Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe

 

Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe

 

At the Peak of Her Career


Nellie Mae Rowe sits in an armchair under a curtained window and beside a bed.

J. Weiland (American, born 1948), Nellie Mae Rowe, ca. 1977, chromogenic print, 7 1/2 × 9 1/2 inches, courtesy of the artist. © J. Weiland Photography. All rights reserved.

By Katherine Jentleson

In 1976, Rowe’s drawings were exhibited in Missing Pieces: Georgia Folk Art, 1770–1976, a bicentennial exhibition at the Atlanta Historical Society that traveled around the state and was reprised in Washington, DC, during the Smithsonian Institution’s 1978 Folk Life Festival. Also in 1978, Rowe began working with gallerist Judith Alexander, who gave Rowe her first solo exhibition in Atlanta and worked quickly to debut Rowe’s work in New York City at the Parsons-Dreyfuss Gallery the following year. Rowe took her first ride on an airplane to see that show and experience the city, where she was moved by visits to the Statue of Liberty and Harlem.

With increased access to art supplies and unprecedented income from her work, Rowe produced dozens of her most spectacular drawings during the final years of her life. This artistic efflorescence occurred despite the physical pain she suffered, which she learned in November 1981 was due to multiple myeloma and which would take her life almost exactly one year later.

When Rowe died in 1982, Atlanta art critic Cathy Fox noted in her obituary that she was “at the peak of her career.” For in that year, she was included in the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s landmark exhibition Black Folk Art in America, 1930–1980. Four of the works in this section were part of that groundbreaking exhibition, which brought Rowe national renown, fulfilling her wish that her art would survive her as the ultimate marker of her legacy: “All my dolls, chewing gum sculptures, everything will be something to remember Nellie,” she told Alexander before her death. “If you will remember me I will be glad and happy to know that people have something to remember me by when I’m gone to rest.”

Citation

Jentleson, Katherine. Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe, wall text. High Museum of Art, Atlanta, September 3 2021–January 9, 2022. https://link.rowe.high.org/essay/at-the-peak-of-her-career/.

“If you will remember me I will be glad and happy to know that people have something to remember me by when I’m gone to rest.”

Nellie Mae Rowe