“A stroll with my mother, Hermi, across the Chattahoochee River in the spring of 1971 brought us to the small, sleepy village of Vinings, all decked out in fragrant, delicate wisteria and bouncing dogwood blossoms. We encountered three girls, eager to be photographed and to tell us that there was one person we should meet — Miss Nellie. ‘She's kinda crazy,’ they said, ‘and she's real nice and friendly. You'll see her house; it's the one with all the things hanging from the trees.’ They scampered off to wherever they were headed, with smiling glances over their shoulders reminding me to bring them the photo I took.

Down the road a bit was the only place the girls could have meant — a small cabin surrounded by little things so colorful that from a distance, it looked like an irrepressible garden in bloom. I knocked on the door and was greeted warmly by the deep, gravelly voice and generous spirit of Nellie Mae Rowe. She welcomed us inside, where the sense of ebullience from outside continued without pause, and where she was busy arranging some newly acquired plastic roses and papier maché canaries and peppers, ‘placing them (as she always said) precisely where she knew they should be. She invited me to look around, take all the pictures I pleased, and said it was fine for me to record her as she spoke, occasionally interrupting herself with the singing of a hymn…”

– Judith Alexander Augustine

Director, The Judith Alexander Foundation

Judith Alexander Augustine wrote the above some 50-odd years ago, when she was a student working on a photojournalism assignment.

While rightly crediting Nellie Mae Rowe as an artist, the defining characteristics of this designation in the twenty-first century still have yet to be unpacked satisfactorily. Rowe has served as inspiration for all kinds of reminiscences, recountings, research, reviews, studies, films, expository writings and projections in all kinds of media both national and international — and yet there’s still more to be considered for enlightening revelations and reality checks. Complicated by new sets of nomenclatures that overtly segment creativity and give agency to branding. Artists compartmentalized as makers, creatives, content creators, influencers, designated designers of, etc. create at best a fake algorithmic scaling or “normalization” of real creativity and imagination and creativity. More labels. More BRANDS.

The nice counterintuitive thing we are learning about visual art after the boundaries of categories are erased (for example, “Folk Art”), is how the similarities found in the investigation of “meaningness” — something every authentic artist thinks about — come to the surface in ways obscured by those labeling boundaries. It contradicts. This is especially true when it comes to the economic realities of class driving recognition in the monetization of “art worlds.”

In today’s world are found not only artists, designers, illustrators, makers and creators but also influencers, pop-ups and art fairs, all thrown into the usual mix of museums, galleries, foundations and nonprofit collectives — not to mention curators, patrons and collectors. Social media? It used to be “It takes a village.” This ain’t a village anymore, it's a megalopolis. The glut found in the online nooks and crannies of the internet, social media, digital media and AI all make one wonder about the effects of homogenization on originality. Is it representative of authentic creativity and imagination? Or does this just continue to morph into the building of The Globalized Brand that ebbs and flows and gets discarded like fast-fashion designs growing into a new mountain of rotting, discarded clothes in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Nothing against “nerds” or “geeks”... but is that all there is? Especially when it comes to the development and building of “machine learning”?

Is visual art having a transitional identity crisis in the culture wars? Is the homogeneity of AI factoring imagination down to its lowest common denominator? The ubiquitous nondescript land of gray? Alongside the fourth wall introduced through film, cinema and theater there is now a fifth, the digital curtain. Curious how here in the US the attempted erasure of intersectionality simply affirms its existence. How does this affect empathy? Creativity? Our Humanity? Where are we? What are we? Jicama stew, melting pot, or none of the above?

This is not anything new, but looking through a different lens can reframe essential understandings. Enter Nellie Mae Rowe. Is it possible, without being redundant, to write about a visual artist whose familiarity in the various art worlds is legendary? There has been an ever-present idyllic mythology around reminiscences of Rowe’s art due to the compartmentalization of genres and outdated contexts that inhibit new approaches of understanding.

