Nellie Mae Rowe fantastical works shown
SPRINGFIELD — Born on the Fourth of July in 1900, Nellie Mae Rowe spent the first half of her life working — as a girl on her family’s farm in Fayette County, Georgia, then as a wife, twice widowed, and as a domestic.
But in the late 1950s, after both her husbands were gone and the white couple she cleaned for also passed away, Nellie Mae was free to devote herself to her passion: making art.
“Now I got to get back to my childhood,” said the self-taught, African American artist. “What you call playing in a playhouse.”
Not only did she recreate a girlhood for herself in her colorful drawings, she turned her home in Vinings, Georgia, into a playhouse decorated with foundobject installations, dolls, chewing gum sculptures and hundreds of drawings. An Atlanta-area newspaper called it an “explosion of creativity.”
An exhibit of 60 works by this neglected American folk artist can be seen in “Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe,” on view through July 10 at the Springfield Museum of Art. The touring exhibit, making its first stop in Springfield, was organized by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.
The works are thoughtfully installed in the Springfield museum’s largest gallery, with five chronological sections that follow Rowe from her beginnings as an artist through to her death in 1982. Working primarily with crayon and pencil on paper, Rowe created complicated and often fantastical drawings that made use of every available space on the paper.
A huge chicken is the centerpiece of a drawing inspired by the creatively spelled saying on a napkin Rowe found at her niece’s house: “My House is Clean Enought to be Healty and It Dirty Enought to be Happy.”
“Untitled (Pig on Expressway)” (1980) places a confused-looking pig on colorful swirls representing highways, a humorous but pointed critique of the building of highways and the gentrification of neighborhoods that
disproportionately affected Black communities.
Rowe placed herself in “Untitled
(Nellie in Her Garden)” (1978-1982) along with a Mulberry tree just outside her Playhouse. After her death, the Playhouse was razed, a casualty to the building of the I-285 highway that prompted her to draw the “Pig on Expressway.”
Doll sculptures are part of the exhibit, including “Untitled (Blue and Pink Doll”) made sometime before 1978 of cloth, yarn, fiber stuffing, acrylic wig and buttons.
In 1978, Rowe began to be represented by gallery owner Judith Alexander, who supplied the artist with paper and pigments and orchestrated her first solo exhibit in Atlanta. Works created toward the end of her life, when Rowe suffered and was in pain from multiple myeloma, are even more vibrant. She died in 1982.
Accompanying the exhibit is a sixminute video loop of images that will be part of “This World is Not My Own,” a documentary about Rowe to be released later this year. The exhibit also includes a large color photo of the quirky, artpacked Playhouse and several black and white photographs of Nellie that capture what must have been her formidable, generous personality.
The “radical” part of the exhibit title refers to Rowe’s reclamation of her girlhood and the tenacity of her self-expression — a “radical act of self-liberation,” according to exhibit text.
Jessimi Jones, executive director of the Springfield Museum of Art, said she is thrilled to introduce Nellie Mae Rowe and her work to new audiences.
“This is a time to highlight those artists who are important and worth looking at but have been neglected and about whom not much is known,” Jones said.
In the colorful, detail-rich drawings of Nellie Mae Rowe, viewers will find a wealth of beautifully and imaginatively expressed memories and dreams — enough to guarantee that this is indeed an American artist worth getting to know.
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