Eliana Willis

By the end of her life, the self-taught artist Nellie Mae Rowe (1900–1982) had been widely recognized for her unique artistic practice, finding both institutional and commercial success for her drawings and sculptures made from all manner of household materials. But a new exhibition at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta is the Georgia-born artist’s first major exhibition in 20 years.
“People here know how brilliant she was,” Katherine Jentleson, the High’s curator of folk and self-taught art, told Artnet News. “I really want to make her name known and her art appreciated outside of Atlanta.”
To that end, after it closes at the High in January, “Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe” will embark on a national tour with the Art Bridges Foundation through 2024 (venues have not yet been announced). The exhibition is drawn largely from the museum’s deep holdings of the artist’s work, including a 130-piece gift from the dealer Judith Alexander, who was the first in the art world to champion Rowe.
Nellie Mae Rowe, What It Is (1978–82). Collection of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Judith Alexander.
Born in 1900 in the then-rural town of Fayetteville, Georgia, Rowe only dedicated herself to art-making late in life.
“When she was a little girl growing up on a farm, she would take all the time she could find in her days to make art. She would make dolls out of scraps of dirty laundry, she would make drawings,” Jentleson said. “Like many self-taught artists, Rowe was somebody who knew from childhood that she had a gift.”
But Rowe married young, and she worked in domestic labor, cleaning the home of a white family for 30 years. It wasn’t until her second husband died in in 1948, and her employers died in the late 1960s, that Rowe began revisiting that early passion.
Nellie Mae Rowe, Untitled (Dandy), 1978–82. Collection of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Harvie and Charles Abney.
By 1971, Rowe had transformed her home in suburban Vinings into an elaborate art installation she called her “Playhouse,” decorating the outside with her multimedia works.
“She had mulberry trees and dogwood trees and urns filled with other flowering plants, and she would embellish those natural elements with artificial flowers so she had blooms year-round,” Jentleson said. “She hung the trees and the roofline with clotheslines she turned into garlands with ornaments and plastic fruit and baby toys, creating this shimmering, moving site-scape within the yard.”
“There were tons of chairs scattered all around the yard where people could sit, but some were decorated in ways that would impede sitting, with these thronelike installations,” Jentleson added. “Rowe would affix all types of things to the fence, like dolls’ heads and chewing-gum sculptures [that] she would embed with marbles and beads and other decorative things. She covered every surface with different decorative arrangements, laying seashells on the stumps of old trees.”
Some people responded negatively—Rowe’s home was vandalized, and she was accused of witchcraft. But after local press caught wind of her creative endeavor, the Playhouse became something of a tourist attraction, even keeping a series of guestbooks for visitors to sign.
Scale model of the Playhouse in “Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe.” Photo: Mike Jensen. Courtesy of the High Museum of Art.
Alexander began working with Rowe after encountering her in a 1976 folk art exhibition at the Atlanta Historical Society. Representation was a turning point for Rowe, with Alexander providing large-format acid-free paper for the artist to work on.
“It allows her this new freedom,” Jentleson said. “With these large, flat surfaces, that’s when her imagination just exploded onto paper. Rowe starts to create these rich compositions that are much more like quilts, decentralized with all of these interlocking forms that harmonize together. There’s so much symbolism and narrative embedded in every single work.”
Those drawings represent the bulk of Rowe’s surviving works, since the Playhouse was dismantled after her death. (The exhibition includes instead a six-by-six-foot reimagining of the home, created by New York documentary firm Open Dox for the forthcoming This World Is Not My Own.)
Re-creation by Open Dox of the Playhouse’s interior, in “Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe.” Photo: Mike Jensen. Courtesy of the High Museum of Art.
In Rowe’s era, “Assemblage and installation art was just beginning to be understood in the art world,” Jentleson said. “It was a practice that was only starting to be acknowledged as something that was important. I think it was too soon, unfortunately. When she passed, there wasn’t a precedent [for preservation].”
And the unique nature of the Playhouse also has complicated Rowe’s legacy.
“Part of why Rowe hasn’t been taken as seriously as she should have been was that she framed her work as play and returning to her girlhood,” Jentleson said. “She’s been as unfairly infantilized. That’s something that has to do with her identity, with being a woman and being Black. We’re willing to let so many white male artists reclaim their childhood and embrace this state of liberated play and exploration. That’s a sophisticated thing for Picasso or Kandinsky, but with Rowe, it’s held her back, and that’s something that should change.”
Nellie Mae Rowe, Real Girl (1980). Collection of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Judith Alexander.
Though much of Rowe’s work was decorative, she was also deeply engaged with the social and political issues of the day. She made a series of drawings responding to the Atlanta child murders between 1979 and 1981, which targeted Black adolescents. Another work was a tribute to Black women getting the right to vote in Atlanta in 1965.