There are contingencies of fans both black and white who are adamant about the essentiality of Nellie Mae Rowe’s roots and her Blackness – but there are also those who insist that this art must go beyond, be transcendent. Transformative. Her art is her art as she said. “It is what it is.”

Rowe was an artist with a message. And artists who think of their work in this cross border of mainstream logistics can learn a lot from her. Especially in these convulsive times. Prolific, original, imaginative, authentic. “Making something out of nothing,” as she would say. Making Something. When you make something out of nothing, there’s a message. It’s not nothing anymore.

Because of the ways of the world, her attitude, and that agency, we may never have another Nellie Mae Rowe… but we may well need one. It is important to realize that this enigmatic placeholder in time retains its essential maneuverability. Not be mothballed, characterized as kitsch, material culture or anthropological artifact. There are countless reminiscences of Nellie Mae Rowe’s complex life and art, all beautiful and true, but her desire and ability to address a conveyance of future generational identities, reciprocity and recognition of humanity deep in her work still remains inscrutable.

BACKSTORY

Nellie Mae was a woman of the South with a complex hardscrabble heritage. It must be said that her father was born into slavery, making Nellie one generation removed. She was a little girl who, with eight other sisters, helped to work the family farm and those of their neighbors alongside their mother and father. Her parents kept an orderly and religious home supplanted by the necessary work of hard labor, yet they found time for the cultural remnants of existence: the intricate production of basketmaking and ironwork of Nellie’s father, Sam Williams and the expert seamstress, producer of quilts, jellies and jams, medicinal elixirs and tinctures all made by Nellie’s mother, Louella. Both parents, highly respected in their community, more than tolerated an obsession that their next-to-youngest daughter had with the making of things, creating things — drawings and dolls, dolls and and drawings. Depending on when she was born in Fayette County Georgia (records vary around November 1896, 1899 or July 4,1900, the date she chose), she married a young man named Ben Wheat at age 16. They stayed in this county south of Atlanta until they moved to the big city in 1930, when Nellie was around 30 and Ben was 36. Cotton crops had been decimated by the boll weevil, in part instigating the Great Migration. The Great Depression was in full swing. Work in rural areas was impossible to come by, causing many to leave and look for work in Atlanta or to leave the state of Georgia altogether. A new start in Atlanta provided hope, and even today such a movement is a phenomenon creating inevitable trends and fads that mature into psychological social shifts. Micro movements that evolve into a larger social phenomenon through acculturation. A touchstone and mainstay of imagery in Nellie Mae Rowe’s later work.

Six years after they moved to Atlanta, Ben Wheat died. Nellie Mae moved in with her confidante, mentor, and nephew, Joe Brown. This was an influential time, during which both became Saved and religion became a cornerstone, prefiguring every aspect of their lives thereafter. A year later, she married her second husband, Henry Rowe, and together they built a small house on Paces Ferry Road. When Henry died in 1948, Nellie Mae Rowe continued to work, now in the home of a white couple that lived near her in Vinings. Later on, she described her love of arranging and placing things in their home. She said she could tell that the woman she worked for, Vera Smith, liked the arrangements and rearrangements Nellie made in her home because Mrs. Smith left them just as Nellie had placed them. When Vera, and then her husband Robert, died in the 1960s, Nellie made a major life change.

NELLIE’S PLAYHOUSE

Nellie’s Playhouse was the masterwork of Nellie Mae Rowe and literally grew out of the house that she and Henry Rowe built. When Henry died in 1948, Nellie by her words and actions signified a change best described metaphorically by this writer as, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” (The film Network,1976; stream it.) After 32 years of burdensome labor — not counting the work she did as a child to help out on the farm with her siblings, then dealing with the death of both her husbands — Rowe declared that she was done with married life, domesticity, husbands and all the rest of it. She was going to do what she wanted to do, and that was Make Art. She always wanted to be an artist, and said so in the cinema verité documentary Nellie’s Playhouse, produced and directed by Linda Connelly Armstrong in 1976. (You can find it on Youtube) The film begins with Nellie playing gospel songs on her electric organ, singing hymns including Call Him Up and Tell Him What You Want and Hush, Hush, Somebody Callin’ My Name; singing along with with gospel records on a record player; talking about how she likes the really old hymns because she’s old… 76 years old. She says she walks with a stick and adds, “I want somebody old like me to play in my playhouse”; and talks about the difference between talking to God directly vs. going through the church (African Methodist Episcopal).

