CRITIC’S PICK

Nellie Mae Rowe Levels the Wall Between Insider and Outsider Art .
By Roberta Smith . September 2, 2022

The artist has been a major — if underrecognized — American talent. But the biggest look yet at her achievement gives it a whole new stature.

Nellie Mae Rowe’s drawing “When I Was a Little Girl” (1978) in the exhibition “Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe” at the Brooklyn Museum. Credit: Estate of Nellie Mae Rowe/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via High Museum of Art, Atlanta

If you’ve paid any attention to that roiling mass of talent variously known over the past century as folk, naïve, primitive, Art Brut, self-taught or outsider, chances are you’ve come across the infectious creations of Nellie Mae Rowe (1900-1982). They rivet the eye with bright, dense colors, ingenious patterns and thickets of line and buoyant, sometimes bulbous figures and animals. Arranged in the topsy-turvy manner of a patchwork quilt, these elements fill the page and push forward with an energy that is both modern and primal.

Rowe’s “Untitled (Pig on Expressway),” 1980; crayon and colored pencil on paper. Credit: Estate of Nellie Mae Rowe/Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York; via High Museum of Art, Atlanta

Rowe’s materials were modest — felt-tip and ballpoint pens, pencil sand colored pencils and above all, crayons with which she achieved an unusual magnificence: solid planes of brilliant color that give so many of her drawings the power of paintings.

Perhaps one or two of Rowe’s works on paper have stuck in your memory, like her nearly hallucinatory “Untitled (Pig on Expressway)” (1980), in which a porker with dainty white hooves and big rabbity ears balances along and among swaths and swoops of rainbow stripes that devour the surface like a deranged cloverleaf interchange.

But it’s one thing to know a few Rowe works and another to grasp the full force of her achievement, which is revealed as never before in “Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe” at the Brooklyn Museum, the most extensive survey of her work yet realized. With over 100 of her paintings on paper, several sewn dolls (and one chewing gum sculpture) as well as two amazing reimaginings (not replicas) of her home and yard recently constructed for a hybrid documentary-feature, the show fills the museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Altogether, it propels Rowe’s art into the upper echelons of the self-taught canon with the likes of Martín Ramírez, Bill Traylor and James Castle, where female artists are rare.

“Making Soap” (1981); felt-tip on paper. Rowe’s complex scenes often combine fantasy and autobiography. Credit: Estate of Nellie Mae Rowe/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via The William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation

Rowe was not your customary outsider artist, an isolated genius who often became known for one style or motif reproduced with consummate control. “Really Free” is the operative phrase here. She was gregarious and restless, prone to exploration of both subjects and materials. Her complex scenes often combine fantasy and autobiography. “Making Soap” shows a queenly woman on a thronelike chair, overlooking a bubbling kettle on an open fire. In photographs and images that are more clearly self-portraits she holds her head high, looking regal.

Rowe made beguiling drawings of single figures, as demonstrated by a cluster of eight from before 1978 in the Brooklyn show. Houses, a frequent subject, contribute a geometry unlike anything else, as in the chalets of “Untitled (Nellie and Judith’s Houses)” of 1978-82. And in numerous works words take over, quoting gospel music lyrics, the Bible and so forth. One of my favorites here is “God Said,” the title stated in vibrant blue on orange with a beautiful floral event at far right, in purple and white. Her images develop on the page and frequently mutate, so that, whatever the central image, a work’s four corners are rarely identical.

“Untitled (Nellie and Judith’s Houses),” 1978–82. Houses, a frequent subject of Rowe’s, feature a geometry unlike anything else.
Credit: Estate of Nellie Mae Rowe/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via High Museum of Art, Atlanta

Rowe knew she was an artist from childhood, as indicated by “When I Was a Little Girl.” In it she floats above a childhood scene in which she is being punished by her mother for piecing artworks together with a homemade glue that attracted rats, one of whom observes the scene from the lower center. Mother holds a switch in one hand and with the other gives her daughter some fruit for comfort. Framed artworks adorn the wall and a succession of trees and plants enlivens the scene.