“Working on this show during 2020 was a very profound experience. The Black Lives Matter movement and the urgency around acknowledging racial violence in this country provided a different lens through which I started seeing Rowe’s work and her experience,” Jentleson said. “I hope the show is going recontextualize her as a very significant Black feminist artist…. She was taking a very bold stance, demanding visibility for herself and her artwork.”
“Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe” is on view at the High Museum of Art, 1280 Peachtree Street NE, Atlanta, Georgia, September 3, 2021–January 9, 2022.
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Preparatory drawings for an unrealized second version of The Potato Eaters, Vincent van Gogh’s initially reviled early masterpiece, are going on view for the first time in an exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
The show, “The Potato Eaters. Mistake or Masterpiece?” features 50 letters, drawings, and paintings related to The Potato Eaters, including never-before-seen sketches from 1890 that demonstrate that the artist planned but never completed another version of the composition.
Visitors can also step into the painting, so to speak, posing for photographs in a life-size reconstruction of the humble cottage dining room immortalized in the work.
The original painting, completed in 1885, portrays the De Groot family sharing a simple meal of potatoes. Van Gogh painted the work while living in the Dutch village of Nuenen, in Brabant. The family members, whom he came to know well, appear in some of his other works of the period.
Visitors to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam pose in a reconstruction of the cottage in Vincent van Gogh’s 1885 painting The Potato Eaters in a new exhibition dedicated to the work. Photo by Tomek Dersu Aaron, courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
The artist hoped the work would convey the hard truths of peasant life, but painting was not well received. Van Gogh’s friend, the painter Anthon van Rappard, savaged the piece in a letter, insisting “You can do better than this,” and criticizing the proportions of the figures.
“What I’m trying to get with it is to be able to draw not a hand but the gesture, not a mathematically correct head but the overall expression,” Van Gogh wrote to his brother, Theo van Gogh. “The sniffing of the wind when a digger looks up, say, or speaking. Life, in short.”
Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh with sketch of The Potato Eaters (recto). Collection of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
“I really like that Van Gogh stands behind his own work,” exhibition curator Bregje Gerritse told the Guardian. “He says there is a certain life in it, writing that while, of course, there are technical mistakes but that technical perfection isn’t what he is after; it is the impression that it conveys about peasant life that is much more important, and that he is sure people will forgive him for that.”
Vincent van Gogh, Four People Sharing a Meal (1885). Collection of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
Despite the criticism, Van Gogh’s faith in the painting never wavered, even as his style evolved to include brighter colors.
“In 1887 he writes to his sister that he still considered this work to be one of the best he ever made,” Gerritse said.
And in the last months of his life, Van Gogh thought about revisiting his early painting, telling Theo, “I’m thinking of redoing the painting of the peasants eating supper, lamplight effect.”
Vincent van Gogh, Interior with Five Figures Around a Table (1890). Collection of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
He asked for the original drawings he had made five years earlier and began working on new sketches in his mature style. The resulting drawings—unveiled to the public here for the first time—are a marked departure from the original work, with hatch marks instead of his previous dark shading and more naturalistic poses—a tantalizing glimpse of a Van Gogh masterpiece that never came to be.
“The Potato Eaters. Mistake or Masterpiece?” is on view at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, October 8, 2021–February 13, 2022. 
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When Marina Abramović re-created Joseph Beuys’s legendary performance piece How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), at the inaugural Performa Biennial at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2005, there was little hint that performance art was about to transcend its previously niche status. 
Since that initial outing, however, a parade of international artists—some well-known, others on the cusp of becoming so—have produced a vast, vibrant, and surprising body of installations, plays, dances, videos, and happenings. Along the way, Performa has arguably commissioned or presented a masterpiece or two. Says art historian RoseLee Goldberg, who founded and still helms Performa as director and chief curator: “We showed this work could reach a much different audience. We made people very curious.”
Seventeen years on, Performa can take some credit for the rise of the event-hungry experiential economy. It has altered or accelerated artists’ careers, changed the architecture and programming of museums, spurred copycat events, and encouraged artists to become multimedia and multi-platform. It has even presaged the rebirth of the creative collectives that are today fueling the NFT art market, And, not incidentally, it helped heal New York City after 9/11.
As the ninth edition kicks off on Tuesday, October 12, with a three-week slate of events conceived for outdoor locations throughout New York City, here is a look back at what mattered, and what’s coming.

