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Nellie Mae Rowe (1900–1982) was an African-American self-taught artist from Fayette, Georgia. Although she is best known today for her colorful works on paper, Rowe worked across mediums. Colorful drawings, collages, altered photographs, hand-sewn dolls, home installations and sculptural environments all make up her collection. With a penchant for integrating found materials with traditional mediums, Rowe’s oeuvre testifies to her creative vision, resourcefulness, and independent spirit. Within her bright imagery and playful constructions lies a serious study of race, gender, domesticity, African-American folklore, and spiritual traditions.

Now recognized as a one of the most important American folk artists. Her work is held in numerous collections, including at the following museums: The American Folk Art Museum, High Museum of Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, Museum of International Folk Art, National Museum of American Art, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and The Studio Museum.

Born on July 4, 1900, Rowe grew up in the farming community of Fayetteville, Georgia. Burdened by financial pressures, she left school after the fourth grade to work in the fields with her father, Sam Williams. Despite this early disruption of formal education, Rowe grew up in a household, that valued creative production. In addition to managing the rented family farm, her father worked as a blacksmith and basket weaver. Her mother, Luelle Swanson, was an expert seamstress and a quilter.^[1] While Rowe displayed an early interest in drawing and fashioning dolls out of left over cloth, it wasn’t until the death of her second husband that her artistic talents came to fruition.^[2]

In 1916, Rowe married Ben Wheat. In marriage, she quickly halted her artistic production. The couple remained in Fayetteville until 1930, when they moved in Vinings, a small rural community northwest of Atlanta. There, they settled down on a farm together. For the newlywed couple, making a living off the farm proved to be a challenge. Rowe began to work as a domestic. In 1936, hardship turned to tragedy: her husband died from cardiovascular renal disease. At thirty-six years of age, Rowe became a widow.^[3]

While recovering from her short-lived married, Rowe met her second husband, Henry ‘Buddy’ Rowe, an older widower and fellow Vinings resident. In 1937, the couple built their home at 2041 Paces Ferry Road. It would be at this site that Rowe finally launched her artistic career. When Henry died nine years later, Rowe, now at the age of forty-eight devoted her full attention to her artmaking.^[4]

Over the span of the next three decades, Rowe developed her multifaceted craft. In the final decade of her life, her work was shown at local and national galleries and museum. In November 1981, she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. On October 18, 1982, after spending her final weeks in the hospital, Rowe died of the cancer. She is buried in the Flat Rock A.M.E. Cemetery in Fayetteville, Georgia.^[5]

Rowe’s living space – her home and yard – served as her first canvas and installation project. Adorned with dozens of objects from dolls and stuffed animals to household bric-a-brac, 2041 Paces Ferry Road emerged as a site of transformation. There, recycled and discarded materials became works of art. Scraps of wood and chewing gum became dolls and sculptures.

Years later, while describing her artistic process, Rowe stated, “I started doing it way ago, right after my husband died. He died in ’48 and then people just started to bring in this, bring in the dolls, and bringing me things. I take nothing, you know, take nothing and make something out of it.”^[6]

Creative production soon enveloped Rowe’s entire house and yard. Outside, dolls hung from trees and colorful furniture was carefully laid out. Inside, the walls were covered with photographs and crayon drawings. Plastic flowers, small knick-knacks, and stuffed dolls adorned her living room.

Notably, Rowe described her elaborately decorated two-room cottage and yard as her “playhouse.” It was a place for creation – for play. Years later, she later “I enjoy playing. I ain’t trying to keep house now, I’m just a-playing house. I just got my playhouse like I’m come back a baby again.” For Rowe, it was here, in the playhouse, where her creative obsessiveness could flourish.^[7]

One visitor, who first saw Rowe’s house in 1979, later recalled, “It was a densely packed hodgepodge environment that would make your mouth fall open. Everyone from architects to the local deliveryman who stop and stare, because it was an astounding creation.”^[8]

Rowe’s house was dismantled and eventually torn down after her death in 1982. A hotel now stands on the site. A plaque commemorates where the alternate world of play and production that once stood there.

Through inventive use of color, space, and form, Rowe realized fantasy-like landscapes in her drawings and paintings. While her early works comprised largely of single images, such as a dog, a fish, a plant, a tree, or a person, Rowe’s later works exhibit a mastery of more complicated compositions. Describing Rowe’s “masterly” multifigured works from 1980 and 1981, Kogan notes that “figures generally interact and merge organically; negative space often invites other forms, and every available space is occupied either by images or decorative patterning or both. The viewer’s eye literally dances around the composition at a lively, rhythmical pace.”^[9]

Uniting Rowe’s singular compositions with her later multilayered works is an unflagging focus on narrative. Through her drawings and paintings, Rowe sought to recreate scenes from her daily life, past memories, and dreams. Paying “equal attention to scenes of everyday life and to fantasy,” she composed “naturalistic scenes” and scenes, which sought to merge “the everyday with the fantastic.”^[10]

This merging of real and fantasy often represented itself in Rowe’s shapes. While human and animal shapes are repeated throughout Rowe’s works, she often created “hybrid figures such as dog/human, a cow/woman, a dog with wings, and a butterfly/bird/woman.”^[11]

Rowe’s original use of space and perspective further reinforce the imaginative and whimsical qualities of her work. Eschewing realistic constraints of scale, her figures often seem to float in space.