But Rowe’s artistic ambition was obstructed by racism and poverty. She spent much of her childhood laboring on her family’s farm, and much of her adulthood keeping house for various white families in Atlanta. She didn’t give up art entirely. The show includes the lovely “Untitled (Cross and Trees)” from 1947, in yellow and pink, and from the 1950s, “Untitled (Woman and Plaid Background); both indicate that she hadn’t connected with crayon’s ability to make color blast.

Only in the mid-1960s, after the deaths of a white couple she had worked for since 1939, was Rowe able to make art full time, producing an astounding number of works on paper and also turning her small four-room house and its yard into a work of environmental installation art that she called the Playhouse, perhaps in reference to her disrupted childhood artistic ambitions. By 1971, her eccentric residence was attracting photographers and passing traffic; the Atlanta Journal-Constitution followed with an article in 1973.

Nellie Mae Rowe in Vinings, Ga., 1971. Rowe turned her small four-room house and its yard into a work of environmental installation art that she called the Playhouse.
Credit: Melinda Blauvelt; via High Museum of Art

This glorious show originated at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta — whose Rowe holdings are the most substantial in the country — organized by the estimable Katherine Jentleson, the High’s curator of folk and self-taught art, and numbered about 55 works. It will travel to three museums beyond New York, with its checklist adjusted to accommodate the delicate nature of works on paper.

A reimagining of the Playhouse exterior (2019), built by Opendox for its forthcoming documentary-feature, “Nellie Mae Rowe: This World Is Not My Own.”
Credit: Danny Perez/Brooklyn Museum

As the show headed to New York, the Brooklyn Museum curators — Catherine Morris, the Sackler’s senior curator, and Jenée-Daria Strand, its curatorial associate — decided to expand it with additional loans. Ultimately they doubled its size with works from the American Folk Art Museum in the city, the William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation in Mt. Kisco, N.Y., and the Judith Alexander Foundation in Decatur, Ga., which was formed to honor the collector and dealer who gave Rowe her first solo show in her Atlanta gallery in 1978. Around 2000, a few years before her death, Alexander made substantial gifts of Rowe’s work to both the High Museum and the American Folk Art Museum. Rowe’s first solo show in New York took place in 1979 at the Parsons-Dreyfuss Gallery and she traveled to the city for the opening. Her first institutional appearance in the city was in the formative “Black Folk Art in America: 1930-1980,” originated by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington in 1982, and then traveled to the Brooklyn Museum.

“Snake Signature” (1978), felt-tip markers, ballpoint pen, Credit: Estate of Nellie Mae Rowe/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Danny Perez/Brooklyn Museum; via Private Collector.

Looking at Rowe’s efforts summons many analogies, to modernists like Klee and Chagall, to American nonconformists like Roy DeForest, Gladys Nilsson, Bob Thompson and Emma Amos, to cartoons and children’s book illustrations, to the floral decorations painted on European peasant objects (a.k.a. Pennsylvania German in this country). These connections have less to do with influence or precedent than with ideas in the air, inspired by similar things like nature, perhaps, but always moving fluidly across divisions like high and low, trained and self-taught, insider and outsider.

Despite the hardships of her life, Rowe made art that is exuberantly celebratory — of her God, her world and herself. The show opens with five small colorful drawings that feature her name. Four simply depict it — Nellie Mae Rowe, Mrs. Nellie May Rowe — in extravagant, curling and in one instance, snakelike cursive. The fifth, edged in orange and red, invites visitors into the Playhouse, the pages of whose sign-in book — photographed and enlarged — cover a nearby wall.

Rowe’s expansive, self-aware work and career argue against these oppositions, suggesting that they are obsolete. The more we know artists like her the clearer it becomes that most artists, not just outsiders, are in some way “self-taught,” and also that many outsiders aren’t nearly as isolated as is sometimes assumed. Nellie Mae Rowe didn’t resist being celebrated in both Atlanta and New York. She once mused that her work would make her “famous,” and she was right.

