Around Atlanta
High Museum announces major Nellie Mae Rowe Exhibition
For the last 15 years of her life, self-taught artist Nellie Mae Rowe (1900-1982) lived on a busy thoroughfare just outside of Atlanta and welcomed visitors to her “Playhouse,” which she decorated with found-object installations, handmade dolls, chewing-gum sculptures and hundreds of drawings.
This fall, the High Museum of Art will present “Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe” (Sept. 3, 2021-Jan. 9, 2022), featuring nearly 60 works drawn from the Museum’s leading collection of her art. The exhibition is the first major presentation of her work in more than 20 years and the first to consider her practice as a radical act of self-expression and liberation in the post-civil rights-era South. “Really Free” marks the Museum’s first partnership with the Art Bridges Foundation, an organization dedicated to expanding access to American art, which will allow the exhibition to travel nationally into 2023.
“The High was among the first American museums to establish a department dedicated to self-taught art, and today we hold the foremost collection of work by artists without formal training from the American South, including Nellie Mae Rowe,” said Rand Suffolk, the High’s Nancy and Holcombe T. Green, Jr., director. “We are incredibly proud of this distinction and honored to celebrate Rowe’s life and work through this exhibition. Her art has been a fixture in our collection galleries for decades, and this exhibition allows a much-needed deeper look into her bold artistic production.”
Katherine Jentleson, the High’s Merrie and Dan Boone curator of folk and self-taught art, added, “The exuberant color and imaginative design that characterize so many of Rowe’s drawings—which comprise most of her surviving work—is so aesthetically pleasing that her work is often taken at face value. This show will really explore her drawing practice, tracing its emergence and relationship to the installations of her Playhouse, as well considering the artistic path she blazed for herself as a radical act undertaken at a time when Black, women and self-taught artists struggled for respect and visibility.”
Rowe began making art 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 members of the family for whom she worked. Although she did not speak much about politics or social movements, she purposefully embraced her creativity and devoted her life to making art during a time when civil rights leaders and Black feminist politicians and artists were igniting great change across the country.
As she filled it with drawings and sculptures, Rowe’s Playhouse became an Atlanta attraction, which fostered her growing reputation and public reception. She began to exhibit her art outside of her home, beginning with “Missing Pieces: Georgia Folk Art, 1770-1976,” a bicentennial exhibition that brought attention to several Southern self-taught artists, including Rowe and Howard Finster, and traveled to venues across Georgia. In 1982, the year she died, Rowe’s work received a new level of acclaim, as she was honored in a solo exhibition at Spelman College and included as one of three women artists in the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s landmark exhibition “Black Folk Art in America: 1930-1980.”
The High began collecting her drawings in 1980. Between 1998 and 2003, major gifts totaling more than 130 works from trailblazing Atlanta art dealer Judith Alexander, a friend and ardent supporter of Rowe, solidified the High’s holdings as the largest public repository of Rowe’s art. Recently, the Museum announced another major gift of 17 drawings by Rowe from Atlantans Harvie and Charles Abney. Selections from this gift, as well as recent gifts and pledges of Rowe’s drawings and photographs of the artist and her Playhouse taken by Lucinda Bunnen and Melinda Blauvelt, will be presented as part of the exhibition.
“Really Free” will feature the colorful, and at times simple, sketches Rowe made on found materials in the 1960s and reveal their relationship to her most celebrated, highly complex compositions on paper of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Other sections of the exhibition will explore themes in Rowe’s work such as depictions of women, her childhood, images of her garden, and her experimentation with materials, including recycling cast-offs to make handmade dolls and chewing-gum sculptures. The final galleries will focus on her career breakthrough and ruminations on death and the afterlife.
In addition to works on paper and sculptures, the exhibition will feature photographs as well as components and footage from the experimental film on Rowe’s life to be released by Opendox in 2022, “The World is Not My Own,” which includes an artful reconstruction of her Playhouse. Through these elements, visitors can experience the lively art environment she created in and outside of her home.
“Really Free” will be presented in the lower level of the High’s Wieland Pavilion.
Exhibition Publication
“Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe” is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue co-published by the High and DelMonico Books that reproduces the High’s vast Rowe collection and features a lead essay by Jentleson with contributions from documentary producer Ruchi Mital, scholar Destinee Filmore and award-winning artist Vanessa German. The High also will publish a suite of online content, including author videos, a virtual tour and additional interpretive material, as part of a new library of collection-focused digital resources that launches with “Really Free.”