She moves on to sweep her yard and dust off objects she’s arranged there. She cuts off pink single-petal roses from a bush, piles them on a plate and redistributes them elsewhere. In this film she says she knew all along she was an artist — and that while she’d been making things all her life, she never had the chance that young artists of today have to pursue their dreams.

Beginning in 1948, when she announced she was leaving a traditional life behind, she proceeded to fill her house to the brim with constructions and compositions of the stuff of life. Her life. Cutouts, drawings, found belongings and gifts, recycled, repurposed, a twentieth century graphic novel on interior walls curiously surrounded by populations of dolls. Commercially manufactured dolls lounging with the magnificent representations made by the artist. Dolls suspended from the walls and congregating on sofas and chairs. A mixtape.

Nellie said the dolls she made were often created in the likenesses of people she knew, but wouldn’t say who because they might not think they looked like that; she didn’t want to hurt their feelings.

Down the driveway and between the hedges, an entry to Nellie’s Playhouse formed a proscenium of sorts honed through decades and decades of lived experience between what was and what was not real. In the early days, the Playhouse was made available to Nellie’s nieces and nephews drawn into this state of play, an imaginative stimulus to discover creativity in a place, that to them verged on magical realism. A scaled down, homemade version of a land-art installation, an artist-built environment.

Nellie understood the significance of play in a singular and intergenerational way. She was way ahead of her time. The space encompassing her house and surrounds was confined and defined, attentive to borders — with Rowe, as she often said, constantly thinking about placement. Where to place things, arrange things. Where she wanted objects to go. The way she wanted them ordered. Composed. The Playhouse space. Carefully curated. Tended-to over decades. Exposed. Less private, more accessible. Personified with creatures and dolls, both handmade and found, perched on fences, in trees and on the ground.

There’s a clip in Armstrong’s film, a closeup of Rowe pulling and manipulating, working an awesomely malleable batch of what looks like taffy as she describes her discovery of using chewing gum as an artistic medium for sculpture; her technique for the production of one Chewing Gum Sculpture.

This encapsulated influx added to, took away from, arranged, placed, designated, spilling from inside and beckoning outside. House metamorphosed into Playhouse arena. Unnerving constructivist watch-doll constructions. Round about chewing gum sculptural sentries. This, along with Rowe’s incomparable drawings of it all, is a gestalt of unsurpassed beingness and beatitude through art.

Later, her attention was drawn to passersby curious and willing to see what she visually had to say. More than 800 visitors, some arriving by busload, were recorded in guest books that Rowe kept. In retrospect, was this for the express purpose of documentation? Was she aware of the attention? The Playhouse morphed into a shared message, a transactional continuance of time and culture. For Nellie, interaction always was a state of play, a device steeped in love, faith and perseverance. (The diligent hand will rule, but laziness will lead to forced labor. Proverbs 12:24) A touchstone experience for those passersby daring to stop by, contemplate and wonder. Most of them friendly, though some not. Nellie Mae Rowe recounted these experiences in both the positive space and the negative. Her humor was a salve.

She worked across race. She did not discriminate. She welcomed her visitors and shared her visions: “You all come and see me anytime, be glad for you to come by and see me.”