2005
RoseLee Goldberg, founding director and curator of Performa. Photo: Patrick McMullan
Performance art is notoriously difficult to sell, so it is ironic that its rise coincided with a great art-market boom, during which the auction houses had (temporarily) grabbed the spotlight. Performance art as we think of it now is roughly a century old—dating back to the Futurist movement circa 1909—but collectors only knew it from grainy archival footage of 1960s–70s events that just looked peculiar. 
Building on this canon, however, and coming out of left field, Performa 05 was anchored by Abramović’s magnetic marathon of several classics of the genre. Her weeklong run of the Guggenheim’s rotunda was unlike much of what was available at the time as either culture or entertainment, and gradually grew packed with open-mouthed young people who might normally have been at the movies. They encircled Abramović, entranced. By the final days, the festival had a “don’t miss this” buzz. Performa had keyed into the FOMO that was later to grip the millennial generation.

2007
Christian Jankowski’s Rooftop Routine (2007), commissioned for Performa 07. Photo: Paula Court. Courtesy of Performa.
If Performa 05 seemed conjured out of thin air, by November 2007, the city and the artistic community were eagerly anticipating an even larger program. But the second edition went on to establish a recurring theme in Performa history: the big names often don’t end up doing the most important pieces.
Take the marquee event, Francesco Vezzoli’s interpretation of Pirandello’s 1917 play Right You Are (If You Think You Are), with a glamorous cast topped by Cate Blanchett. But, as its premiere was delayed into the night, art-world swells queued up on Fifth Avenue, cranky and smoking like Magritte chimneys (it was, after all, 2007). The New York Times dubbed the show “court entertainment in the guise of suburban dinner theater.”
Instead, celebrity-free pieces captivated: a claymation horror film by Nathalie Djurberg and the silly, delirious Rooftop Routine. On roofs in lower Manhattan, some two dozen performers spun in hula hoops in a piece choreographed by video artist Christian Jankowski. Was it just by chance that those very same rooftops had given New Yorkers a searing view of the Twin Towers four years earlier? The piece reclaimed those spaces. And the ebullient, wacky hula-hooping image became emblematic of Performa.

2009
Jennifer Rubell, Creation, the Performa 09 opening night benefit dinner. Photo: Paula Court. Courtesy of Performa.
By its third iteration, everybody wanted in: Guy Ben-Ner, Wangechi Mutu, Joan Jonas, and The Bruce High Quality Foundation were just a handful of participants. This year, Performa notched more than 150 artists and 80 locations.
But there was a problem: the Great Recession. Performa 09’s opening gala—designed by artist and “eventist” Jennifer Rubell—needed to skew spectacular, not glamorous. So, at Dia:Chelsea, hundreds of BBQ ribs sat in a heap under a dripping honeycomb as superstar chef Mario Batali ladled on sauce. The bar, inside a freight elevator, was self-serve. Guests commuted between floors deemed “heaven” and “hell.” Hell featured dessert and Jeff Koons: full-size replicas of his famous stainless-steel rabbit, made of chocolate.
The golden ticket was for Mike Kelley’s Day Is Done. Inspired by yearbook photos, it was one of Performa’s more successful dance pieces. The show combined a game of basketball, a horn section and, curiously but arrestingly, a parade of shiny, naked men carrying ladders.

