Bessie Nickens: A Hidden Figure in Black Art

Fern Gillespie

In the 1980s, while most retired seniors downsized their lives, Bessie Nickens changed her life. At age 80, she sold her laundry business in Louisiana and moved to Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood to live her daughter Barbara and become an artist. Born in 1906, during her childhood, she grew up with her sharecropping parents migrating through Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas working in fields and picking cotton. Since childhood, painting and art were her passion.

In New York City, she delved into a career as a self-taught folk artist creating vivid artwork about her life in rural early 20th Century South as a Black child. The paintings depicted childhood games, iron hot tubs for bathing, jumping rope in the woods, carrying water from the wells, going to country markets, her mother doing hair with a hot comb in the kitchen, ironing and washing clothes with tubs and a furnace, and picking cotton in the fields.

A neighbor in Chelsea was fascinated by her work and persuaded Nickens to develop a storybook based on her folk art paintings. In 1994, when she was 88, the prestigious art book publisher Rizzoli published her paintings as a storybook for children. Her editors Manuela Soares and David Eli Brown helped her pen her family tales in her voice. Rizzoli published Nickens’ Walking the Log: Memories of a Southern Childhood, packed with tales about her childhood in rural Louisiana and illustrated with her wonderful paintings.

Walking the Log: Memories of a Southern Childhood has been honored in Hofstra University Museum collection Children’s Pleasures: American Celebrations of Childhood and in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture’s select Reading Resources for school children and educators.

By 1997, the art world took notice of the poignant paintings by Nickens. At age 91, she had a major art exhibit at Baruch College that was covered by both the New York Daily News and the New York Times. “Her paintings are part family history, part artistic expression, part social commentary,” Lena Williams wrote in The New York Times. “They tell the story of a Black sharecropper’s daughter who, despite growing up in austere surroundings, enjoyed the simple pleasures of life, from the childhood games she played with her brother and sister to exploring the lush landscapes of Louisiana.”

Ellen Sragow, founder of the Sragow Gallery in Manhattan, was Nickens’ first art dealer. Sragow was known for representing Black artists and her clients included print work for Elizabeth Catlett. Through Sragow, Nickens was introduced to famed Black art collectors Oprah Winfrey and Bill Cosby, who own her paintings in their collections. Ellen died in 2024, but her husband Alphonse von Woerkom warmly remembers Nickens. “Ellen really loved Bessie’s paintings,” he told Our Time Press. “Her paintings were pure and fresh. It was well painted and it came from somebody who had never painted before. It was very unique.”

Every year, Nickens would exhibit and sell her folk art at the Harlem Fine Arts Show (HFAS), the largest Black-owned and operated Black Diasporic art show in the United States, which is now held in Downtown Manhattan. Through Sragow, Nickens began a long time relationship exhibiting at HFAS. “Bessie was unique not just because she was a senior citizen,” Dion Clarke, founder of HFAS told Our Time Press. “She was also unique because she was a woman artist and that she helped start that trend towards more Black women artists. Because in the 80s and 90s, it was not a typical sightseeing African American women selling their art.”

Nickens’ paintings have been exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Fisk University, Pennsylvania State University, Vanderbilt University and Augusta, Georgia’s Morris Museum of Art and other locals.

In 2004, Bessie Nickens died at age 98. She was still painting. “I think Bessie was an outstanding artist,” said Clarke. “I think she was a trailblazer. I think she opened up doors and she told great stories. She has a great legacy with the works she has left us.”
The public can still have a piece of Bessie Nickens’ art through her book Walking the Log: Memories of a Southern Childhood, which is available online at secondary market booksellers like Ebay.