Really Free: The Radical Art of
Nellie Mae Rowe

Through Jan. 1, 2023 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, (718) 638-5000; brooklynmuseum.org.

Roberta Smith, the co-chief art critic, regularly reviews museum exhibitions, art fairs and gallery shows in New York, North America and abroad. Her special areas of interest include ceramics textiles, folk and outsider art, design and video art. @robertasmithnyt

A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 3, 2022, Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Walls Come Tumbling Down.

The Work of Nellie Mae Rowe at the Brooklyn Museum . WNYC All Of It Hosted by Alison Stewart . October 18, 2022

A new exhibition at The Brooklyn Museum celebrates the life and work of Nellie Mae Rowe, a Black female artist who created while living in the Jim Crow American South.

Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe, displays Rowe's drawings, sculptures, and paintings, and tells the story of how she made art in a dangerous period for Black people in the South.

Co-curators Catherine Morris and Jenée-Daria Strand are with us to talk about the life of Nellie Mae Rowe, and why her art is important to engage with.

The Really Radical Work
of Nellie Mae Rowe .
Rose Higham-Stainton . APOLLO the International Art Magazine .
November 8, 2022

Playful rather than whimsical, vivid and honest, her work is not shaped by the politics of institutional learning nor indebted to the canon or artistic movements. 

Q&A - Katherine Jentleson, Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art, The High Museum of Art, Atlanta . Antiques and the Arts Weekly . August 23, 2021

Q: You’ve linked her work with an aspect of liberation and self-expression in the post-Civil Rights era, tell me about that.

A: Rowe is somebody who experienced the Twentieth Century. She grew up on a rural farm in Georgia in the segregated South. She lived the trajectory of so many women.

Works by folk artist
Nellie Mae Rowe contemplate faith, feminism, and freedom .
By Kelundra Smith . Atlanta Magazine . September 10, 2021

Every Sunday, Cathi Perry and her sister visited their aunt Nellie Mae Rowe at her “Playhouse” in Vinings.

“Nothing was off-limits at Aunt Nellie’s house,” Perry recalls, describing afternoons spent eating pound cake, drawing pictures with crayons on notebook paper, and making jewelry from scrap materials. Rowe turned her home into a world of her own imagination, adorning floor to ceiling and ground to tree branch with masks, found objects, dolls, chewing-gum sculptures, and hundreds of drawings.

“Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe” an exquisite undertaking . By Xenia Zed . ArtsAtl.org . September 15, 2021

Who is Nellie Mae Rowe? Self-taught, visionary, folk artist. A true Georgia treasure known throughout the world.

A woman with passion and conviction who chose to spread her message through visual channels. An artist who like so many others, in order to survive, had to wait before she could create, only to realize that the lifeblood of survival was through creativity.

Self-Taught Artists Take Center Stage At High Museum Of Art In Atlanta, With Nellie Mae Rowe In Spotlight .By Chadd Scott . Forbes . November 1, 2021

A great art museum simultaneously serves as a global and local institution, bringing global artwork to its local audience and introducing local artists to a global audience.

On the heels of saying “goodbye” to an exhibition featuring two of the most celebrated artists in world history–Pablo Picasso and Alexander Calder–the High Museum of Art in Atlanta now shines its spotlight on a local artist deserving more acclaim: Nellie Mae Rowe.

Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe . By Daniel Fuller . The Brooklyn Rail . June, 2022

And there was Nellie Mae Rowe, a Black woman living in the South, declaring that she was forever an artist. Her work dazzles at every turn, but make no mistake; beneath Rowe’s playfulness there is bravery we seldom see on museum walls.

We need to think about time and place. When Nellie Mae Rowe settled in the village of Vinings, it was a rural community twenty minutes northwest of Atlanta. Desegregation happened in various waves that occurred here between 1961 and 1973. Blockbusting, forced-housing patterns were outlawed, allowing Black citizens to own homes “in town.” Prominent neighborhoods went from white to Black in a blink, as 60,000 white residents (20 percent of the population) turned rural hamlets into affluent suburbs. Rowe’s home and studio sat in the middle of the developing town and became a conspicuous local attraction. Around 400 visitors a year would tour her home, see her art, and sign her guest book.