Another extraordinary feature-length film was directed and produced by Opendox films. Described by its makers as a hybrid documentary, This World is Not my Own was released in 2022 and is available on the PBS program AfroPop in April 2025, and may be streamed thereafter. The film takes a retrospective look at Nellie Mae Rowe’s life both after her death and the death of her patron, advocate, friend, and dealer: Judith Alexander. Although the documentary examines their relationship amidst the irony of Atlanta’s extraordinary racial, civil rights history, the film treatment has a real time feel; one segment shows school children in an art class halfway around the world in Kuwait as they learn about Nellie Mae Rowe and her creativity. Emmy winner Uzo Aduba voices the animated Nellie and supplies her movement, and Amy Warren does the same for Judith Alexander. A scaled hand-built replica of Nellie’s Playhouse was created expressly for the film and gives a sense of how it was. (It is now in the permanent collection of Atlanta’s High Museum of Art.)

The title, This World Is Not My Own is a quote from one of Nellie’s many made-by-hand aphorisms: “What It Is”; “God Is Not Dead”; “Real Girl”; “This World Is Upside Down” and a personal favorite in her inimitable script: “This kitchen is closed because of illness. I am sick of cooking.” The filmmaking literally enlivens, extends and animates her original work and philosophies with creative devices she would have been fascinated by but were unavailable at the time.

Enter technology and exquisite cinematography. When directors Petter Ringbom and Marquise Stillwell decided to annotate Rowe’s astounding two-dimensional work through cutout animations of some of her elements and decorative devices, they created a metaphorical extension cord and plugged it into an impatient twenty-first century juggernaut. A stunning creative and poetic license justified in its contemporary currency without jeopardizing and, some would argue, even extending her intentionality.

Nellie’s Playhouse. It no longer exists. Attempts to preserve it did not prevail. The house and grounds were razed the year after she died in 1982. Today, a boutique hotel occupies the original grounds of Nellie Mae Rowe’s masterwork. A historical marker documents her life and art on Paces Ferry Road in Vinings, Georgia.

NELLIE MAE ROWE, ARTIST / JUDITH ALEXANDER, DEALER

Judith Alexander was a great patron of the arts and was the first in Atlanta to exhibit abstract art. She also championed and exhibited work by contemporary abstract artists there. For four years she studied “up North” at the The Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, the Barnes Foundation, with Hans Hoffman in Provincetown, Mass. and finally the Art Students League in New York City. She returned to Atlanta with the desire to further engage artists she met there with the tenets and ideologies of Abstract Expressionism. Since there was no gallery of abstract art in Atlanta at the time (1957), Judith opened one. The New Arts Gallery was the only gallery in the South that brought the most influential artists of the day to exhibit, interact and participate in gallery talks. Franz Kline, Ad Reinhardt, Hans Hoffman, Ellsworth Kelly, Jim Dine. Judith Alexander was beloved by artists in the Atlanta arts community and was an advocate for Southern contemporary visual artists. She was a force to be reckoned with until the day she died, in 2004.

Judith first saw drawings by Rowe in the bicentennial exhibition Missing Pieces: Georgia Folk Art, 1770 – 1976. In 1978, she saw Nellie Mae Rowe dolls in an exhibition at Nexus Contemporary Art Center, sought out the artist for representation in the new Alexander Gallery on East Paces Ferry Road, and consequently gave Rowe her first one-person show that same year.

The relationship between Nellie Mae Rowe and Judith Alexander was very connected — exceedingly ironic, as Judith came from a wealthy, well known, established Southern Jewish family; Nellie, from a tight-knit AME, South Georgia rural farm culture — as aforementioned, one generation removed from slavery and manumission. Between Nellie and Judith there was a “I know that you know that I know” kind of a thing. Both women had their own power: Judith Alexander was a trustworthy mover and shaker in the arts and that probably mattered; and Nellie Mae Rowe was Nellie Mae Rowe. While there definitely was an interdependency, both women incredibly independent, both recognizing in their own unique way that there were far more similarities between them than differences. Judith: “I thought Nellie understood things that I had to learn. That I had to go to school and find out…” Perhaps Judith recognized in Nellie Mae Rowe and her art, the tenets and attributes she was aware of in Abstract Expressionism, a fascination she explored through her own studies as an artist. Ultimately, this leads to a confluence of elements inclusive yet crossing boundaries still being unpacked to this day.

