Barbara Nessim, whose solo show at London’s V&A Museum continues through May 19th, could be called an “accidental feminist.” Coming of age as a woman and an artist before the term “glass ceiling” was invented, she made a place for herself in a man’s world, page by page, in her sketchbooks. You could almost say that she drew her way to the top. 

Nessim tells of her student days at Pratt Institute in the 1950s, where her abstract paintings routinely earned her A’s but her true art sprang from her sketchbook drawings, which she made freely, without constraint, never editing her thoughts and ideas. One day, a bundle spilled out of her locker in front of her tutor, the painter Walter Murch, who seized on them. “’They’re nothing!’ she said. ‘They're just things I want to do.' And he said, 'Well what do you think art is?' I started expounding about color and form and pathos and whatever. And he goes, 'You know what? Art is something you do for yourself, just like what you're doing here. I think these are wonderful.' It was a revelation. As I'm saying it now, it gives me the chills."

From then on, Nessim listened to her inner voice, and continued to pour her thoughts and feelings into her sketchbooks—the workout pages that made her agile and consistently on point. On commercial assignments, which include top media like Time, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, and more, she says, "I never feel blocked and I don't know why. If I get a job, I can always do it. As soon as somebody tells me what the job is, I'm already making sketches on the phone. I have to be working all the time, because I need to know what I'm thinking, and I won't if I don't see it."

Given access to a mainframe computer by Time Video Information Services, which created an artist-in-residence position for her in 1984, Nessim became the first artist to create digital art. The system offered her just six shapes, six colors and six shades of gray plus the ability to create her sinuous line work. Taking these seeming limited features, she made a series on the Statue of Liberty (center, above) that are as evocative as any of her hand-drawn imagery. When the V&A began collecting digital art, she was among the first to be selected for an exhibition there, Digital Pioneers, in 2009.

Barbara Nessim: An Artful Life continues at the Victoria and Albert Museum through May 19^th. In conjunction with the exhibition, a new book of the same title has been released by Abrams. A video recorded in Barbara Nessim’s New York City studio can be seen on the V&A Channel.