Inez Walker

1911-1990

Inez Walker was born in Sumter, South Carolina in 1911.  Walker decided in her twenties that farm life was too rigorous – “The muck would eat you up,” she once remarked.  By that time both her parents were dead.  She was already married and had four children.  She moved north with them around 1930 to Philadelphia, where she worked in a pickle plant for nearly 20 years.  For Walker, the door to art was opened by tragedy.  In 1970 she was convicted of criminally negligent homicide in the killing of a man who had apparently abused her, and she was sent to the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. She began to draw, at first on the backs of sheets of the prison newspaper, as a way, she said, of isolating and protecting herself from the “bad girls” around her.  Perhaps as a result, her art which consisted primarily of portraits of women done in pencil, ink, crayon, felt marker, and watercolor, gave the sense of being wholly self-generated.  The patterned details of clothing and backgrounds seem a direct reaction to her prison environment, and expression of her experience with the prison’s surrounding order.  Walker insisted that she never worked from models, though many of the drawings in which the eyes are the focus, bear a striking resemblance to the artist.  A prison English teacher took an interest in her work and showed it to a gallery owner in Bedford Hills, where Walker was given her first show in 1972.  The same year, she was released from prison and moved back to upstate New York.  There, while working as a seasonal farm laborer, she married again.  Later separated from her husband, in 1980 she disappeared from view and after 1986, was intermittently a patient at Willard Psychiatric Center in upstate New York. She worked only sporadically until her death in 1990 from pancreatic cancer. ³