2011
Ragnar Kjartansson, Bliss (2011), commissioned for Performa 11. Photo: Paula Court. Courtesy of Performa.
By now, Performa had found its groove, if not a fixed formula: a mix of dissonance and dissidents, visual opulence, inside jokes, nudity, and absurdity. Not all works were successful by any means. But this year Performa had possibly its greatest: the hypnotic Bliss.
“Hypnotic” is an overused adjective in the art world, but Ragnar Kjartansson’s show was exactly that—even narcotic. Simply put, a small group of opera singers and musicians performed the last three minutes of the gorgeous final aria of The Marriage of Figaro—again and again and again, for 12 hours. An act of beauty, insanity, will, and stamina, it was a cultural car crash scored by Mozart, with some performers seemingly running out of breath, others serving water to exhausted colleagues, some bouncing the melodies back and forth to each other as one singer seemed on the verge of giving up. Audience members sat for hours, and then returned for more.

2013
Rashid Johnson, Dutchman (2013), commissioned for Performa 13. Photo: Paula Court. Courtesy of Performa.
This was the year that performance art hit the mainstream, as Jay-Z danced with Goldberg and Abramović in a video. Performa inaugurated global “pavilions.” And Rashid Johnson tackled his first performance piece, a production of Amiri Baraka’s 1960s-era play Dutchman. 
A sauna in a Lower East Side bathhouse was used to replicate the tight quarters of a subway car. Wrapped in bath towels and slicked with sweat, art lovers gathered for a searing staging of the work in which a chat between a Black man and a white woman turns brutal.
Dutchman changed the course of Johnson’s career, Goldberg noted, putting him “in a new framework”: He decided he liked bigger projects.

2015
Edgar Arceneaux, Until, Until, Until… (2015), commissioned for Performa 15 and Malcolm McLaren Award winner. Photo: Paula Court. Courtesy of Performa.
This year’s most memorable piece, by artist Edgar Arceneaux, righted a historical wrong. In 1981, Broadway and Roots star Ben Vereen was invited to appear at the Reagan inauguration. His act was two-part, and controversial. In the first part, saluting the great black vaudeville performer Bert Williams, Vereen took the stage in blackface and belted a boisterous “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee.” In the second part, Vereen, still as Williams, acted out an attempt to buy drinks for cheering members of the audience—but, in the piece, he was denied service.
ABC did not air the second half. Instead, it cut to commercial, then to Donny and Marie Osmond. Vereen was sharply criticized in the Black community for indulging in minstrelsy for seemingly little reason. Arceneaux’s play Until, Until, Until… restaged Vereen’s full performance. It was heartbreakingly beautiful.

2017
Threeasfour, Fest (2013). Presented by the Jewish Museum for Performa 13. Photo by Chani Bockwinkel, courtesy of Performa.
threeASFOUR, Fest (2013), presented by the Jewish Museum for Performa 13. Photo: Chani Bockwinkel. Courtesy of Performa.
South African artist William Kentridge, a Performa veteran, this time took the stage with a roar. His piece was based on a Dadaist work presented by Kurt Schwitters in 1932. Ursonate (primal sonata)’s series of nonsense sounds were transformed into a passionate lecture, opera, and conversation. Barbara Kruger, not to be outdone, took over a skate park on the Lower East Side.
More intimate was fashion collective threeASFOUR’s Fest. I brought, with some trepidation, my elderly aunt—for decades a seamstress in New York’s fashion business—to the show. In a series of actions around clothing that almost seemed religious, the audience engaged in ritual hand-washing, then pulled chunks of freshly baked bread from the performers’ outfits and shared the food with them. My aunt, 97, was mesmerized.

2019
Paul Pfeiffer, University of Georgia Redcoat Band Live (2019), commissioned for Performa 19. Photo: Paula Court. Courtesy of Performa.
Performa is rarely visually subtle, and this year, The Immortals, artist Samson Young’s interpretation of a Chinese folk tale, employed giant construction cranes lit in rainbow colors.
Paul Pfeiffer’s Redcoat Marching Band/R, staged at Harlem’s legendary Apollo Theater, was even louder. Presenting a “soundtrack to one of America’s most popular mass rituals”—the football game—Pfeiffer orchestrated an unlikely juxtaposition. Fifty members of the University of Georgia band came playing and marching into the Apollo as, onscreen, the rest of the 400-member troupe joined in back in the university’s stadium.
There were scattered technical and sound problems. But one look at the nutty, glorious delight and raw confusion on the faces of the trumpet-blowing Georgia students swarming the Apollo was unforgettable.