Real Girl: Nellie Mae Rowe at High Museum, Atlanta . By Yves Jeffcoat . Burnaway . October 21, 2021

Now it is time for me to rest and play.

“All my dolls, chewing gum sculptures, everything will be something to remember Nellie,” Rowe said. “If you will remember me, I will be glad and happy to know that people have something to remember me by when I have gone to rest.” Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe would, with little doubt, make Rowe glad and happy. It demonstrates how Rowe left her mark on the people who visited her home, the people who viewed her art, and the people who witnessed her unfolding into the artist she always wanted to be. She worked, she rested, and she played. What more could you ask of a person?

Review: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe Exhibition . By Eli Anapur . Widewalls . October 28, 2021

High Museum Of Art Elevates Legacy Of Nellie Mae Rowe With Overdue Exhibition
Re-Framing Her Work As ‘Radical’ . Forbes . By
Natasha Gural . May 18, 2021

A pale gray dog stands on its hind legs, with what appears to be blood around its mouth, staring directly at the viewer in wide-eyed surprise. Six smaller dogs and a tiny human figure surround it, along with various potted plants, acorns, and other objects that bend the boundaries . . .

An Exhibition in Atlanta Pays Tribute to the Late Artist Nellie Mae Rowe, a Self-Taught Visionary Whose Imagination ‘Exploded Onto Paper’ .
By Sarah Cascone . Artnet News . October 7, 2021

Rowe reclaimed a sense of self through her compositionally complex, socially aware drawings and exuberant assemblages.

“People here know how brilliant she was,” Katherine Jentleson, the High’s curator of folk and self-taught art, told Artnet News. “I really want to make her name known and her art appreciated outside of Atlanta.”

'Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe' To Debut At High Museum of Art . ArtFixDaily.com . April 27, 2021

After the pandemic brought museum and gallery shows to a dead stop, last year’s racial justice protests lent new urgency to demands that institutions become more transparent, more representative and more diverse.

Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe -Drawing on the High Museum’s singular collection of work by Rowe (1900-82) — which includes chewing-gum sculptures, handmade dolls and a “playhouse” in her yard just outside Atlanta — this show is, according to the organizers, “the first to consider her practice as a radical act of self-expression and liberation in the post-civil-rights-era South.” (Sept. 3-Jan. 9, 2022; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, high.org)

Nellie Mae Rowe, Atlanta Visionary Artist, in High Show . Atlanta Journal-Constitution . By Bo Emerson . May 18, 2021

Self-taught creator from Vinings gets first comprehensive exhibit in two decades

When passersby in sleepy Vinings saw Nellie Mae Rowe’s decorated yard, packed with handmade dolls and chewing gum sculptures and beads and wigs hanging from trees, they didn’t know what to make of it.

Here Are the 14 U.S. Museum Shows That Matter This Fall, From a Survey of 21st-Century Feminisms in Berkeley to a Radical Art Rediscovery in Atlanta Institutions are presenting contemporary and historical works that speak to our current moment. By Caroline Elbaor, ARTNET.com., September 13, 2021

Born in Georgia in 1900, the daughter of a formerly enslaved man, Rowe achieved fame as a self-taught folk artist. The first major exhibition devoted to Rowe in more than 20 years celebrates the late artist’s notable drawing career, which was only fostered later in her life, after the deaths of her husband and employer, in the 1960s. The museum bills the show as the first to position Rowe’s creative pursuit as a “radical act of self-expression and liberation in the post-civil rights-era South.”

These Are the Art Shows and Events to See This Season . By Will Heinrich . New York Times . September 17, 2021

This fall, the High Museum of Art will present "Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe" (Sept. 3, 2021-Jan. 9, 2022), featuring nearly 60 works drawn from the High Museum’s folk and self-taught art collection, which has the largest public holdings of Rowe’s art.