Source: High Museum of Art Atlanta Press Release
The special exhibition of the Medford and Loraine Johnston Collection will run January 17 through May 25, 2025
In the mid-1970s, artist and Georgia State University professor Medford Johnston, along with his wife and collaborator Loraine, began collecting works by artists who were in the vanguard of contemporary art. Today, they hold one of the finest collections of postwar American drawings and related objects of its kind, now numbering more than 85 works.
In 2025, the High Museum of Art will present Thinking Eye, Seeing Mind: The Medford and Loraine Johnston Collection, featuring their collected works, which is a promised gift to the museum. Featuring artists such as Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Elizabeth Murray, Martin Puryear, Ed Ruscha, Al Taylor, Anne Truitt, Stanley Whitney and Terry Winters, among others, the exhibition will demonstrate how establishing the parameters of an art collection requires infinite patience, focus, discipline and a keen eye.
“The Johnstons have been friends of the High for a very long time. They’ve also built an impressive collection featuring works by many of the 20th century’s most significant abstract artists,” said the High’s Director Rand Suffolk. “We are honored that they have promised to leave their collection to the Museum where it will be preserved for future generations — and we are delighted that they are sharing it with our audiences now, hopefully inspiring the next generation of art collectors and supporters.”
A curated collection
The Johnstons’ story is a testament to, in the words of the High’s Wieland Family Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Michael Rooks, “knowing the difference between what is right and what is almost right” when building a collection.
Although the Johnstons acquired several paintings and objects when they first began collecting in 1972, they quickly narrowed their focus to drawing, primarily by artists working on the frontlines of abstraction in the mid-1960s during a time of great innovation and experimentation.
Rooks added, “Med and Loraine’s collection struck me at once by its single-minded focus on a specific moment in time, which was essentially the time of their contemporaries. The artists in their collection are like close friends to the Johnstons — in fact many are or were. What is equally astonishing about the collection is the Johnstons’ dogged pursuit of quality. Their in-depth knowledge of each artist’s practice combined with their understanding of specific qualities to look for — or more appropriately, to hold out for — will be a revelation to emerging collectors.”
The Johnstons have built their collection with the High in mind as the benefactor of their passion and discernment. For them, their collection “is a labor of love, pursued over more than 50 years, and we are delighted to be able to help the High Museum document and celebrate these important artists working during the same decades as our lives.”
About the exhibit
Thinking Eye, Seeing Mind: The Medford and Loraine Johnston Collection will be presented in the Special Exhibition Galleries on the second level of the High’s Stent Family Wing.
The exhibit is organized by the High Museum of Art and made possible through the generosity of sponsors:
- Premier Exhibition Series Sponsor Delta Air Lines, Inc.
- Premier Exhibition Series Supporters Mr. Joseph H. Boland, Jr., The Fay S. and W. Barrett Howell Family Foundation, Harry Norman Realtors and wish Foundation
- Benefactor Exhibition Series Supporters Robin and Hilton Howell
- Ambassador Exhibition Series Supporters Loomis Charitable Foundation and Mrs. Harriet H. Warren
- Contributing Exhibition Series Supporters Farideh and Al Azadi, Mary and Neil Johnson, Mr. and Mrs. Baxter Jones, Megan and Garrett Langley, Margot and Danny McCaul, Wade A. Rakes II and Nicholas Miller and Belinda Stanley-Majors and Dwayne Majors.
Support has also been provided by the Alfred and Adele Davis Exhibition Endowment Fund, Anne Cox Chambers Exhibition Fund, Barbara Stewart Exhibition Fund, Dorothy Smith Hopkins Exhibition Endowment Fund, Eleanor McDonald Storza Exhibition Endowment Fund, The Fay and Barrett Howell Exhibition Fund, Forward Arts Foundation Exhibition Endowment Fund, Helen S. Lanier Endowment Fund, John H. and Wilhelmina D. Harland Exhibition Endowment Fund, Katherine Murphy Riley Special Exhibition Endowment Fund, Margaretta Taylor Exhibition Fund, RJR Nabisco Exhibition Endowment Fund and USI Insurance Services.
About the High Museum of Art
Located in the heart of Atlanta, the High Museum of Art connects with audiences from across the Southeast and around the world through its distinguished collection, dynamic schedule of special exhibitions and engaging community-focused programs.
Housed within facilities designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architects Richard Meier and Renzo Piano, the High features a collection of more than 19,000 works of art, including an extensive anthology of 19th- and 20th-century American fine and decorative arts; major holdings of photography and folk and self-taught work, especially that of artists from the American South; burgeoning collections of modern and contemporary art, including paintings, sculpture, new media and design; a growing collection of African art, with work dating from prehistory through the present; and significant holdings of European paintings and works on paper.
The High is dedicated to reflecting the diversity of its communities and offering a variety of exhibitions and educational programs that engage visitors with the world of art, the lives of artists and the creative process.
