Abraham Lincoln Walker

1921-1993 · East St. Louis, Illinois, USA

A house painter who ran his own decorating firm by day, painted to Miles Davis 8-tracks by night, and left more than 800 canvases sealed in a trailer that the art world only opened decades later.

The life

Walker was born in Henderson, Kentucky in 1921 and moved as a youth to East St. Louis, Illinois, where he spent the rest of his life. He ran the Lincoln Walker Painting and Decorating Company, painting houses for a living, and taught himself fine art in the hours around work: mornings before jobs, evenings after, weekends straight through, often with Miles Davis, raised within walking distance of his home, playing on 8-track. He produced over 800 paintings that stayed almost entirely unseen until 2024, when the trove stored in a tractor trailer on his property came to light and went from obscurity to New York solo shows.

The work

Oil on board, applied with brushes but also putty knives, newspaper and plastic wrappers. Early neighbourhood scenes full of Black life and jazz syncopation give way to elongated masked figures in desolate landscapes, and finally to visionary celestial spaces where barely identified human forms tangle in the fibres of a living world. From a distance the late work reads as abstraction; up close, faces surface. His paintings are now held by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City.

Why we love them

A whole life’s work waiting quietly in a trailer while its maker painted other people’s houses. Patience on that scale is its own masterpiece.

Go deeper

• Abraham Lincoln Walker at the Outsider Art Fair
• Abraham Lincoln Walker on Wikipedia
• Andrew Edlin Gallery
• 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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