Born 1907, Sumter, S.C.; died 1990, Ovid, N.Y.
Inez Nathaniel Walker was born in Sumter, S.C., in 1907. In the 1930s, during the Great Migration, she sought an alternative to farm work and left the South for Philadelphia. There, she found work at a pickle plant until losing the job because of strikes. In 1949, she moved to Port Byron in upstate New York and began working in an apple processing facility.
In 1971, she was imprisoned for a homicide in self-defense and was relocated to a correctional facilityjust outside New York’s Finger Lakes region. While imprisoned, she took English and art classes, in which she began drawing. One of her teachers found her work remarkable and set out to share it with a local art dealer. This encounter led to Walker’s first gallery exhibition in 1972, which occurred while she was still imprisoned. She served a short term and returned home in early 1973 with a newfound artistic practice and planned exhibition showings in the near future. In 1975, she remarried and began using the last name Walker.
Walker was a portraitist. Whether imagined or recalled, her figures were drawn with exactness, allowing viewers to identify recurring subjects and sitters. Her figures were drawn either facing forward or set in profile, with their widened, captivating eyes always directed forward. Her compositions were zoomed-in, often capturing characters in social situations: talking, toasting or smoking. Her earliest pieces were done on the back of found ephemera, until she eventually started working in sketchbooks and on larger, high-quality paper. Similarly, she moved from ballpoint pens and pencil to felt-tipped markers, crayons and more. In 1982, she was included in the seminal exhibition Black Folk Art in America 1930–1980 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.. Walker’s art received pronounced recognition through the rest of her life and into today.
—Emily Q. Slavin, Intuit Art Museum curatorial fellow