For more information about the High or to purchase tickets, visit high.org.
Top image: (from the collection) Terry Winters (American, born 1949), Orb, 2020, oil on paper, The Johnston Collection. © Terry Winters, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.
This holiday season, Atlanta’s Center for Puppetry Arts is proud to present groundbreaking displays highlighting how puppetry — an ancient form of storytelling — brings together diverse religious and cultural traditions.
Running from November 12 to December 29, this special holiday exhibition invites visitors to experience a global celebration of unity — all under one roof.
Two remarkable exhibits at the heart of this year’s holiday programming are Jane Henson’s Nativity Story and The Famous Chelm Players by Robert Rogers. These powerful displays bring to life Christian and Jewish traditions through the art of puppetry, alongside contributions from other world cultures.
In addition to these new exhibits, the Center’s signature Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer™ performance returns, making the Center for Puppetry Arts a must-visit holiday destination.
A rare display of Christian artistry: Jane Henson’s Nativity Story
Jane Henson’s Nativity Story, a masterful crèche, brings the birth of Jesus to life through puppetry. Created by the co-founder of The Jim Henson Company (and wife of Muppets creator, Jim Henson), Nativity Story adds emotion to the traditional display, making it an engaging exhibit for all ages.
The Center for Puppetry Arts is one of the few museums in the world to publicly showcase Jane Henson’s work, offering a rare chance to experience her artistry. This unique celebration of Christian tradition is also a tribute to an often-overlooked female pioneer in puppetry.
A closer look: The Famous Chelm Players
Another highlight of the holiday exhibition is The Famous Chelm Players, created by renowned puppeteer Robert Rogers. These characters, inspired by Eastern European Jewish folklore, depict the Wise Men of Chelm, a town known in Jewish stories as the “village of fools.”
The puppets bring to life the lighthearted and well-meaning — yet comically misguided — characters who share wisdom and are used to tell stories about holidays and everyday lessons. They have been a beloved part of many Jewish traditions.
Designed with intricate detail, the Chelm puppets evoke the shtetls (small Jewish towns) of the past, capturing the essence of Jewish cultural heritage. Originally performed in Rogers’ New York playhouse, the debut at the Center for Puppetry Arts marks a rare opportunity for Southern audiences to see these whimsical puppets and learn about the timeless tales of Chelm.
A global holiday experience
In addition to these special exhibits, The Center maintains a rich collection of global puppetry in its permanent collection, some include:
• Puppets of Hindu deities, crafted by Indian artist Anupama Hoskere, depict stories from Hindu epics like the Ramayana, showcasing the intricate traditions of Indian puppetry.
• Muslim folk characters from various regions illustrate how puppetry has been used to convey religious stories and community traditions from the Middle East to Southeast Asia.
• Asian puppets, including shadow puppets from Indonesia and China, show how they are used in religious ceremonies and folk storytelling.
Rudolph returns for holiday fun
No visit to Atlanta’s Center for Puppetry Arts during the holidays would be complete without Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
Running fromNovember 13 to December 29, this family-friendly adaptation of the 1964 Rankin/Bass television special features fully staged puppetry performances that capture the timeless story of Rudolph, Santa, Yukon Cornelius and the Abominable Snowman.
An Invitation to All Faiths and Communities
The Center for Puppetry Arts is extending a warm invitation to religious and interfaith organizations to participate in this celebration of global traditions.
By bringing together these diverse stories, the Center is offering a rare chance for communities of all backgrounds to come together through the common love of art and storytelling.
Plan Your Visit
Dates: November 12–December 29; Performances of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer™ begin November 13.
Location: The Center For Puppetry Arts: 1404 Spring St NW, Atlanta, GA 30309. Parking is free.
For more information and to purchase tickets, visit: puppet.org/programs.
Rudolph performance tickets include the show, as well as admission to the Worlds of Puppetry Museum, Festive Features special exhibition and a Create-A-Puppet™ Workshop.
To purchase a membership, visit: puppet.org/visit/become-a-member.
About the Center for Puppetry Arts
The Center for Puppetry Arts is the largest nonprofit in the U.S. dedicated solely to puppetry, offering live performances, interactive workshops and a world-class museum. Home to the Jim Henson Collection, featuring original Muppets, Fraggle Rock characters and Sesame Street icons, the Center provides a rare, behind-the-scenes look at beloved TV and film favorites.
With over 4,000 puppets from around the world in the museum, the Center immerses visitors in diverse cultural traditions, making it a must-visit destination for families. Supported by local institutions, it remains a key player in Atlanta’s vibrant arts scene.
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