I remember the house well. It was on the right side of Paces Ferry Road in Vinings if you were headed west. The fence was covered with worn and weathered stuffed animals; cans and bottles hung from the trees in the front yard from string.
It didn’t look like art. It looked like trash. It looked junky and unkept, even scary to a young person. I didn’t know who lived there. Even though my mother was herself an artist and collected folk pieces she never told me about Nellie Mae Rowe.
Rowe festooned her three-room house near the railroad tracks with homemade dolls, found objects and just about anything that caught her eye. Just like Howard Finster, the man who created the famous Paradise Garden in Summerville, Nellie Mae Rowe was a deeply religious, self-taught artist who saw beauty in things others did not. Just like Finster’s eclectic outdoor folk art Mecca, Rowe used her home and her property to express herself.
Born in 1900 to a father who had been a slave, she was raised in Fayette County on a rented farm. Rowe and her nine brothers and sisters spent much of their youth working in the fields. She learned to sew as well, but she loved more than anything laying on the floor of their home and drawing pictures. In a short documentary about her life by Linda Armstrong, Rowe said drawing pictures is all that she wanted to do when she was a child. She also made dolls out of old rags and discarded quilts. She would tie them in a way to create a head, arms and legs and draw eyes on them. She played with them every day. Her family did not like it, though, and told her to stop. She did it anyway.
Rowe moved with her first husband, Ben Wheat, to Vinings in 1930. He died in 1936, and later that year she married a man named Henry “Buddy” Rowe. She and Buddy Rowe built the small house with a screened-in front porch on Paces Ferry Road, back when Vinings was out in the country.
After her second husband died in 1948, Rowe did not remarry. She did housework to support herself but she always created. Over time, her house went from being her home to her “playhouse.” That is what she called it.
Behind a fence was a shallow yard, and just about every inch of it had something to see. She saw beauty in things people no longer wanted. She took discarded items from the side of the road and turned them into works of art accenting her yard and house. She made sculptures out of chewing gum. She hung things off the porch and the trees. The lone constant was color — nearly everything she collected had a brightness to it, or at least at one point it did.
In her back yard she kept a garden, but it, too, was joined by the myriad of found objects that drew her eye. She spent her days drawing, “placing” things, making her dolls and singing old hymns.
People slowed down when they drove past her house. Her yard in many ways was a work of art itself, an extension of this colorful, eclectic, self-taught artist.
For those curious enough to approach, Rowe was always welcoming and even invited people into her home, where she played her electric piano and sang as they gawked at the wall-to-wall artwork, statues, decorations of all kinds, drawings, family pictures and dolls. Her artwork was bursting with color, done with crayons and markers on sheets of paper.
She was “discovered” in 1976, when the Atlanta History Center in Buckhead presented an exhibit that included her work. Upon seeing it, gallery owner and artist champion Judith Alexander reached out to Rowe. The two became friends and Alexander became Rowe’s art dealer. She exhibited her work at Alexander’s Buckhead gallery, and then she was off to a show in New York. Over the next several years, many exhibitions across the country featured Rowe’s work.
By the time success found her, however, she had weathered hands and referred to herself as an old woman. Rowe died in 1982.
Today her work is in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, the American Folk Museum in New York and many others. Her Vinings playhouse, perhaps her greatest work, has been lost to time.
Read more: Neighbor Newspapers – Column Vinings playhouse served as artist s canvas
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