Welmon Sharlhorne’s drawings became his lifeline in prison and were already hanging in galleries when he became a free man.

By Bill Sasser
Raw Vision
January, 2022

“When I did my time, I had time to see how art could make me free,” says Welmon Sharlhorne, whose wild imagination took flight inside a Louisiana prison cell. Before his parole in 1996, his artwork was already prized by collectors and had been shown at museums in the US and Europe. “Yes, my art made it out into the world before I did,” muses the artist, a dapper 69-year-old who is by turns ever congenial and ever contentious.

Sharlhorne spent 22 years in Angola prison, Louisiana’s notorious state penitentiary, and since then has taken life as an ever-rolling adventure. In the past year, he has endured Covid lockdown, was part of a museum show at New York’s MoMA PS1, evacuated for Hurricane Ida, and is currently featured in Prospect New Orleans, a citywide international art triennial.

“My art comes from the heart—keep your eyes on the prize and you’ll be recognized,” Sharlhorne declares from his perch by a coffee shop, studying a busy sidewalk through fashionable glasses missing both lenses, a personal trademark. Well known for his rap like asides, his voice is transmitted through an electronic speech aid, a result of throat cancer in 2018. Though he has slowed down in recent years, Sharlhorne abides as one of New Orleans’ few remaining vernacular artists from the Outsider art boom of the 1990s.

Left: Untitled (Beaked Creature), c. 1994, ink on manila envelope, courtesy: Smithsonian American Art Museum. Right: Sharlhorne, October 2021, photo: Bill Sasser.

Born in 1952, he grew up in rural Houma, Louisiana, the fourth of 14 children during a time of strict segregation. Leaving school without learning to read or write, he was convicted of robbing a grocery store in his early teens and spent several years in juvenile detention. He was sentenced to prison for extortion at age 18, following a dispute with a homeowner over his pay for mowing a lawn. A journalist in his hometown of Houma has noted records for some later charges, including another for extortion in 1989. For that $10 crime, plus previous convictions, Sharlhorne got another seven and a half years in prison.

Located on the site of a former antebellum plantation, the Angola prison complex is still a working farm. Sharlhorne labored in cotton fields as armed guards on horseback watched on. During his years in prison, he was beaten, stabbed, and did time in solitary.

Sharlhorne noted other inmates using their art as a currency, to trade for cigarettes and win favors from guards. With no background in art, he began drawing with ink pens on manilla envelopes and folders, which he requested to correspond with his non-existent lawyers. He used bottle caps and tongue depressors as edges for tracing. Lucid, Afro-centric, nearly psychedelic, his drawings create precise geometric shapes, embroidered with abstract details, biomorphic forms and otherworldly faces.

Untitled, c. 1994, ink on manilla folder, courtesy: Welmon Sharlhorne.

“I used art as an escape from the reality of prison,” Sharlhorne told David Houston, curator of Ohr-O’Keefe Museum or Art in Biloxi, Mississippi. “It helped me survive and do my time. I became better minded and had thinking better.”

Inmates and prison staff shared his art with relatives outside Angola, and it soon caught the art world’s attention. Aarne Anton, owner of American Primitive Gallery in New York City, first saw Sharlhorne ’s work during a trip to Louisiana in the mid 1990s.

“I visited a collector’s home and was blown away, and I got obsessed with finding him.” He tracked the artist down and began buying pieces by mail, with Sharlhorne asking for payment in advance. “I’d have no idea what I’d get, unfolding these manilla envelopes that he used for drawing paper.”

Sharlhorne’s art often features one of several subjects: buildings, buses and imaginary creatures. Anton says that each reflects his life in prison.

Untitled (Building with Bricked Exterior), c. 1992, ink on manila envelope, courtesy: Smithsonian American Art Museum.

“His buildings are these elaborate fantasies, like he’s having a blast being an architect, but also have a prison-like quality, with those high walls and sometimes no windows.” Buses became an object of his imagination, as they delivered him to prison and also took him back to freedom. Clocks appear in nearly all of Sharlhorne’s drawings, including his giant birds and horned demons, with huge timepieces in their bellies. “They’re his monsters of time, about him marking time.”

Anton has represented other ex-prisoner artists, such as Raymond Materson, who sewed autobiographical needlepoint pictures using thread he unravelled from his socks. “Artists who discover their talent in prison often do their best work in confinement,” he notes. “With no distractions, they take on this intensity of focus, so much so that they feel free. That clarity is like a high.”

