Walker, Inez Nathaniel

United States of America, 1911 - 1990

Inez Nathaniel – Walker went north to Philadelphia during the Great Migration of the 1930s to escape the harsh realities of farm work in the rural South. Convicted of the manslaughter of an abusive male acquaintance, she served time in the Bedford Hills, New York, Correctional Facility from 1971 to 1972, where she began to draw to isolate herself from the “bad girls” in the facility. When she remarried in1975, she took her new husband’s name, Walker. Walker’s drawings are almost exclusively single or paired portraits of females. In most of her works, the heads are drawn much larger and more expressively than the rest of the figures and dominate thecomposition. Though Walker never felt she was able to capture a likeness, and she relied on her imagination to develop the faces, she created clearly recognizable characters. Some recur frequently. Elements of self-portraiture are also evident in her figures, many of whom wear clothing, especially hats, based on the artist’s own.