Katherine Jentleson: Whose History of American Art? . Interview with Logan Lockner . ART PAPERS . December 2021

Curator Katherine Jentleson joined Atlanta’s High Museum of Art in September 2015 as the institution’s inaugural Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art. The High began collecting artworks by self-taught artists forty years earlier, in 1975, and in 1994 it became the first major American museum to form a department dedicated to the field. Among the department’s most significant holdings is the largest collection of works by Nellie Mae Rowe, an African American self-taught artist who spent the last three decades of her life dedicated to making drawings, collages, hand-sewn dolls, and other artworks in her home in Vinings, Georgia, just outside Atlanta. She elaborately adorned nearly every available surface of both the interior and exterior of the building, often referring to it as her “playhouse.”

Another Tradition: Drawings by Black Artists from the American South' On View at The Morgan Library NYC . Through January 16, 2022

An exhibition at The Morgan Library celebrates its 2018 acquisition of eleven drawings from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, an organization dedicated to supporting Black Southern artists and their communities. The artists represented in the acquisition are Thornton Dial, Nellie Mae Rowe, Henry Speller, Luster Willis, and Purvis Young. In the last three decades, exhibitions and publications have established the rightful place of figures such as Dial and the quilters of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, in the canon of twentieth-century art. The focus has often been on the impressive works of assemblage—whether of found objects or fabric—that have emerged from the Southern United States. Artists only one or two generations removed from slavery, and subjected to the abuses of Jim Crow, developed ingenious formal techniques using found materials and skills learned outside the classroom and studio. Many, like Dial, Rowe, and Lonnie Holley, exhibited their creations at their homes in elaborate “yard shows,” drawing the attention of passersby and art-world figures alike.

Presenting Ten More Visionaries and Rule Breakers in Smithsonian American Art Museum's (SAAM’s) Collection . By Howard Kaplan . Smithsonian Voices . March 18, 2022

The “Drawn to Art” comic series continues to share the lives of women artists you should know

A self-taught artist, Nellie Mae Rowe (1900, GA–1982, GA) used humble materials such as crayon, cardboard, and felt-tip markers in her to create lively artworks in vibrant colors. She made beloved found-object installations with untraditional materials including dolls, stuffed animals, beads, bottles, and gum.

As Interest In Southern Folk Art Swells, Bidders Buy In Buford . By Greg Smith . Antiques and the Arts . November 22, 2021

There is no denying the thundering momentum that Southern Folk Art is experiencing in this moment.

Georgia is a beacon for self-taught art and the High Museum in Atlanta has established itself as a leading institution in the field. Katherine Jentleson, the curator of two concurrent exhibitions at the museum, “Gatecrashers: The Rise of the Self-Taught Artist in America” and “Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe,” was on hand during the auction’s preview exhibition to speak with collectors of self-taught art. Slotin described the collaboration with the museum as a win-win where like-minded collectors and curators can come together to talk about the field and the currents moving through it.

Rowe had five works in the sale as the top lot, “Dog on Roof With Birds,” established an auction record for the artist at $30,000. The work had provenance to the collection of Judith Alexander, the gallerist most credited with bringing the artist to recognition. The 1981 work was created with paint, crayon, colored pencil and graphite on paper and measured 23½ by 18 inches.

Brownfield outs 4 'outsider' artists . By Kelsey Dayton . Jackson Hole (WY) News & Guide . June 16, 2021

Art advisor Shari Brownfield was looking at photographs of walls covered in art when something caught her eye. She homed in on a colorful piece by an artist who she had not heard of: Nellie Mae Rowe.

“I just saw the work and was blown away,” Brownfield said. “It was something about it that drew me in and I didn’t yet know why. I really enjoy storytelling in art work, and I could tell the artist was expressing her story. I immediately wanted to get up close to it.

Looking Back to Fly Forward: "Another Tradition" at The Morgan Library and Museum . By Nicole Acheampong . Art in America . January 20, 2022

In an untitled 1978 work, Nellie Mae Rowe used pen, paint, and pastel to embellish and frame a black-and-white photograph of herself standing in her yard. Dense blue ink shades a path beneath the artist’s feet, the seat of the chair behind her, and some of the foliage that surrounds her. The caption referenced Rowe’s “idiosyncratic” take on the African bottle tree: in lieu of hanging the traditional cobalt blue bottles meant for catching wayward spirits, she placed Christmas ornaments on the trees around her home and lined the walkways with bottle caps. But if cobalt is for catching spirits, Rowe has here color-coded a whole garden for them.

Nellie Mae Rowe, Cow Jump Over the Moon, 1978, Courtesy Museum of American Folk Art, NYC. Gift of Judith Alexander

An Artist Who Didn’t Know She Was One . By Tessa DeCarlo . New York Times: Arts and Leisure . January 3, 1999

During a lifetime of obsessive creativity, Nellie Mae Rowe apparently gave little thought to her place in art history. The hundreds of drawings and collages she made in her three-room house in rural Vinings, Ga., the figures she fashioned out of old stockings and chewing gum, and the densely decorated found-object environment she created in her home and yard were to her simply an intense and deeply satisfying form of play.

Black Doll Exhibition explores women's craft history of childhood play, and dynamics of America's racial structure . Paris, France 2018

A 2018 exhibition at La Maison Rouge in Paris presented art objects produced during an early period in American history. “Black Dolls: The Deborah Neff Collection” features more than 200 dolls handmade between the 1840s and 1940s.

Nellie Mae Rowe, whose dolls were created a bit later than most, is one of only three artists who are cited by name in this exhibition; the makers of most of the dolls are unknown.

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