Georgia Women Who Impacted the Arts: Part 2

Last week we learned about three women from Georgia who were born before 1900 and made history with their artwork. This week we're finishing up our Women's History Month retrospective with three more women from Georgia who made art history in the past century.

Nellie Mae Rowe (1900-1982)

Nellie Mae Rowe's "Playhouse" Source: vinings.org/vinings-history/nellie-mae-rowe

Nellie Mae Rowe was born south of Atlanta and spent her young childhood working on her formerly enslaved father’s rented farm. Drawing and dollmaking provided an escape and a source of joy in young Rowe’s life. This set the stage early for the artist to emerge.

Rowe married young, was widowed young, and married again. Her second husband built their home on the main street in Vinings, not far from the governor’s mansion, and this home would eventually help Rowe make history.

Her second husband died in 1948, and the 48-year-old Rowe found work as a domestic to support herself. She had no children, she was independent, and she was now able to dive deep into the creative pursuits she adored. Her house was her canvas, a place for her to express herself and recover a childhood spent in difficult labor. She called it her “playhouse” and decorated both house and yard with her dolls, drawings, handmade ornaments dangling from tree branches, sculptures of reclaimed items (including chewing gum!), and more. The house attracted a lot of attention, some good, some bad, but it was a bold statement of a self-claimed life.

Her work was included in an exhibition on Georgia Folk Art in 1976, which opened the door to connect her to a gallerist named Judith Alexander, who arranged her first solo exhibition in Atlanta in 1978 and then in New York City in 1979. Rowe now had a decent income coming from her art and access to more art supplies, so she was able to devote the final years of her life to creating. In her last year of life, she was included in the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s exhibition of Black Folk Art in America.

Mattie Lou O’Kelley (1908-1997)

O’Kelley’s art career was a long time in the making. She was born on a farm in the rural area outside the small town of Maysville, GA (a jaunt east of Gainesville). She attended school until the 9th grade and then spent the remainder of her childhood and early adulthood doing hard labor on the family farm.

After her father died during the Great Depression, O’Kelley moved with her mother to the town of Maysville itself and served as her mother’s caretaker while also working various jobs, including cooking, sewing, and factory work, to keep them financially solvent. It was a hard, unromantic life of low wages, with little room for creative expression or individuality.

Her mother passed in 1955, leaving her on her own for the first time. She was able to move into a small, humble home and devote herself to the long-held desire to paint. Her work is often referred to as “memory painting,” drawing on the experiences she had on the farm in childhood. Her colorful and intricately detailed scenes of rural Appalachian life would eventually earn her acclaim as a folk artist, but not without some boldness on her part. The shy, isolated, self-taught painter took a bus to the High Museum in 1975 and made the acquaintance of the museum director of the time, Gudmund Vigtel, who purchased her work for the museum’s collection. The future director of the American Folk Art Museum, Robert Bishop, saw her work and became her agent, opening doors to galleries across the nation.

In 1976, O’Kelley received the Georgia Governor’s Award for the Arts (an honor The Art Center now shares with her!).

While the first sixty years of her life were a picture of hardship and toil, O’Kelley’s final 30 years were filled with creative endeavors and artistic success. She published two books in the ‘80’s, had her work on a Life magazine cover, and still has her work in several museum collections. Her life stands as proof that it is never too late to follow your dreams.

Caroline Luzene Hill (1946-Present)

Luzene Hill is a contemporary multimedia installation artist who pulls on both her Cherokee heritage and her personal past to inform powerful works that have been exhibited internationally.

Hill was born in Atlanta in 1946, but didn’t study art until her thirties and forties. She pursued an MFA at Western Carolina University. Her work transforms her trauma of surviving a violent assault in an Atlanta park into powerful statements about violence against women, especially Indigenous women, and she uses elements of Indigenous culture to communicate her message. She uses over 3000 khipu knots, a record keeping method from the Inca Empire, in her installation Retracing the Trace, to represent the large number of unreported sexual assaults in the states. It was important to her to reference cultures prior to colonial contact to serve as a metaphor and connection point between her own lived experience and the greater silencing of indigenous culture and voices.

Women in Georgia are still working hard to make their voices heard in the annals of art history. You can see the work of several contemporary women artists in Georgia on display in our exhibit, A Woman's Place is in the Arts, on display through March 29th at The Art Center.

Georgia Women Who Impacted The Arts: Part 1

In a continuing celebration of Women’s History Month, we want to celebrate some of our home-grown female artists who made an impact on history with their work! In this post, we’ll be focusing on three artists who were born before 1900, working through some turbulent times in history in the Deep South.

Harriet Powers (1837-1910)

Pictorial quilt by Harriet Powers Source: Wikimedia Commons

Harriet Powers was born in Athens, GA on October 29, 1837. She was a folk artist and quilt maker, born a slave, who likely learned to sew from other slaves. Powers could neither read nor write, but she found a timeless language in her art. Utilizing a mix of African applique and European stitching techniques, she created quilts that told stories, often Biblical tales.

