Bessie Harvey

1929-1994 · Alcoa, Tennessee, USA

She saw spirits waiting inside roots and branches, and helped them out with paint, beads and hair.

The life

Born in Georgia, ninth of thirteen children, Harvey raised eleven children of her own, largely alone, while working as a housekeeper’s aide at the hospital in Alcoa, Tennessee. Art arrived in her forties as both calling and consolation. She insisted the figures were already present in the wood, placed there by God, and bristled at anyone who called her work voodoo.

The work

Root and branch sculptures transfigured with paint, beads, shells, cloth and human hair into prophets, serpents and ancestral spirits, often with faces multiplying along a single limb. Museums from the American Folk Art Museum to the High in Atlanta collected her before her death in 1994.

Why we love them

She is BRUT’s kind of sculptor: the material was free, the vision was not negotiable, and the neighbours were scandalised.

Go deeper

• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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