By PAT NEWMAN
Staff Writer

The whimsical folk art of Fayetteville-born Nellie Mae Rowe will be exhibited starting this Saturday at the High Museum of Art Downtown Galleries.

“The Art of Nellie Mae Rowe: Ninety-Nine and a Half Won't Do,” is a 90-piece collection of colorful drawings and collages, mixed media sculptures, chewing gum figures and hand-sewn dolls created by the late artist.

Lynn Spriggs, curator of folk art at the High, said the exhibit “gives viewers an opportunity to witness the great spirit of creative celebration with which Rowe lived her life. While she regularly used her works as expressions of play and free invention, Rowe also created each piece with a tremendous sense of purpose,” said Spriggs.

Rowe's most artistic period spanned the last 50 years of her life when she occupied a small house in Vinings, which she decorated inside and out with her original art. Rowe called it her “playhouse.”

Her drawings are described as “highly detailed and vividly colored” and include self portraits, friends, barnyard animals and local personalities. Lee Kogan, exhibition curator explained that Rowe's art derives from the natural world. “It is rooted in regionally based cultural traditions, but comes from the wellspring of her vivid imagination,” said Kogan. “Rowe's creative expression mirrored her life journey, and her perceptions linked seemingly separate realms into a unity of organic forms: heaven and earth; reality and fantasy; spirituality and sensuality; transformation, time and space.”

The title of the exhibit, “Ninety-Nine and Half Won't Do,” comes from a gospel song of the same name. It was sung at Rowe's funeral and according to Kogan, it summed up her credo of living life to the fullest, with energy and without artifice.

“You see a bird, he is way up in the air flying, but when he gets ready to light, he has to come back to the ground. So that's me - I'm on the ground and I'm going to stay here. I may go up a little bit, but I'm not going to fly so high I can't get back to the ground. That is the life I am living,” said Rowe.

The artist was born in Fayetteville July 4, 1900 to Sam and Luella Swanson Williams. According to Kogan, she was raised on a farm in a two-story house that her father, a former slave, rented for his family that consisted of his wife, son and nine daughters. Both parents were craftsmen, her father a basket weaver and her mother a quilter.

Rowe married Ben Wheat at age 16 and moved to Vinings 14 years later. She worked as a domestic most of her life. Wheat died in 1936 and she later married Henry Rowe. They built the house on Paces Ferry Road which would become her “playhouse” and most public display. The Wyndham Hotel now occupies the site of her home, but a small plaque marks the spot where Rowe lived. She died in 1982 at the age of 82.

The High Museum of Folk Art and Photography Galleries are downtown in the Georgia Pacific Center, near the Peachtree Center MARTA station, at 133 Peachtree St. on the corner of John Wesley Dobbs Avenue. The hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday. For information, phone 404-577-6940. Admission to the downtown galleries is free. Rowe's retrospective exhibit runs Nov. 20 through Feb. 26.

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