02/13/2026
Ann Graves Tanksley (b. 1934, Pittsburgh, PA) was drawn to art from an early age. Tanksley maintained an interest in creative self-expression and earned a B.F.A. from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1956. After graduating college, she married and dedicated herself to full-time motherhood.
Tanksley worked in art education, holding teaching positions at Queens Youth Center for the Arts (1959 – 1962), the Arts Center of Northern New Jersey (1963), and working as an adjunct art instructor at Suffolk County Community College from 1973 to 1975. She simultaneously continued her own artistic development, taking classes at the Art Students League, The New School, The Paulette Singer Workshop, and the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop where she learned monotype printing techniques.
Tanksley began exhibiting her work as early as the late 1960s. During the Civil Rights Movement, art became a vehicle for her to process the weight of her emotions in response to the political moment and collective rage and urgency felt by Black Americans. These works were noted for their flat composition, loose brushwork, melancholic figures, and shocks of unexpectedly bright color. The focus on social commentary eventually began to negatively impact her, and Tanksley decided to pivot toward depicting black joy, celebration, and uplifting everyday scenes.
In 1971, Ann Tanksley was among the first members of Where We At: Black Women Artists, Inc., a New York women’s art collective founded by Kay Brown, Dingda McCannon, and Faith Ringgold. One of her early group shows was the collective’s 1972 exhibit, “Cooking and Smokin’” at the Weusi-Nyumba Ya Sanaa Gallery in Harlem, New York.
A deep admirer of Zora Neale Hurston’s writing, Ann Tanksley eagerly took an opportunity to collaborate with psychoanalyst Hugh F. Butts in the 1980s to illustrate his book about Hurston. Though his book was never published, the 60 monoprints that Tanksley created for the publication were shown across the United States in the ‘90s and early 2000s to great critical acclaim.
