Meet the artist who gained fame by painting 100 women in 100 days. That impressive project led to an NEA grant to teach community workshops focused on healing at Huntington’s West Edge Factory.
When it comes to Sassa Wilkes, it’s difficult to put a label on the Marshall University alum. There’s the incredible artist who has scores of followers on social media. Then there’s the spouse and parent, the imaginative gardener, the former co-owner of a bakery, the teacher and the person who’s launching an art studio in Huntington’s West Edge Factory that soon will give back to the community.
“There are many different personalities that inhabit my body,” said Wilkes, who is transgender and uses they/them pronouns. “It’s always felt really difficult for me to stick with just one mode of expression when there is so much to learn and explore.”
Wilkes first gained notoriety in the art world at the end of 2020 after painting 100 portraits of 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 Wilkes a tremendous amount of respect and opened doors to new opportunities.
Born in Huntington and educated in the Cabell County public schools, Wilkes went to Marshall University. Unsure of what direction to take, they switched majors several times before dropping out to have a child, work and gain some life experience. When their son Max was 2 
years old, Wilkes panicked and realized it was time to go back to school and find that direction.
“Eventually, I just couldn’t deny that I really 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.”
Wilkes credits both Jonathan Cox and Dr. Maribea Barnes-Marsano in Marshall’s art department as strong influences. Upon returning to college Wilkes was drawn to sculpture.
“I carved stone and wood, did assemblage and steel,” Wilkes said.
That educational experience resulted in a large steel structure Wilkes created called “Dancing with Max” that now stands in Harris Riverfront Park. After graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2011, Wilkes went straight into a Master of Arts in Teaching (M.A.T.) program at Marshall. In that curriculum, the classes included people studying to teach a variety of subjects, not just art, but it provided the skills necessary to become a teacher. When Barnes-Marsano took an interim position, Wilkes replaced her as a full-time art education professor for one year.
After graduation in 2013, Wilkes and their mother began Sweet and Sassy Bakery in Barboursville. Sadly, it didn’t last long, and Wilkes went to Cabell-Midland to teach art. Working with Advanced Placement art students, they taught sculpture and introduced aspects of art that the kids hadn’t been offered in a while. But three years later Wilkes decided it was time for a change.
“I felt it was time to step away from teaching and get to the core of what I was really good at,” Wilkes explained.
That turned out to be painting. While Wilkes still did some private art tutoring for children and taught art to seniors, most of their free time was devoted to becoming the best painter possible.
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 to offer a series of community workshops with the theme of healing.
“We’re all healing from something, especially in the last year,” 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. We’re not separate, and it would be so much nicer if we could collaborate in every way. Making art with people in the community seems like an awesome way to do that.”
Wilkes said they aren’t afraid to take on political and social issues in their approach to teaching.
“I don’t want to just teach art. I want to teach protest art and show how to argue in a non-polarizing way,” Wilkes explained. “I want to teach self-portraiture in a way that explores insecurities and social imbalances. Ultimately, I want the community to feel really unified, including the art show at the end of our two-year grant.”
It was during the height of the pandemic, when Wilkes missed the feeling of being together, 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, they 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 deciding each morning who that day’s subject would be. Serendipitously, the overwhelmingly positive reaction to the paintings on social media helped conquer their loneliness and often influenced the choice of 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.
A one-person exhibit of the 100 paintings is slated to open at the Huntington Museum of Art in November 2022, and Wilkes is considering including some of those online conversations along with the portraits. Wilkes also hopes to publish a coffee table book of the 100 women in the near future.
“In many ways, those 100 portraits transformed me. I don’t think I was 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 things. 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.
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About the Author: Carter Seaton is a freelance writer living in Huntington, West Virginia.
Photos (from second from top):
Three paintings from Wilkes’ 100 Badass Women project feature, from top: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Frida Kahlo and Maya Angelou.
Marshall alum Sassa Wilkes was commissioned by the university in 2021 to paint a portrait of Dr. Carter G. Woodson, Father of Black History. The image is based on Dr. Woodson’s likeness from a photograph in the Ancella Bickley Collection in the West Virginia State Archives.