As she began representing Nellie Mae Rowe, Alexander worked to build the requisite classic artist’s resume of that time, with group and one-person shows of her work consistently through 1982 (the year that Rowe died) and beyond. In 1979, Alexander worked with Betty Parsons to have a solo show of Nellie Mae Rowe’s art in the New York gallery of Betty Parsons — the Betty Parsons who represented the likes of Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Clifford Still. She was part of a nascent artworld that instigated the beginnings of NYC as the world’s center of art. There is, in the 2000s, this rapid ongoing seismic shift from the artist-centered world that Betty Parsons and Peggy Guggenheim focused on to an incursion of globalization, monetization and economies gone awry — a detached simulacrum of art markets, global galleries and international art fairs gaming to see who is going to make the most money from their brand. Today, one can even take educational online classes to learn how to become a self-taught artist!

“Nellie’s yard was so famous. Her drawings relate to this first masterpiece of hers, her environment. Who knows, Nellie Mae Rowe may be considered high art one day.”

— Judith Alexander interview clip, Breakaway Films, Inc. segment.

While in today’s parlance Judith Alexander would be recognized as a gallerist, it was Nellie Mae Rowe who delightedly referred to her to as “My Dealer”... and it is because of Judith’s relationship to Rowe as (if you prefer) her gallerist that we have the remarkable extant body of the best known work: her works on paper created in the last years in her life. If she so desired, a wider choice and better quality of the materials she’d been using — every artists’ dream: good paper, crayons, oil crayons, pens, colored pencils, paint and markers were made available. She desired it all, as if any artist in their right mind would reject any kind of material they would be interested in working with, finding out about. That is the nature of art.

Rowe was 78 when she began to believe what her dealer thought — that the very people curious about Nellie’s Playhouse and way beyond it would be equally fascinated by her drawings. The drawings began by reiterating familiar assemblages first encountered on the walls of the literal-house-within-the-Playhouse, objects and images rendered in explosions of compositional complexities. Her work far exceeds the ubiquitous “quilt” metaphor. The drawings are transliterations, predellas of the Playhouse with color blocks of lives lived, juxtaposed with layers of intricacy and symbolic loads of asymmetrical patterning. A visual mapping. Scaled details. A visual diagrammatics telling about the ebb and flow of existence, hers… and by the brilliant beauty and resolution of her compositions, ours. Through the shock of color, her art celebrates the potential of humanity rather than its societal dregs. Untitled (Nellie Mae and Judith’s Houses) is demonstrative of all of the above: A domineering construct in the foreground of heavyset set diagonals can be read as an A frame, abstracted letters, symbols, chevrons or zig zags. A large central vertical blue post in the center of the picture conjoins the six equally heavy diagonals all supported by two thick short verticals on either side of the picture plane forming a foundation for a house, Nellie and Judith’s house/design/geometry/symbol. This framework is juxtaposed over a detailed interiorized amalgamation of geometric shapes — squares, rectangles and triangles lined, outlined and cross-hatched in tints and shades of repetitive, patterned colors: reds, blues, purples, greens and black. Windows. The heavy blue vertical post in the center grows into a forest green stalk of a plant/tree/tropical flower; continuing to blossom and grow, it moves to the left of the picture plane transformed into a green camouflaged changeling, looking at a white face coming out of the chimney. “Haints, varmints?” This creature’s tail flows to the right back through the centered plant growing vine-like around the edge of the page, forming a decorative frame or perimeter on the opposite half of the composition. That’s just the beginning. The overall composition infers a mirrored Janus faced–like reflection, but one that isn’t identical. Fraternal twins. Not identical. There are so many places the viewer can go through this work of art. The significance of twinning in African culture both good, bad and ugly: Africa. African Diaspora. The delicate tracery of dots and lines of the vine unwind and remind. The calligraphic potential for a flowery Haitian veve? Nellie Mae Rowe’s art, like all great art, motivates and enlivens the imagination of the viewer.

