Freehand: Drawings by Inez Walker

Freehand is the first one-person museum exhibition dedicated to the work of self-taught artist Inez Nathanial Walker (1907-1990). The exhibition presented fifteen works by Walker from the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center's permanent collection, donated by the late art dealer Pat O'Brien Parsons (Vassar class of 1951), along with a number of key loans from private and public collections. Featuring over fifty drawings and sketchbooks that range from Walker's earliest drawings to works made in the last year of her life, the exhibition offers the first comprehensive view of the artist's output. Walker's richly patterned drawings combine meticulous detail and playful simplicity, forming expressive depictions of her subjects' personalities and physical attributes.

Like many other self-taught artists, Walker's motivations for making art stemmed from her instinctive survival skills to help her cope with the anxieties of her difficult circumstances: Walker made her first works of art while imprisoned at a maximum-security correctional facility for killing a man by whom she had been abused. An English teacher in the prison noticed Walker's drawings and showed them to Parsons who ran a nearby gallery. Given the growing interest in black, self-taught artists from the south at the time, Parsons easily found a market for Walker's work and bought many of her drawings for her own collection. This changed the course of Walker's life as her drawings, which she had not intended for a commercial audience, were introduced to collectors, art dealers, curators, and enthusiasts of self-taught and folk art in the United States.

The drawings reveal the artist's focus on the soft curves of the human form and her particular concentration on facial features evident in her precise treatment of each curled eyelash carefully drawn around the edges of her signature large, frontal eyes. Gathered together, Walker's works draw the viewer in with their unmistakable style, exemplified by her distinct sense of proportion, composition, and graphic sensibility. These characteristics permeate her work, allowing viewers to focus less on the circumstances of her life and more on the frankness of her art and the genuine act of expression through portraiture.

The exhibition is supported by the Friends of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center Exhibition Fund and organized with the cooperation of the American Folk Art Museum, New York. There are works that appeared in this exhibition that were loans to the Loeb and therefore do not appear on this website.