Sharlhorne’s art markedly improved his life in prison, after the warden saw his drawings and ended his hard labor in the fields. “They saw what I was doing and made me a trustee,” he says, referring to inmates who work lighter, unsupervised duties. Paroled on Christmas Day in 1996, aged 44, he had spent over half his life behind bars.

“I don’t know how he found me but he came straight to my gallery with a bunch of drawings,” says Andy Antippas, owner of Barrister’s Gallery in New Orleans. “I bought everything he had for $4,000. Welmon set himself up with new clothes and a place to stay, and I was excited to have this new artist. His work was great.”

Folk art collectors Chuck and Jan Rosenak visited Barrister’s soon afterwards and bought every drawing, Antippas recalls. The couple added four of the artist’s drawings to the permanent collection of The Smithsonian Museum of American Art and included his work in their high-profile exhibition at the Musée Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland.

“They quickly helped make Welmon’s career as an artist,” says Antippas, but Sharlhorne had difficulty adjusting to life after prison. He spent years on the street, though many acquaintances didn’t realize that he had no permanent address. Carrying all of his possessions in a briefcase, he became a widely familiar face on his endless walks across New Orleans.

“Welmon didn’t like being cooped up or feeling he lived under anyone’s rules,” says Bradley Sumrall, curator of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. “He didn’t want to be confined, and that same drive for freedom was the motivation for his artwork.”

Untitled, c. 1996, ink on paper, courtesy: American Primitive Gallery. Right: Don’t be a Part of an Illusion, 2002, ink on manilla folder, courtesy: Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

Sumrall has known the artist for 25 years, well before his own career took off, and was working the late shift at a Bourbon Street diner when he first met Sharlhorne.

“Welmon introduced himself as ‘Nighthawk’ and that spurred my interest,” he remembers, citing one of the street names the artist used. “He’d buy a cup of coffee and stay for hours drawing on napkins and I really liked the work.”

At night, Sharlhorne often slept upright in chairs at 24-hour bars and diners. He befriended bartenders and kitchen staff in the French Quarter, who often fed him. A fancy dresser, he rotated his wardrobe, wearing one set of clothes while others were at the dry cleaners. As a night owl, he was known to spend freely at casinos and for the company of Bourbon Street dancers. Antippas offered Sharlhorne a corner in his gallery to work. Other gallerists encouraged him to let them manage his career, but Sharlhorne demurred.

“They tried to tell him to just sit here and make your art, we’ll take care of your rent and get your prices up, but he’s never trusted anyone to do that,” says Sumrall. “He’s sold individual drawings to collectors for hundreds of dollars, then sells them to a bartender or a tourist for $80. He wants that money as soon as he needs it.”

Drawing every day, art earned his living, gave him a high purpose, and eventually changed his life again, as several benefactors outside the art world organized his affairs and persuaded him to move off the street. Dean Church, an attorney, met Sharlhorne at a food court in downtown New Orleans in 1998.

“I met Welmon and his world seemed so interesting and new to me,” Church says, recalling his instant fascination with a life that seemed like a never-ending piece of performance art. “Welmon’s voice was maybe his brightest gift—he was so expressive, like an emcee, the life of the party. And I feel so bad for him now, losing so much of that with his cancer.”

With no background in art, Church became one of Sharlhorne’s biggest collectors. He started making a documentary film about the artist and took him back to Angola for the annual inmate rodeo and art show, which is open to the public.

“He got up on stage with an inmate band and sang that James Brown song, ‘Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud.’ It was wild,” says Church. He hasn’t finished his documentary, in part because Sharlhorne will not sign a legal release. “Welmon has some real issues with trust, which goes back to prison.”

Sharlhorne has become an art icon in New Orleans as his work continues to find wider acclaim. Currently, he is one of ten artists showing work at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, as part of the Prospect New Orleans triennial. He lives in the city’s Treme neighborhood, in a retirement complex managed by a local Catholic diocese.

Bus, c. 1992, ink on manila envelope, courtesy: Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Sharply dressed, wearing sporty hats and glasses with no lenses, and wielding one of his many homemade canes, he still holds court at French Quarter hangouts. To fans, helpers and thousands of fleeting acquaintances, Sharlhorne is known as “Uncle Shadow,” his self-styled dramatic persona.

Throwing out one-liners, his satirical “superhero” of New Orleans street culture often sounds like a bawdy Dr Seuss. Many unsuspecting tourists are astonished when they play along and look him up on their phones, to discover that Sharlhorne really is “a world famous artist!”

“They sent me to prison and finally I made the best of a bad situation,” the artist declares. “Back then I couldn’t draw like I do today, until my little butt got put away.”

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