When Nellie Mae Rowe moved to Vinings in 1930, she may well have been an artist deep down inside, but to the wider world, she was a wife and a housekeeper, cleaning up and cooking for other people.
That is, if the wider world knew she existed at all.
Her father had been a slave freed in the aftermath of the Civil War. Her mother was born “the year of freedom,” Rowe once told her ardent supporter, Buckhead gallery owner Judith Alexander.
Her father rented land in Fayette County, which he farmed, while also working as a blacksmith, syrup maker and basket weaver. Her mother was a seamstress and quilter.
But they were destitute. For their ten children, there was always work to do.
Into this world, Nellie May was born in 1900.
Despite the hardships, she found moments to draw on found scraps of paper with broken pencils. When she was supposed to be picking cotton out in the fields, she would hide so she could make dolls out of the dirty laundry, often drawing her parents’ ire.
When she was 16, she ran away.
She married a gentleman named Ben Wheat. In 1930, they moved to Vinings, where Rowe found domestic work in other people’s homes. Her husband died in 1936. The following year, Nellie Mae married Henry ‘Buddy’ Rowe, who built the three-bedroom house in 1939 that would become one of the area’s most interesting landmarks.
Buddy Rowe died in 1948, which would become a watershed moment in the life of Nellie Mae Rowe, the Atlanta arts community and the art world.
After his death, Nellie Mae Rowe returned to her favorite moments from her childhood — laying on the floor and drawing pictures and creating something out of nothing, as with her dolls.
She started creating all day, every day. She started one project, put it down, worked on something else, then something else, and eventually, maybe days later, finished her first project and found a place for it.
She drew colorful pictures. She made dolls. She played music, She sang. She didn’t have much, so she created out of what others saw as nothing. To Rowe, there was no trash. She could take anything and make something out of it, even pieces of chewed gum.
By the time a documentary filmmaker from Memphis showed up at her Paces Ferry house in the 1970s, it seemed she had covered every inch of every wall in her with her self-taught art.
She told Alexander — the Buckhead gallery owner who promoted Rowe’s work around the country and gave her her first solo show — she never knew what she was drawing. Her pencil went the way it went, and a picture revealed itself to her. She could see things in her work others could not. She let her tools and medium guide her worn hands.
Her spirit took over her yard as well. She hung found objects from the branches of the trees in her yard and created installations all over the place. Strangers would even leave discarded materials at her fence, which she used to decorate her yard and house.
She created what she called her playhouse.
Some Vinings residents thought it looked like a junkyard and even vandalized it, breaking windows with rocks. She didn’t mind. She was dealing with a higher power, she told Alexander. She had a strong faith and believed God gave her her talent.
That talent led people like Alexander to her, who first saw her work in an Atlanta Historical Society folk art exhibit. From there, Rowe’s work appeared in galleries and exhibitions from New York to Washington, D.C. to Dallas and just about everywhere in between.
Alexander ensured she received the proceeds from her art, which Rowe used to buy better art supplies and create more complicated, colorful works.
Today some of those pieces are in the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the American Folk Museum in New York City and many others. Her works sell for tens of thousands of dollars.
Her Vinings playhouse, perhaps her most extraordinary project, has been lost to the progress of time, replaced by a hotel on Paces Ferry Road today.
Thanks to her art, the world now knows who Nellie Mae Rowe is.
On Sept. 3, the High Museum of Art will open Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe, and you can see for yourself what she accomplished over the next three decades of her life. She died in 1982 at 82.
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