In 1886, she displayed one of her quilts at a cotton fair in Athens and was discovered by a local art teacher named Jennie Smith. Smith tried to purchase it but was denied. She recognized its artistry and value and maintained correspondence with Powers over the years until finally in 1991 Powers was willing to part with it for $5 ($174.54 in today’s money; still a criminally low amount). Smith was so thrilled with the quilt that she wrote an 18 page document about it, which helped to keep Powers in the eye of history.

Her two surviving quits are owned by the Smithsonian’s American History Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Nearly 100 years after her death, Powers was inducted into the Georgia Women of Achievement Hall of Fame.

Lucy May Stanton (1875-1931)

Lucy May Stanton Self-Portrait by Lucy May Stanton Source: Wikimedia Commons

Stanton was born in Atlanta and attended the Southern Female College in LaGrange, now known as Cox College. Her art career began in 1896, and she painted many distinguished personages from Georgia that are still a part of museum collections in New York, Boston, Washington, and Emory (Howell Cobb’s portrait hangs in the Speaker’s Lobby in Washington, D.C., for example).

Stanton was well-traveled in her life, receiving formal training in Paris, living for a year in New York, returning to Athens, GA, living primarily in Boston for ten years, and returning to Athens in 1926. In 1927 she had a solo exhibition at the High.

Uncle George by Lucy May Stanton Source: Wikimedia Commons

Stanton was remarkable not only for the quality and breadth of her work, but also for the fact that she was one of the first white artists in the Deep South to portray Black subjects in her paintings with neither sentimentality nor prejudice.

Alma Thomas (1891-1978)

Photo of Alma Thomas Source: Wikimedia Commons

Alma Thomas was born in Columbus, Georgia in 1891 to a family that valued culture and education. Unfortunately, freedom to participate in culture and education as a Black woman in turn of the century Columbus were highly limited. She still made the most of her environment as a child, however, using the abundant clay of Georgia’s soil to make little bits of art like puppets and sculptures.

There weren’t opportunities for education past grade school and she was not permitted to visit museums, so in 1907 her family decided to move to Washington, DC for the greater access to schools and culture.

She took her first art class in DC at Armstrong Technical High School, which she cited as laying the foundation for her life. She went to college at the school that would become the University of the District of Columbia and earned her teaching credentials.

She served as a teacher for much of her life, returning to college at Howard University to study art in the midst of a varied teaching career that ranged about 35 years and covered elementary and junior high school. She kept working on her art, using summer breaks to visit art museums in New York City.

Her art career didn’t get fully underway until she retired at the age of 68 or 69. Her practice through her teaching years had taken her through sculpture and realistic painting, but she began exploring abstracts in the 50’s and developed her signature style once she was able to devote herself completely to her art.

She was the first Black woman to get a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum, exhibiting her abstracts in 1972 at the age of 77. Her work features bright and beautiful colors, reflecting her personal philosophy to concentrate on beauty and happiness. Her work received a revival in 2015 when the Obamas hung her painting Resurrection in the White House dining room, making Thomas’s work the first piece by a Black woman to enter the White House Collection.

If you want to further explore the joyful expression of Alma Thomas, we have a free kids’ workshop this Saturday from 2-4 pm for kids ages 7-11!

We'll be back next week with more women from Georgia who made their mark on the arts. Make sure to stop by to see our current exhibition, A Woman's Place is in the Arts, open until March 29th, and don't miss our free children's workshop on Alma Thomas this Saturday!

Women’s Work: 5 Lesser-Known Female Artists Who Overcame the Odds to Make History (Part 2)

Last week we began an exploration of five lesser-known women who overcame the odds to make history. This week we continue our journey through history with two more women who made it through difficult circumstances to have a thriving art career in their lifetimes.

Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938)

Young Woman Crocheting by Suzanne Valadon Source: Wikimedia Commons

Many of the women who were able to fight their way into the art scene throughout history benefitted from such privileges as being born into a higher economic class or having a parent or spouse in the arts. Valadon is an exception to this trend.

Valadon was the illegitimate child of an unmarried laundress, born into poverty. Before she hit her teenage years she was left to support herself, working a range of odd jobs that included food service and circus performance.

When she was 15, she started modeling for painters whose names you might recognize, like Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec. She observed the artists at work and was able to learn from them in lieu of formal training (the expense of which was out of her reach). She transitioned from subject to painter, developing a bold and unique style that set her apart. She frequently painted the female nude, but from the lens of a woman exploring the female experience. Paintings depicted intimate but not sexualized moments, like a woman doing her hair or a mother drying off her teen daughter.

