Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe

By Katherine Jentleson
Foreword by Rand Suffolk
Text by Katherine Jentleson, Ruchi Mital, and Destinée Filmore
Poem by Vanessa German

During the last fifteen years of her life, Nellie Mae Rowe (1900–1982) created hundreds of drawings and welcomed visitors to her home, located on a busy thoroughfare just outside of Atlanta, that she called her “Playhouse” and decorated with found-object installations, handmade dolls, and chewing-gum sculptures.

 Rowe created her first works as a child in rural Fayetteville, Georgia, but only found the time and space to reclaim her artistic practice in the late 1960s, following the deaths of her second husband and her longtime employer. Reproducing more than two hundred works from the High’s leading collection of Rowe’s work, this catalogue offers an unprecedented view of how Rowe cultivated her drawing prac–tice, starting with colorful and at times simple sketches on found materials and moving toward her most celebrated highly complex compositions on paper of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Featuring contributions that examine Rowe’s art and life from a variety of perspectives, Really Free is published on the occasion of the first major exhibition of Rowe’s work in more than twenty years.

9.75 x 11 inches, 276 pages, Hard-cover

Available from The High Museum of Art, The American Folk Art Museum, and Amazon.