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Nellie Mae RoweA Beautiful Day1978
1978
About the Item
A Beautiful Day, 1978
by Nellie Mae Rowe (American, 1900-1982)
Unframed: 9" x 12"
Framed: 11.25" x 14.25"
Signed and Dated Lower Left
Nellie Mae Rowe is a preeminent figure of twentieth-century American art.
Through the traveling retrospective exhibition Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe, currently at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, her practice has been re-contextualized as a radical act of self-expression and liberation for a Black woman artist living and working in the American South.
The Really Free features more than one hundred works exploring themes of girlhood, play, and spirituality. Autobiographical drawings, experimental sculpture, and renderings of Rowe’s “Playhouse”—an environment the artist built and lived in for decades—capture her assertion of independence and accessible means of art production. During the last fifteen years of her life, Rowe was fueled by a desire to reclaim a creative vision that emerged during her childhood and achieve self-liberation within the complex cultural climate of the post–civil rights era South.
Born in Fayette County, Georgia, at the turn of the twentieth century, Rowe discovered her passion for art-making early on, producing drawings and cloth dolls as a child. However, the demands of her family farm, an early marriage, and decades of employment as a domestic laborer made it difficult for Rowe to create for many decades. After the deaths of her second husband and her longtime employers in the 1960s, Rowe wholeheartedly returned to her art, devoting the rest of her life to realizing her creative calling. Her dedication resulted in a practice that was immersive, idiosyncratic, and joyous.
Born on the 4th of July in 1900, self-taught artist Nellie Mae Rowe was the ninth of ten children of Sam and Luella (Swanson) Williams. The family lived on a rented farm in Fayette County, Georgia, a rural community twenty miles south of Atlanta. Sam, born a slave, used his expertise as a blacksmith and basketweaver to augment the family income. Luella was a talented seamstress and quilter, skills she taught to her daughter. The family worshiped at Flat Rock African Methodist Episcopal Church, the oldest active congregation in the area.
The church housed an elementary school that Nellie Mae attended for several years. She married Ben Wheat in 1916, and the childless couple moved to Vinings, a rural community northwest of Atlanta, fourteen years later. Ben died in 1936, and later that year Nellie Mae married Henry "Buddy" Rowe, a much older widower. In 1939, the couple built their home on the main street of Vinings, where they spent the rest of their lives. In addition to working as a domestic, Nellie Mae spent her time transforming that house, which became a local landmark, into a fanciful environment.
Buddy Rowe died in 1948, and Nellie Mae increased her artistic output. She called her home her "playhouse" and exuberantly embellished it inside and outside with colorful drawings, stuffed dolls, sculptures, Christmas ornaments, plastic flowers, and recycled objects. Her unusually decorated swept yard attracted positive and negative attention. Nellie Mae welcomed curious visitors to tour her home, sign a guestbook, and listen to her sing gospel songs. Among her visitors were artists and collectors who succeeded in bringing her work to a larger audience. Nellie Mae achieved national recognition as an artist in the last decade of her life, which coincided with her most prolific period artistically.
The first exhibition in which Nellie Mae's work was included was Missing Pieces: Georgia Folk Art 1770-1976 at the Atlanta History Center. Atlanta art dealer Judith Alexander befriended Nellie Mae and staged her first solo exhibition in November 1978. The following year, Rowe took her first trip outside of Georgia to view her work at Parsons/Dreyfuss Gallery in New York City. In 1981 she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma and succumbed to it on October 18, 1982. She is buried in the cemetery at Flat Rock African Methodist Episcopal Church.
A devoutly religious woman, Nellie Mae attributed her talent to God, but her subject matter reflects her personal vision and contemporary events and often includes symbolic elements that are Christian, African, and Afro-Caribbean. Her distinctive style illustrates her sense of color and form, which is devoid of adherence to perspective or scale. Nellie Mae preferred to use humble materials—crayons, pencils, cardboard, recycled food containers, used chewing gum, and scraps of fabrics.
She delighted in embellishing her work with trinkets, marbles, plastic flowers, and toys. Her unique view of life, with her insertion of text and tracings of her hands and feet, is the legacy that this self-taught artist left behind. Her work is included in the collections of the Morris Museum of Art, High Museum of Art, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Tubman African-American Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, American Folk Art Museum, and the Library of Congress American Folklife Center.
Karen Towers Klacsmann
Adjunct Assistant Curator/Research
Morris Museum of Art
Augusta, Georgia
- Creator:Nellie Mae Rowe (1900 - 1982, American)
- Creation Year:1978
- Dimensions:Height: 9 in (22.86 cm)Width: 12 in (30.48 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:Missouri, MO
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU747311446372
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