Nellie Mae Rowe at the California African American Museum

Nellie Mae Rowe, Untitled (Man with Headdress) (1978–82). Crayon, colored pencil, pen, and pencil on paper, 24 × 19 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and CAAM. Collection of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift by Judith Alexander.

In a moment saturated with curatorial branding and institutional revisionism, Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe at the California African American Museum (CAAM) offers something unusually generous and unguarded. Organized by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and presented in collaboration with CAAM, this expansive retrospective lends renewed significance to Rowe’s exuberant practice, which has long been positioned in the realm of outsider art. Her first major exhibition in over 20 years, Really Free invites reconsideration of the weight of that label, and how self-taught artists like Rowe have shaped, yet often remained outside of, institutional narratives of art history.

The exhibition unfolds across two adjoining rooms, where densely populated colored pencil drawings, assemblage sculptures, and handmade dolls fill the space with color and tactility. Rowe’s hand is everywhere, guiding the viewer through worlds rich with symbolism, spiritual attunement, and ecstatic joy. Born in 1900 in Jim Crow-era Georgia, Nellie Mae Rowe (1900–1982) was a self-taught artist who created throughout her life but became especially prolific in her final 15 years. The show captures the full force of this late-period creativity—an outpouring shaped by both her unique vision and difficult lived experience. Rowe’s work from this time is not simply the output of a singular imagination; it reflects her ongoing, intuitive dialogue with the world around her.

Recurring motifs throughout Rowe’s body of work include pigs, religious totems, and the artist’s own silhouette and hands. She often drew intuitively in a process that, in another context, might be called Surrealist automatism. Yet, to place Rowe in conversation with Surrealism is not to elevate her work through an external framework; rather, it reveals how Euro-American art history often borrows, without acknowledgment, from spiritual, improvisational, and ancestral practices long embedded outside Western art traditions. Her drawing What it is (1978–82) exemplifies this: A seated woman outlined in red (likely a self-portrait) extends a hand toward a hovering bird, as if it were pulling thoughts from her mind; meanwhile a pig lurks behind her purple chair and a disembodied blue leg floats nearby. The space is flattened and strange, bordered by a red-and-blue checkerboard floor and inscribed at the top with the phrase “What it is.” The phrase functions not just as a title, but as an artistic stance—a demand that the work simply speak for itself.

Central to Rowe’s vision was her home, which she trans- formed into an immersive art environment she called the “Playhouse.” In the back gallery, a monitor plays excerpts from This World Is Not My Own, a 2023 documentary featuring a miniature recreation of the house. The hand-built model captures both the physicality of the Playhouse and its uncanny atmosphere, an extension of Rowe’s belief that making art was a form of communion. In clips from the film, Rowe’s voice (performed by actress Uzo Aduba) floats over stop-motion animation as she describes the visions that came to her in dreams, the spirit she felt in her materials, and the presence of God in her daily life. Rowe speaks of colors as messages and hands as instruments of something larger. Though the original house has been demolished, its onscreen presence underscores how inseparable Rowe’s drawings were from the world she built around them — how for Rowe, her spiritual practice, domestic space, and artmaking were deeply intertwined.

This rootedness in place—and the exhibition’s arrival at CAAM—prompted me to consider Rowe’s work alongside other California-based vernacular artists, such as Grandma Prisbrey of Bottle Village in Simi Valley and Elmer Long of the Bottle Tree Ranch in Oro Grande. These artists don’t offer outsider perspectives so much as alternate epistemologies: systems of meaning-making grounded in spiritual attunement, resourcefulness, and the divine. Positioning Rowe in conversation with other self-taught artists similarly rooted in place, I see how art environments can serve as both valid forms of expression and potent alter- natives to the formalized world of galleries and museums.

As with many exhibitions of self-taught artists, there’s a curatorial tension in how biography frames the work. The show risks suggesting that Rowe’s art matters primarily because of her life’s hardships or her distance from institutional norms, but the strength of her work actively resists such reduction. One standout, If You Want to Be Seen Stand Up (1981), is a hallucinatory drawing lush with symbolic logic, where electric blues, acid yellows, and baby pinks collide in swirled, pulsing patterns. The surface teems with dogs sprouting human limbs, pig-headed figures with breasts, and bird-human hybrids, rendered with cartoonish precision. These beings float in psychic space, surrounded by the scrawl of an irreverent motto: “If you want to be seen, stand up. If you want to be heard, speak up. If you want to be appreciated, shut up.” Her compositions hum with visual noise as dots, hatch marks, and scumbled textures pull the eye in multiple directions. Steeped in personal mythology, Rowe’s work can be understood not as the product of marginality but as a liberating disruption of commercial art logic.

In Rowe’s world, art was not a commodity but a sacred act connecting her to community, the spirit, and herself. Yet she was also pragmatic, grateful to sell her work and receive recognition later in life. Rowe was neither a naïve artist nor merely a folk visionary; she was deliberate and self-aware, engaged in worldbuilding that both mirrored and defied her circumstances. Her drawings, sculptures, and the Playhouse itself challenge art historical assumptions and ask us to reconsider what it means to be truly free—free from categorization, from hierarchy, and the limiting expectations placed upon artists based on race, class, or formal training. Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe doesn’t just showcase her genius—it honors the genius of all artists who have had to carve their own paths, uninvited, into the history of art.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 41.