellin and Baron Gordon. Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation; Jackson: in association with the University of Mississippi.
Walker, Inez Nathaniel. n.d. Artist’s website. Accessed March 31, 2021. https://www.inezwalker.com.
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