Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe

During the last fifteen years of her life, artist Nellie Mae Rowe (1900–1982) lived on Paces Ferry Road, a major thoroughfare in Vinings, Georgia, and welcomed visitors to her “Playhouse,” which she decorated with found-object installations, handmade dolls, chewing-gum sculptures, and hundreds of drawings.

Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe is the first major exhibition of Rowe’s work in more than twenty years and the first to consider her practice as a radical act of self-expression and liberation in the post-civil rights-era South. One of the first self-taught Black women to be celebrated for her art, Rowe created her earliest works as a child in rural Fayetteville, Georgia, but only found the time and space to reclaim her artistic practice in the late 1960s, following the deaths of her second husband and her longtime employer.

The exhibition, drawn from the collection of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, offers an unprecedented view of how she cultivated her drawing practice late in life, starting with colorful and, at times, simple sketches on found materials and moving toward her most acclaimed, highly complex compositions on paper. Through photographs and an excerpt from an experimental documentary on her life, the exhibition is also the first to put her drawings in direct conversation with images of her art environment.

Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and curated by Katherine Jentleson, Senior Curator of American Art and Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art.

Support for this exhibition and publication is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Major funding for this exhibition and publication is provided by Judith Alexander and Henry Alexander.

Generous support provided by Art Bridges.