While Valadon regretted the injury that ended her circus career, her art career was long and illustrious, with friendships formed with artists like Degas in addition to Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec. She was able to become a full-time artist in 1896, which she sustained through two marriages, the deaths of her famous friends, and struggles with her son’s mental health. Her paintings did not command the prices that her son’s did, but she maintained a powerful reputation in the arts into her sixties, with 19 exhibitions between 1913 and 1932. Her painting career continued into her seventies in spite of illness, and she died at her easel, suffering a stroke while painting flowers.

Margaret Keane (1927-2022)

Keane was an American artist, born in Tennessee, who suffered a permanently damaged ear drum at the age of 2 that left her deaf in one ear. This later affected her signature style of painting, which featured portraits with big eyes as a reference to the attention she paid to people’s eyes in order to understand them when they spoke.

She drew constantly as a child and got married to Frank Ulbrich shortly after graduating high school. The marriage to Ulbrich produced her only child and also brought her to California, but the marriage didn’t last past ten years.

The move to California proved fateful, however, as it led to Keane meeting her second husband, Walter Keane, at an art fair in Berkely. She was trying to keep custody of her child, so agreed to a marriage.

Marriage to Walter seemed to provide another benefit; like many artists, Keane was devoted to her painting practice but didn’t have the promotional skills to easily and effectively sell her work. Walter, however, was excellent at promoting, so for a while it seemed like the ideal partnership. She could devote herself to her art and he could sell it on her behalf. This arrangement sounds idyllic to many artists who wish they could just focus on their work, but it soon turned sour.

Walter Keane began selling Margaret’s paintings at a San Francisco beatnik club, successfully transitioning from his work in real estate to the art scene. Unbeknownst to Margaret, who simply signed her paintings with her last name, he was also taking credit for the work. When she found out, he convinced her to go along with it by explaining that people are “more likely to buy a painting if they think they’re talking to the artist.” He also used a common scammer’s tactic: fear of legal retribution. He claimed they might have to deal with lawsuits if the people who had been purchasing from him found out the wife was actually the painter.

The relationship began a familiar downward spiral. He attempted to learn from her how to paint but couldn’t do it, and he blamed her for his own failings. Her paintings and prints were making millions, originals being purchased by celebrities, but Margaret had no control over the money she was earning. Walter moved them to a nice house and enjoyed the high life, but Margaret was kept in a locked room, painting 16 hours a day. She explains in an interview with The Guardian that he would call every hour he wasn’t home to make sure she didn’t leave, that he’d follow her if she tried to slip away, and that he’d escalated to threatening her with his mafia ties.

His biography from this time is filled with self-aggrandizing statements, claiming that when they met, Margaret called him the greatest artist she’s ever seen, and the most handsome. When Margaret painted Tomorrow Forever for the 1964 World’s Fair, he claims that his dead grandmother told him in a vision that Michealangelo nominated him for their inner circle and compared it to the Sistine Chapel. An art critic did not agree, and his scathing review resulted in the piece’s removal from the Fair. Walter was enraged at this criticism of his borrowed feathers. Margaret was initially upset, but realized enough people enjoyed her work and she decided not to let the criticism stop her from painting what she wanted.

Their marriage ended after 10 years, but Margaret continued to paint for Walter for a while. But in 1970, Margaret came clean. Walter responded predictably: spouting furious lies about her character. She finally issued a direct challenge to him: meet her at high noon at Union Square with paint, brush, and canvas, and they’d prove once and for all who the real painter was. He didn’t show.

In 1986, they went to trial after she filed a defamation suit. She was asked to produce an example of her work in front of the jurors, while Walter lamely cited a shoulder injury as a reason he couldn’t draw right now.

She was awarded $4 million after quickly proving to the jurors that she was the painter, but unfortunately Walter had already squandered the fortune she’d earned and she never saw that money.

Thankfully her life turned around. She became the subject of a Tim Burton biopic called Big Eyes that created a resurgence of interest in her paintings. She had a successful third marriage, lived in Hawaii for 25 years, and then spent the last years of her life in Napa Valley California. She lived a long, full life, passing in the peace of her own home at the age of 94.

This is far from a complete list of the female artists through history that fought hard to have their voices heard and their work seen. There is also a strong European bias in the readily available information on female artists, which must be acknowledged; the names of famous artists that get heard are affected by more than just gender bias. These biases have seen improvements in the past decades, but there is still a long way to go before we achieve true equity in the arts.

There is still plenty we can learn from these powerful women that can apply to our own lives and art careers. Don’t let the opinions and behaviors of others dim your own light. Form friendships and lift each other up in your art career (and life in general). Find your own path to learning, especially if the traditional paths are blocked to you for any reason. Fight for the credit for your work and don’t let anyone take the love of creating away from you.

Join us at The Art Center this March to celebrate Women’s History Month with our current exhibition, A Woman’s Place is in the Arts.