Throughout her life, Rowe pursued and sustained provocative insights with persistent intensities feeding her creative drive. These characteristic traits are often found among visual artists — traits shared by true visual artists, many of whom create works that evolve or devolve depending on what the viewer brings. Critical autonomy. Nellie refused to talk about meaning. Is the give-and-take reflection of self-determination what gives it agency? To this day, Rowe’s work provides layers of cultural awareness and catharsis as only art can.

While communities like hers were impoverished and punished by hideous overt and vicious racism, including not so overt corrupt, sneaky, manipulative, societal tal machinations, Nellie Mae Rowe’s art and culture survives alongside some, if not the, greatest visual art, poetry, literature, criticism, and music of our time:

… Does my sassiness upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom?

Cause I walk Like I’ve got oil wells

pumping in my living room.

– Maya Angelou, Still I Rise

Racism, Disenfranchisement, Representation, Identity, Sexuality — it's all there in Nellie’s work but often in cheat codes. Rhythm. Beats. Her work in living color infused humor, optimism, hope. Black Joy. A “Black is Beautiful,” “Summer of Soul (Or When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised”) era that thrives through art. A Social Emotional Learning Module before it turned into pedagogy. Ah. Ultra-uber chewing gum sculptures, the stuff of dissertations….

During the early ‘80s a huge, newly recognized differentiation between “Black Folk Artists” and “White Folk Artists” birthed the so-called Black Folk Art Movement. In 1982, Black Folk Art in America 1930 – 1980, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., became the seminal exhibition that penetrated mainstream artworlds of the time, opening the door to a much larger community realizing for the first time that not only was Black Folk Art different from White Folk Art, it was revelatory, awe-inspiring, jolting. From the February 14, 1982 review by chief art critic for the New York Times, John Russell:

“It was the role of Black folk art to make the unbearable bearable. When all else failed, and society had given the thumbs-down signal once and for all, art was the restorative that made it possible to go on living… as in every other exhibition of folk art, there are pieces that seduce us by the way they cut the fat off traditional art. Folk art, thus seen, is untaught art, and it is also uncorrupted art. No one ever told these people what to do. Nor has their work been staled by exposure. None of them thought about money….”

The 1982 exhibition created a somewhat contentious frenzy of activity that collectors, artists, art historians, social science people and academicians seized upon. Nellie Mae Rowe was unable to attend the opening in Washington D.C. due to her illness, and she died on October 18 of the same year. Multiple Myeloma. A photograph of her Playhouse environment spreads grace across the Cocoran’s doubled title page of the now collectible catalogue.

Another incident during that year was when Nellie was invited by Nancy Reagan to design the White House Christmas card. She refused, noting that the card would not be seen by people she cared about: “No poor folk, no Black folk” would see it. A sociocultural controversy arose when the question of whether it was ethical to provide these newfound Black folk artists with better quality materials they had no awareness of, could not afford, or did or did not choose to use. Ah. The issues in ethnography and anthropology. In many instances, because materials were made available if the artist so desired, we have some of the most remarkable art from any period, making the relevancy of that question moot. Not to mention, artists often work with assistants (think Koons, KAWS, Kiefer; are there any artists who at scale don’t use help and assistance?). The mysteries of art history. As Peter, Paul and Mary sang, “When will they ever learn”?

Rowe was included in several major exhibitions after Black Folk Art in America. A posthumous one-person exhibition at New York’s Museum of American Folk Art in 1998, The Art of Nellie Mae Rowe: Ninety-Nine and a Half Won’t Do, was organized, along with Judith Alexander, by curator Lee Kogan. It was a blockbuster at the time, followed by museum shows at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the Ogden Museum in New Orleans, and several others.

