Artist

Inez Nathaniel-Walker

born Sumter, SC 1911-died Willard, NY 1990
Also known as
  • Inez Nathaniel
  • Inez Stedman
  • Inez Nathaniel Walker
Born
Sumter, South Carolina, United States
Died
Willard, New York, United States
Active in
  • Port Byron, New York, United States
  • Bedford, New York, United States
Biography

Inez Nathaniel 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.

Woodenworks: Furniture Objects by Five Contemporary Craftsmen. (St. Paul, Minn.: Minnesota Museum of Art with the National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, 1972)

Works by this artist (10 items)

Chuzo Tamotzu, Landscape (Towaco, N.J.), ca. 1935-1937, lithograph, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the Evander Childs High School, Bronx, New York through the General Services Administration, 1975.83.91
Landscape (Towaco, N.J.)
Dateca. 1935-1937
lithograph
Not on view
Chuzo Tamotzu, Queens Landscape, brush and ink on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the Evander Childs High School, Bronx, New York through the General Services Administration, 1975.83.112
Queens Landscape
brush and ink on paper
Not on view
Chuzo Tamotzu, Landscape (Towaco, N.J.), ca. 1935-1937, lithograph, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Audrey McMahon, 1968.98.48
Landscape (Towaco, N.J.)
Dateca. 1935-1937
lithograph
Not on view
Chuzo Tamotzu, Cats, ca. 1935-1937, lithograph, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from D.C. Public Library, 1967.72.255
Cats
Dateca. 1935-1937
lithograph
Not on view