She used whatever materials were at hand. When painting and drawing on paper, Styrofoam, cardboard, and wood, she favored plain and colored pencils, ink and felt tip pens, and gouache. Jewelry, lace, wigs, felt hats, and eyeglasses enhanced her cloth dolls. Sculpting, she gathered found objects, marbles, and glitter and fastened them with chewing gum. In these color-saturated works, there is an exuberant and idiosyncratic self-expression.

Lee Kogan, director of the Folk Art Institute of the Museum of American Folk Art, unites the paintings and sculptures with a look at the artist's surroundings, practices, and culture. This collection of her work also includes a preface by Gerard C. Wertkin, Director of the Museum of American Folk Art, and a contextual essay by Atlanta-born Kinshasa Holman Conwill, director of the Studio Museum of Harlem.

Nellie Mae Rowe lived her entire life on the rural fringes of Atlanta in Fayetteville and Vinings, Georgia. She was one of nine daughters of a former slave who worked as a farmer, a blacksmith, and a basket weaver.

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The Art of Nellie Mae Rowe: Ninety-Nine and a Half Won’t Do

By Lee Kogan (Museum of American Folk Art, 1998)

For Nellie Mae Rowe (1900-1982) the old Southern world of shotgun houses, small churches, flowers, trees, and farm animals shined in her drawings, paintings, and sculpture. A self-taught artist from rural Georgia, she began creating when she was alone after the death of her second husband in 1948. From then until her death, her dreams and memories salved her loneliness with images of a bygone day, and these she made into art.

The Art of Nellie Mae Rowe is the most substantial gathering of her work to date. Here eighty full color and ten black andwhite images display the artist's extraordinary intuitive color sense and the vibrancy and variety of her work.

Nellie Mae Rowe

By J. Richard Gruber and Xenia Zed (The Morris Museum of Art, Augusta GA, 1996)

Nellie Mae Rowe, an American artist of great vision, was born on July 4, 1900. By the time of her death in 1982 her art had received national and international recognition. A gifted self-taught artist, she explored a diverse range of media and demonstrated a unique sense of color, design and composition in her works. This 55-page, soft-cover book was issued in conjunction with a 1996 exhibition of artwork by Nellie Mae Rowe (1900-1982). The exhibition checklist cites more than 60 pieces, and a nice selection of them is pictured here. Includes insightful essays by Zed and Gruber, a chronology, exhibitions history, and bibliography.

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Publications Featuring the Work of Nellie Mae Rowe

Nonconformers: A New History of Self-Taught Artists

By Lisa Slominski
Yale University Press (2022)

A global history of self-taught artists advocating for a nuanced understanding of modern and contemporary art often challenged by the establishment

When the art world has paid attention to makers from outside the cultural establishment, including so-called outsider and self-taught artists, it has generally been within limiting categories. Yet these artists, including many women, people with disabilities, and people of color, have had a transformative influence on the history of modern art. Responding to growing interest in these artists, this book offers a nuanced history of their work and how it has been understood from the early twentieth century to the present day.

Nonconformers includes work by well-known figures such as Henry Darger, Hilma af Klint, and Bill Traylor alongside many other artists who deserve widespread recognition, including Nellie Mae Rowe. After reviewing how self-taught artists factored into key movements of twentieth-century art, the book shifts to highlighting the voices of contemporary practitioners through new interviews with artists William Scott, Mamadou Cissé, and George Widener. An international group of contributors addresses topics such as the development of the Black Folk Art movement in America and l’Art Brut in France, the creative process of self-taught artists working outside of traditional studios, and the themes of figuration, landscape, and abstraction. Global in scope and with chronological breadth, this alternative narrative is an essential introduction to the genre long known as “Outsider Art.”

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Black Folk Art
in America
1930-1980

By Jane Livingston and
John Beardsley

Corcoran Gallery of Art University Press of Mississippi, Jackson (1982)

This volume accompanied the 1982-1983 unprecedented exhibition that opened at The Corcoran Gallery (Washington, DC) and traveled to J.B. Speed Museum (Louisville, KY), The Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY), Craft and Folk Art Museum (Los Angeles, CA), and The Institute for the Arts, Rice Museum (Houston, TX) that explored the achievement of 20th-century Black folk art as seen in paintings, wood carvings, ceramics, and utilitarian objects. The majority of the artists represented began making art as older adults, and almost all of them attribute their motivation to personal revelations. They take their inspiration not only from memory, nature, and everyday events but also from dreams, visions, and religious prophets to renowned politicians, fantastic creatures to farm animals, and faraway lands to hometown scenes. Most of these talented artists were not formally trained, and the works demonstrate a break from traditional and formalized art.

Black Folk Art in America displays a wide variety of art forms. There are colorful drawings and chewing gum sculptures of Nellie Mae Rowe, imaginary landscapes by Joseph Yoakum, painted tin sculptures and whirligigs by David Butler, a miniature navy created by Walter Flax, and narrative Biblical paintings by Sister Gertrude Morgan. The show examines the significance of Black creative ability within the context of folk art.

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In The Eye of the Muses: Selections from the Clark Atlanta University Art Collection

By Tina Dunkley with contributions from
Jerry Cullum,
Richard A. Long,
Freddie Styles, and
Brenda Thompson
Clark Atlanta University Art Galleries (2012)

In the first catalog to chronicle the collection since its inception in 1942, this publication features a rare, up close and personal look at notable pieces of art and the collective story they tell of the 20th century, in regard to theme, subject, medium, and the artists themselves. Originally released in 2012, to commemorate the 70th anniversary of CAU’s historic permanent collection and the 60th anniversary of the unveiling of The Art of the Negro mural series—all attributed to the vision and creativity of artist and teacher Hale Aspacio Woodruff (1900-1980) – In the Eye of the Muses offers an enchanted world for art collectors, artists, and scholars to relish page-by-page.

In 1942, Woodruff began the Exhibition of Paintings, Prints, and Sculptures by Negro Artists of America at Atlanta University. The annual, national juried show continued until 1970. The title essay, “In the Eye of the Muses,” by Tina M. Dunkley, Director of the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, provides an account of the sociopolitical climate and racial politics that produced this 28-year exhibition.

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Souls Grown Deep,
Vol. 1: African American Vernacular Art Of The South: The Tree Gave The Dove A Leaf

By Paul Arnett and William S. Arnett
Tinwood Books (2000)

The first comprehensive overview of an important genre of American art, Souls Grown Deep explores the visual-arts genius of the black South. This first work in a multivolume study introduces 40 African-American self-taught artists, who, without significant formal training, often employ the most unpretentious and unlikely materials. Like blues and jazz artists, they create powerful statements amplifying the call for freedom and vision.

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Black Dolls, the
Deborah Neff Collection

Authors: Deborah Neff,
Robin Bernstein,
Deborah Willis,
Patricia Williams,
Madelyn Shaw,
Hélène Joubert

La maison rouge, Fondation Antoine de Galbert – Fage Editions (2018)

Designed for the most part between 1840 and 1940 approximately by African-American women, these two hundred black dolls, made by hand in various fabrics and materials, are both plural and unique objects. Affective surrogates and intimate archives in a world where black American families were often separated, they also functioned as images of social and political resistance. They stand out today as admirable creations with full artistic value.

On this collection which has hardly ever been the subject of research, this catalog offers new reading hypotheses, crossing cultural studies, the history of American textiles and African arts, the history of photography and that, wider, of American civilization. With this exhibition presented in 2018, La maison rouge closed its cycle of exhibitions dedicated to private collections.

Available from Amazon, Ricco/Maresca Gallery, Antoine de Galbert Fondation