Throughout her two-dimensional works, she incorporated common religious imagery, like the cross, or faith-based texts. A member of the African Methodist Church, Rowe was deeply spiritual. Across some of her canvas she wrote, “Beleave in God and He Will Make A Way Far You” or “God Bless My House.” Additionally, some scholars have located her depiction of “haints” or spirits in broader African-American spiritual traditions, which accepted the presence of voodoo spirits.^[12]

Rowe’s sculptures often took the form of dolls or bust-like figures – made out of old stockings or hardened chewing gum. Rowe adorned her dolls, made out of old stockings, with elaborate outfits and yarn wigs and glasses.^[13] For her chewing gum sculptures, she would knead used chewing into small figures, harden them in her freezer and then paint them with colorfully bright details.

Rowe’s altered photographs reflect her facility in using multiple mediums to create sympathetic portraits of close friends and families. By coloring in particular objects or figures or by adding a patterned frame, Rowe repurposed traditional black and white portraits for her own artistic purposes.

While many of Rowe’s neighbors first regarded Rowe’s outlandish creative displays with a suspicion, by the 1970s 2041 Paces Ferry Road became a prominent local attraction. Between May 27, 1973 and March 15, 1975, over eight hundred people had signed her “guest book.”^[14]

Following a shift in American folk art history, art students and collectors in the 1980s not only began to notice living artists and craftsmen around the country, but also began to seek them out. Notably, on November 9, 1974, Herbert Haide Hemphill Jr., the prominent folk art curator and collector, after visiting Mae’s playhouse and noted, “What a wonderful time!”^[15]

During final years of her life, Rowe’s artistic career culminated in nationwide attention and considerable financial success. The Atlanta Historical Society 1976 exhibit, “Missing Pieces: Georgia Folk Art 1770-1976,” marked Rowe’s debut. It was here that Judith Alexander, a young white art enthusiast and collector, first met Nellie Mae Rowe. The encounter had a lasting impact. Alexander represented Rowe and promoted her artwork nationwide for the remainder of her life.

In 1978, after the Nexus Gallery included Rowe’s pieces in “Viscera,” a group exhibition of contemporary and folk art, the Alexander Gallery in Atlanta launched Rowe’s first one-woman show. The next year, the Parsons/Dreyfus Gallery mounted Rowe’s first-ever New York show.^[16]

Notably, in 1982, after being featured in numerous prominent galleries in New Orleans to Chicago, Rowe’s work was included in the landmark 1982 exhibit “Black Folk Art in America, 1930-1980” at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Posthumously, Rowe’s work continues to enjoy remarkable success. Four years after her death, The Studio Museum in Harlem exhibited “Nellie Mae Rowe: An American Folk Artist.” In 1989, the Guerilla Girls, an anonymous group of feminist, female artists, recognized Nellie Mae Rowe along the ranks of the Frida Kahol, Edmonia Lewis, and Georgia O’Keeffe. And finally, in 1999, the American Folk Art Museum mounted “The Art of Nellie Mae Rowe: Ninety-Nine and Half Won’t Do.”^[17]

In 2014, The High Museum of Art in Altanta, showed “Nellie Mae Rowe: At Night Things Come to Me.”

• Nellie Mae Rowe, The American Folk Art Museum
• Lee Kogan and Nellie Mae Rowe, The Art of Nellie Mae Rowe: Ninety Nine and a Half Won’t Do (New York: Museum of American Folk Art, 1998)
• Karen Towers Klacsmann, Nellie Mae Rowe (1900-1982), New Georgia Encyclopedia
• Nellie Mae Rowe in Judith Alexander Foundation
• William Arnett, "Nellie Mae Rowe (1900-1982): Inside the Perimeter" in Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art edited by Paul Arnett and William Arnett (Atlanta, Georgia: Tinwood Books, 2000)
• Joyce Cohen, Nellie Mae Rowe lecture, March 11, 2010 at the High Museum
• Erika Doss, ”Nellie Mae Rowe (1900-1982)” in Coming Home!: Self-taught Artists, the Bible, and the American South edited by Carol Crown (Memphis, Tennessee: Art Museum of the University of Memphis: 2004)

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