The first of twelve children, Bernice Sims (b. 1926) was born in Hickory Hill, Alabama. She was married at age sixteen and had six children. At age sixty-two she went back to high school, and it was as a result of field trips to museums that she developed an interest in painting. In a child-like style, she paints scenes of life in her home town of Brewster, Alabama. All of the details of the life she knows can be found in her vivid "memory paintings", and occasionally she recreates powerful scenes of the civil rights struggle (which she was a witness to). "I paint the civil rights pictures to keep it alive. These are things people should know about. I tell the story when i paint." Bernice Sim's life and work have been discussed in depth in OUtsider Art of The South and Revelations: Alabama's Visionary Folk Artists. Her work is in the permanent collection of the New Orleans Museum of Art and was included in the traveling exhibition Passionate Visions of the American South.

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