Inez Nathaniel Walker

c.1911-1990 · New York, USA

She began drawing in prison in her sixties, portraits of the women around her, guarded and big-eyed, and kept drawing all the way out the gate.

The life

Born in South Carolina, Walker moved north in the Great Migration, working fields and factories through a life that gave her little shelter. In her late fifties she killed a man who had been abusing her, and in prison in upstate New York began to draw on exercise paper, portraits she said were of the bad girls around her. A teacher saved the work and showed it to a folk art dealer; recognition followed her release, though stability never quite did.

The work

Frontal portraits, mostly of women, with monumental eyes, elaborate hair and patterned clothing that fills the sheet like wallpaper armour. Pencil, ballpoint and crayon, the sitter always composed, always watching. The drawings hold a room the way survivors hold a door.

Why we love them

Art arrived exactly when everything else had failed her, and it held. That is the whole argument for what we do.

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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