The most recent one-person exhibition of Rowe’s work, Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe, opened at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta on September 3, 2021 and was curated by Katherine Jentlesen, senior curator of American Art plus Folk and Self-Taught Art. A book of the same title accompanied the national tour of the exhibition, and to date is one of the best-researched, comprehensive and sensitive considerations of Rowe’s work, with essays by Jentlesen, Ruchi Mital, Destinee Filmore and an awakening poem by Vanessa German:

...But / You see / That tight / Mean seed / Never took up root in you / Nellie Mae Rowe / ’Cause there in your leg muscles / Even in the arches of your feet / In the church curls at the / top of your hair / The magic held its own name / in perpetual coronation / In the shape of / The line / And the page / And the powers of infinite / possibility named there…

Currently, Really Free is ending its national tour — with sponsorship from the Art Bridges Foundation, founded by Alice Walton — at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles (February 17 – August 17, 2025).

Really Free:The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe made an exhibition stop at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (September 2, 2022 – January 1, 2023). Here, art from the William Louis-Dreyfus collection of Nellie Mae Rowe works on paper, works from the American Folk Art Museum and the Judith Alexander Foundation were combined. Wrote New York Times art critic Roberta Smith, September 2, 2022:

It’s one thing to know a few of Rowe’s works and another to grasp the full force of her achievement... it propels Rowe’s art into the upper echelons of the self-taught canon with the likes of Martin Ramirez, Bill Traylor and James Castle where female artists are rare. Rowe’s materials were modest… but achieved an unusual magnificence: solid planes of brilliant color that gives so many of her drawings the power of paintings... Moving fluidly across divisions like high and low, trained and self-taught, insider and outsider, Rowe’s expansive and self-aware work argues 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.”

In The Guardian, Betsy Reed’s May 20, 2024 review of the documentary, This World Is Not My Own said much the same:

For the past few decades Nellie Mae was tied to the genre of folk, self-taught, outsider, vernacular, idiosyncratic, a concept that is slowly, appropriately being dissolved. ​​Rowe’s infectious, unstoppable drive to create shows up her categorisation as “folk artist” as a kind of condescension; she’s clearly an artist, period.

In 2018, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened History Refused to Die: Highlights From the Soul’s Grown Deep Foundation Gift, an exhibition of art curated from 57 works donated to the museum. Out of the 29 works in the exhibition, three were drawings by Nellie Mae Rowe. Randall Griffey, one of the curators who organized the exhibition and is now head curator at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, wrote, “The placement of these works [in the same building that holds] works by some of the best-known modern artists sends a strong message that these self-taught artists’ works are not apart, spatially or conceptually, from other works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection.” In 2022 Griffey, described as one of the most dynamic curators and influential scholars in the field, was tasked with a reenvisioning of the Smithsonian American Art Museum galleries in ways that are more inclusive. It appears History Refused to Die paid off.

Nellie Mae Rowe’s work was and curiously is of the moment. Artists have been inspired and have extended her vision. The speed at which information moves these days tends to wreak havoc on opinions and points of view, leaving confusion and uncertainty in its wake. So much has been written about Nellie Mae Rowe that one wonders, why keep on making the effort to explain? Yet, her signature in the annals of contemporary art remain indelible despite the ebb and flow, the impositions and more benign considerations of Race. Disenfranchisement. Sexuality. Representation. Reciprocity. Identity. And then there are the weaponized culture wars.

In the recountings of meaning through the telling of Rowe’s biography and work, volumes of intriguing questions, connections and revelations will continue. Nellie Mae Rowe remains a touchstone for democratic ideals born out of the Civil Rights movement, preceded by a heritage of intolerances and hardships brought into focus through Slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and now, once again, through DEI demolition. Nellie knew this. She intentionally constructed a visual inventory of what counts in life: Love. Beauty. Compassion. Recognition. Acknowledgement. Forgiveness.

We love you, Nellie Mae Rowe.

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‘This World Is Not My Own’ just finished a Southern Circuit Tour this spring. Visit: www.thisworldisnotmyown.com to learn more about this celebrated documentary on Nellie Mae Rowe.

Xenia Zed is a board member of The Judith Alexander Foundation, whose mission is “To carry on the work of the late arts patron Judith Alexander, supporting Georgia artists and the legacy of the extraordinary artist Nellie Mae Rowe.”