Born Ann Graves in the Homewood community of Pittsburgh, Ann became interested in art at an early age. She graduated from South Hills High School in 1952 and went on to study at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and earn a BFA. She married fellow Homewood native, John Tanksley and they moved to Brooklyn, NY. Tanksley began raising her family before returning to study at the Art Students League, the New School for Social Research (Greenwich Village), and also at Bob Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop.

Tanksley was an early member of Where We At: Black Women Artists, Inc., a women’s art collective based in New York. She exhibited at the 1972 show, Cookin' and Smokin', at the Weusi-Nyumba Ya Sanaa Gallery in Harlem.

Ann Tanksley paints ordinary events in an extraordinary manner…Dark outlines surround relatively flat portrayals of three dimensional objects, and the two-dimensional world makes the paintings seem extremely direct.  Tanksley sets the painting - foreground, subject, and background - close to the viewer, almost as if the entire painting were caught somewhere in the foreground, near the point at which the viewer is looking at it. Her methods are reminiscent of the unsophisticated or child artist, the elegant simplicity of which has an immediate impact on the viewer.

Terry Bain, St. James Guide to Black Artists, ed. Thomas Riggs, 1997.

Her work is included in the collections of the Johnson Publishing Company (dispersed), Studio Museum in Harlem, National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Hewitt Collection, among others.