Ann Graves Tanksley

Place: Pittsburgh

Born: 1934

Biography:

Ann Graves Tanksley is an American artist born in 1934 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She works with representational oils, watercolor and printmaking. One of her most notable bodies of work is a collection inspired by the writings of African-American novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, which includes over 200 pieces of monotypes and paintings.

Early Life and Education

Ann Graves Tanksley was born on January 25, 1934, to Marion B. Graves and Gertrude DiuGuid Graves. She was raised in the Homewood community in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She was drawn to art at an early age and credits the actions of a kindergarten teacher as her introduction to art. In order to relax her separation anxiety from her mother on the first day of school, the teacher gave Ann Graves Tanksley crayons and beads. This launched the beginning of her artistic expression. Tanksley graduated from South Hills High School in 1952 and from Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1956 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Following graduation, she married fellow Homewood native John Tanksley and they moved to Brooklyn, New York.

Career

Tanksley decided to focus on raising her daughters before pursuing painting full time. In the interim, she worked in arts education as an art instructor at Queens Youth Center for the Arts from 1959 – 1962, and substitute instructor of art at Malvern Public Schools in 1971. She also served as an adjunct art instructor at Suffolk County Community College from 1973 to 1975. Throughout her early career, she continued her education and development as an artist by pursuing studies at several programs, including the Arts League of New York and the New School for Social Research, now known as The New School. She also studied at the Paulette Singer Workshop in Great Neck, New York, and the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, where she learned the monotype printmaking technique, prominent in the Zora Neale Hurston works. Tanksley was one of the first members of Where We At: Black Women Artists, Inc., a New York-based women's art collective. The organization was founded by artists Kay Brown, Dindga McCannon, and Faith Ringgold, and others associated with the Black Arts Movement.

• Ann Graves Tanksley exhibited as early as the late 1960s, but her work began to garner critical acclaim and greater recognition in the 1980s and 1990s.
• A career turning point was her creation of a large body of work based on the writings of Zora Neale Hurston.
• The work traveled throughout the United States in the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century.
• Tanksley “immediately fell in love with her writing,” she said in a 1996 New York Times interview.

Tanksley was introduced to Zora Neale Hurston during the 1980s upon discovering amongst her daughter's belongings a copy of Hurston's book, Their Eyes Were Watching God. She read the book and was so inspired by it that she read many of Hurston's other works. Tanksley “immediately fell in love with her writing,” she said in a 1996 New York Times interview. Important works by Ann Graves Tanksley can be found at https://Wikioo.org/@/Ann-Graves-Tanksley, and more information about the artist can be found on Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Tanksley. More details about Ann Graves Tanksley and her work can be found at https://Wikioo.org/Art.nsf/Art_EN?Open&Query=ann+graves+tanksley,graves,tanksley&, including a collection of her paintings and monotypes inspired by Zora Neale Hurston. Ann Graves Tanksley's work is a testament to the power of art to express the human experience. Her use of representational oils, watercolor, and printmaking has created a unique and captivating body of work that continues to inspire and educate audiences today.