Meet the artist who painting 100 portraits in 100 days at the height of the pandemic. Today he is working to expand cultural understanding of gender in Appalachia.
By Carter Seaton
Photos by Rick Lee
HQ 121 | Spring 2023
When it comes to Sassa Wilkes, it’s difficult to put a label on the Huntington native.
There’s the incredible artist who has scores of followers on social media. Then there’s the spouse and parent, the imaginative gardener, the teacher and the person who helped launch an art studio in Huntington’s West Edge Factory with a focus on giving back to the community.
“I’ve always had a hard time focusing on just one mode of expression,” said Wilkes. “There is so much out there to learn and explore.”
Wilkes gained notoriety at the end of 2020 after painting 100 portraits of influential women in 100 days. Titled “100 Badass Women,” the colorful portraits of world and local leaders were posted online each day and received rave reviews. A truly ambitious and grueling project, it garnered him a tremendous amount of respect.
Born in Huntington and educated in the Cabell County public schools, Wilkes went to Marshall University. Unsure of what direction to take, he switched majors several times before taking time off to have a child, work and gain some life experience. When his son Max was a toddler, Wilkes realized it was time to go back to school and find that direction.
“Eventually, I couldn’t deny that I had such a strong pull to art,” Wilkes said. “And after I realized I would tell my son to do what he loved if faced with the same situation, the decision became easy for me.”
Upon returning to college, Wilkes was drawn to sculpture.
“I carved stone and wood, did assemblage and steel,” he said.
That educational experience resulted in a large steel sculpture Wilkes created called “Dancing with Max” that now stands in Harris Riverfront Park.
Wilkes graduated from Marshall University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2011 and a Master of Arts in Teaching in 2013. He spent some time teaching at Marshall after graduation, as well as three years teaching art at Cabell Midland High School. While teaching, Wilkes fostered a love for oil painting and spent nights, weekends and summers honing his skills. In 2017, he left teaching to become a full-time artist. This year, Wilkes was given a Distinguished Alumni Award at Marshall University.
Today, Wilkes can be found at the West Edge Factory in a spacious art studio inside the turret of the building that once housed the Corbin Ltd. clothing factory. Thanks to an NEA grant given to Coalfield Development, Wilkes has been awarded a two-year residency with the theme of healing. His work at West Edge has included numerous community workshops and a permanent indoor mural co-created by community members, as well as a huge outdoor mural slated for completion in July of this year. Independently, Wilkes is in the process of creating an art co-op with members of Huntington’s LGBTQ community.
“We’re all healing from something, especially in the last couple years,” Wilkes said. “We were suffering, we were mourning and we were sick. If there’s one thing we all need to heal from, it’s being separate. Making art with people in the community seems like an awesome way to do that.”
It was the height of the pandemic, when Wilkes most missed that feeling of togetherness, that inspired the “100 Badass Women” series of oil portraits. On the day Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, Wilkes felt compelled to paint her portrait. Realizing there were 100 days left in 2020, he decided to paint one woman’s portrait each day until the end of the year. The paintings ranged from local “shero” Jan Rader to a wide variety of entertainers, political figures and historical game-changers. For each, Wilkes began by researching their stories and decided each morning whom that day’s subject would be. Serendipitously, the overwhelmingly positive reaction to the paintings on social media helped conquer his loneliness and often influenced his choices for future subjects.
“It was my way of reaching out to people. The social media interaction and community collaboration were the most meaningful parts of the whole project,” Wilkes said.
On Nov. 5, 2022, an exhibit of all 100 paintings opened at the Huntington Museum of Art. Local art lovers were able to view his prolific project for a 12-week run before the exhibit ended. The show’s opening reception drew a record-breaking crowd to the museum, where Wilkes spoke openly about how community support for the project helped him come out as transgender. He recently told this story as a speaker for Marshall University’s TEDx event in a talk titled “How Art Helped Me Communicate, Connect, and Come Out.”
“In many ways, this project transformed me. I wasn’t totally comfortable showing up in the world because I wasn’t being real,” Wilkes said. “That’s part of why I wanted to come out as trans and be honest about who I am. That felt like a necessary step. What’s the point of being seen if you’re not really being seen? I want to be 100% authentic all the time, no matter where I am. I think it’s going be a good thing.”
Now we truly see all the parts that make up that one person known as Sassa Wilkes. And what we see is inspiring.
