Self-Taught Artists Take Center Stage At High Museum Of Art In Atlanta, With Nellie Mae Rowe In Spotlight

A great art museum simultaneously serves as a global and local institution, bringing global artwork to its local audience and introducing local artists to a global audience. On the heels of saying “goodbye” to an exhibition featuring two of the most celebrated artists in world history–Pablo Picasso and Alexander Calder–the High Museum of Art in Atlanta now shines its spotlight on a local artist deserving more acclaim: Nellie Mae Rowe.

“Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe” (through January 9, 2022) features nearly 60 works drawn from the Museum’s leading collection of her art. The exhibition is the first major presentation of her work in more than 20 years and the first to consider her practice as a radical act of self-expression and liberation in the post-civil rights-era South.

Rowe’s story follows a not uncommon narrative for self-taught artists in the 20^th century, particularly Black artists. Late in life, freed from the obligations of manual labor to earn a living, Rowe rediscovered a passion for artmaking. Memories and personal experiences poured out of her in unique, rich expressions of creativity. These were represented through the simplest of materials: crayons, cardboard, found objects.

Her very home transformed into an art environment.

For the last 15 years of her life, Rowe (1900-1982) lived on Paces Ferry Road, a major thoroughfare in suburban Atlanta’s Vinings neighborhood, where she welcomed visitors to her “Playhouse” which she decorated with found-object installations, handmade dolls, chewing-gum sculptures and hundreds of drawings.

Mainstream art world attention found Rowe before she passed, but in the years since, her mark has faded. The High Museum attempts to change that, positioning Rowe into a broader conversation, less susceptible to the historic marginalization which can affixed to the “Black, Southern, folk artist.”

“She was (at her creative peak, being shown in New York galleries, welcoming visitors to the Playhouse) during the 1970s, which was a pivotal moment in the reception of art by Black, women and self-taught artists,” Katie Jentleson, Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art at the High Museum, told Forbes.com. “The (Black Emergency Cultural Coalition) picketing the Whitney. Linda Nochlin publishing "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" The surge of interest in folk and self-taught art that emerged from the bicentennial moment. I hope this show helps put her in context as a person who lived and worked at the intersection of these and other histories.”

The Playhouse

Rowe began making art as a child in rural Fayetteville, Georgia. She was one of 10 siblings, nine girls. Rowe only found the time and space to reclaim her artistic practice in the late 1960s. As she filled her home with drawings and sculptures, Rowe’s Playhouse became an Atlanta attraction, which fostered her growing reputation and public reception.

“She loved drawing and making dolls as a child, but had to put those interests aside quickly because she was needed on the farm, married young (17), and spent most of her life as a domestic worker,” Jentleson explains. “Once her second husband died (she was widowed twice) and her longtime employers also passed away in the late 60s, she began drawing seriously again and transformed her home into her ‘Playhouse,’ decorating every surface and corner with recycled and handmade things.”

Out of the service of others, she could serve herself. “Now I got to get back to my childhood. What you call playing in a playhouse,” Rowe said.

She chose to open the Playhouse to hundreds of visitors, mostly white, a decision Jentleson finds “courageous.”

“Atlanta loves its motto as ‘the city too busy to hate,’ but in reality, Rowe lived through the revival of the KKK in nearby Stone Mountain and the birth of the American Neo Nazi movement, which included a tremendous amount of violence toward black people who were moving closer to the city, as Rowe did,” she explains. “So, the way that she demanded respect and visibility through her art, and the generosity she showed to the people who came to her doorstep to meet her, was truly radical.”

One reason for the exhibition’s title.

Sadly, Rowe’s Playhouse was demolished soon after her death.

“In the early 1980s, there was not the kind of widespread regard for art environments that you see today, with institutions like the Kohler Foundation that labor to preserve them,” Jentleson said. “She also lived in a part of the metro Atlanta area that was–and still is–constantly gentrifying.”

A Hotel Indigo occupies the spot now with a plaque memorializing her and a display of her art in the lobby. The High’s exhibition contains several scaled-down reconstructions of the Playhouse that have been created for an upcoming film on the artist.

One piece of a larger puzzle

The High began collecting Rowe’s drawings in 1980. Between 1998 and 2003, major gifts totaling more than 130 works from trailblazing Atlanta art dealer Judith Alexander, a friend and ardent supporter of Rowe, solidified the High’s holdings as the largest public repository of her art.

These acquisitions supported the historic importance the High has placed on self-taught artists. The museum began collecting the work of living self-taught artists in 1975 with a piece by Mattie Lou O’Kelley. Thirty drawings by Bill Traylor entered the museum in 1982 establishing it as a leader in the field. In 1994, the High became the first general interest museum to establish a dedicated department for folk and self-taught art.

Much of this direction came from longtime Southern folk-art collector and High board member T. Marshall Hahn who felt the museum should be a leader in the area and donated his collection to the institution to support that vision.

Today, the High boasts one of the most significant collections of American folk and self-taught art in the world, especially rich in artworks by Southern and African American artists. That broader story can simultaneously be seen now at the High during the exhibition “Gatecrashers: The Rise of the Self-Taught Artist in America” (through December 11).

Also curated by Jentleson, “Gatecrashers” features work from famed early 20^th century painters including Horace Pippin and Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses, artists who fundamentally reshaped who could hold that moniker in the United States.

They paved the way for Rowe and others, overcoming class-, race- and gender-based obstacles to enter the inner sanctums of the mainstream art world. Despite their lack of formal training, these artists’ paintings of American life in the cities and rural communities where they lived, as well as fantastical scenes derived from their imaginations, were celebrated by fellow artists, collectors and taste-making museums such as New York’s Museum of Modern Art, especially in the 1930s and early 1940s.

Following its presentation at the High, “Gatecrashers” will travel to the Brandywine River Museum of Art (May 28–September 5, 2022) and The Westmoreland Museum of American Art (October 30, 2022–February 5, 2023).

“Really Free” will also travel nationally into 2023 with locations yet to be determined.

Elsewhere around Atlanta

Now presents a particularly good time for seeing art in Atlanta. In addition to the High exhibitions, the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University displays “Each/Other: Marie Watt and Cannupa Hanska Luger,” a rare presentation of contemporary Native American art in the city through December 12.

The Museum of Design Atlanta, the only museum in the Southeast devoted exclusively to the study and celebration of design, displays “Survival Architecture & The Art of Resilience” through Sunday, January 16, 2022. The exhibition demonstrates design’s power to help build resilience and find solutions to the 21st-century’s biggest challenges, including climate change.

The future looks bright as well with superstar Radcliffe Bailey, who lives near the Cascade Springs Nature Preserve in southwest Atlanta, breaking ground on a commission from the City of Atlanta to create a site-specific work to be installed in the 120-acre preserve. Music is a recurring subject in Bailey’s work, and the site will be an homage to this part of Atlanta’s history and culture, envisioned as a gathering place for musicians and the wider community.

Bailey hopes to see the space activated with musical performances and reenactments of speeches by abolitionist leaders. He describes the open-air work as an “African American Stonehenge,” with the foundations modeled after an amphitheater.