2021
Sara Cwynar, Sahara from SSENSE.com (As Young as You Feel) (2020). Image courtesy of the artist
This year, Covid-19 has curtailed the crew to mostly U.S. artists, and trimmed the number of commissions to eight, all outside. They are staged at some of New York’s legendary locations: Top of the Rock, the Brooklyn Bridge, and Rockaway Beach among them. A telethon kicks off October 12. Everything will be streamed live.
This year’s slate includes commissions from Tschabalala Self, who wrote a play to be enacted at Jackie Robinson Park in front of sets she painted. Erika Beckman will mount an elaborate, anticapitalist Jack and the Beanstalk in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. Sara Cwynar offers a searing look at the advertising industry, staged within a shuttered Fifth Avenue retailer. Kevin Beasley will create a sound sculpture of, and on, the Lower East Side’s Orchard and Rivington Streets.
Goldberg told Artnet News that when Performa first began, “New York was the star of the show, it couldn’t be anything else.” That fondness and focus returns this year—and, one hopes, so does the glorious “what-the-hell-is-going-on-here?” absurdity.

Performa 21 takes place October 12–31, at various venues throughout New York City and online.
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From the opalescent glazes of the self-proclaimed Mad Potter of Biloxi George Ohr to the art collective Gelitin’s simulation of sex with raw clay, ceramics have long been a site of avant-garde experimentation. Now, “Clay Pop,” a group show curated by Alia Williams at Jeffrey Deitch in New York, follows a cohort of artists pushing the medium forward in strange, wonderful new directions.
For the 36 artists included in the show, “the range of influences encompasses vernacular commercial imagery and artistic sources from African American assemblage to Walt Disney,” and everything in between, according to a statement from the gallery.
Seth Bogart’s How to Get Rid of Pimples, Valley of the Dolls, Hollywood Babylon, and DRUGS (all 2021). Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch.
Many of the works on view seem to recreate everyday objects, but if done by a mad scientist. Seth Bogard’s ceramics take the shape of well-loved paperbacks with lightly tattered dog-eared pages.
Then there’s Sally Saul’s forlorn-looking woman who’s a little rough around the edges. It reminds us of real life, but messier, and more fun to look at.
“Clay Pop,” curated by Alia Williams, is on view at Jeffrey Deitch, 18 Wooster Street, through October 30. See more pictures from the show below.
Masato Mori, Bamboo Dance (2021). Photo: Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch.
Installation view, “Clay Pop” at Jeffrey Deitch, New York. Photo: Genevieve Hanson.
Rubi Neri, Clay Pop (2021). Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
Installation view, “Clay Pop” at Jeffrey Deitch, New York. Photo: Genevieve Hanson.
Installation view, “Clay Pop” at Jeffrey Deitch, New York. Photo: Genevieve Hanson.
Installation view, “Clay Pop” at Jeffrey Deitch, New York. Photo: Genevieve Hanson.
Genesis Belanger, Good Guy (2021) [detail]. Photo: Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
Jessica Stoller, Untitled (embrace) (2021). Photo: Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
Heidi Lau, Play I and Play II (2021). Photo: Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
Devin B. Johnson, Adornment V (In which it was grown over), (2021). Photo: Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, Untitled (2020). Courtesy the artist and kaufmann repetto.
Melvino Garetti, It’s Only a Matter of Time…I Haven’t Whipped Any Ass Around Here (2020). Photo: Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
Seth Bogard, Valley of the Dolls (2021). Photo by Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
Sharif Farrag, Big Dog (Guardian), (2021). Photo by Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
Katie Stout, Frog Rider (2021). Photo: Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
Bari Ziperstein, Farm Labor: Handwork + Technology (2021). Photo by Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
Sally Saul, Thinking Things Over (2021). Photo by Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
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