Documenting the Rise of a Self-Made African American Female Artist, Bernice Sims

Art by Bernice Sims, was an autodidact who was born in Alabama. Late in her life, she became a talented painter.  As one of the folk pioneers in the art of telling her life stories, Sims' artwork exemplifies endurance and innovation.

Early Life and Background to Artistic Development

Bernice Sims was born in 1926 in the rural area of south Alabama. She was a young girl when she experienced extreme social and economic difficulties. Like many black people living in the segregated South, Sims had very little exposure to art at a young age.   Bernice was fascinated by some ladies who painted with oil on canvas at the local country store she visited. This planted the seeds of her wanting to try painting for herself one day but she never had a chance to try.  She became a mother and reared six children after her husband deserted the family.  Bernice Sims worked at different jobs and helped others to register to vote during the 1960s when the civil rights movement was building.  After rearing her six children, she had the time to go back to school in her fifties to get a GED. It also was a turning point in her life and she tried painting for the first time. After encouragement from friends and family, she began to paint what she saw in front of her eyes, her life and memories and what she wanted her family and people in her community to remember.

Unique Artistic Style

Typically, the artworks of Bernice Sims possess plain shapes in addition to the primary and profound colors. She is best known today for painting familiar scenes, gatherings, and important historical events of the civil rights movement in Alabama. She painted about her times picking berries and cotton in the fields, collecting turpentine, wash days and church dinners. The bright colors and uncomplicated composition makes her work appealing easily to the emotive part of the human brain.

Bernice Sims’ art work is well known for its storytelling aspect. Her paintings also provided a narrative about the many ordeals that African American people endured, as well as their fight to achieve equality and unity. In her art Sims essentially painted history – she allowed the viewer to get up close and personal and to see how her community in question stood, fell, rose and triumphed.

Recognition and Legacy

Contrary to many artists, Bernice Sims started painting at a later age when she was in her 50s, yet she received a lot of attention. During her art career she has exhibited her paintings in galleries and museums throughout America and her work is included in many important museum collections. Sims’s gift to take her memories and to make art from such rare experiences recorded in paint, garnered her much well-deserved appreciation.  Bernice Sims became the personification of hard work and the mantra that you’re never too old to do what you love. Her work remains influential to new artists, and to collectors of rare art. It is a valuable narrative that is preserved through her paintings.

Conclusion

Bernice Sims’ story of country born and raised, self-taught art and self-made celebrity has not only the courage and inspiration inherent in her paintings but civil activism involved. Her art not only expresses her own life story but also teaches people about history and social things of her era. Sims generated her legacy in what will continue to serve the purpose of motivating future generations of portraying art that tells stories with passion.