Join B. Brian Foster, an ethnographer and multi-medium storyteller, and Lehigh University Art Galleries (LUAG) Curator of Education, Stacie Brennan for an Art in Dialogue discussion about Nellie Mae Rowe and the importance of her artwork and its intersection with Black southern placemaking practices. After a tour of the exhibit and a short lecture, Brian will join Lehigh Professor of Sociology LaToya Council in conversation. Time will be permitted for audience participation. Light refreshments will be served along with a book signing of Brian’s books I Don’t Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life and The Ghosts of Segregation: American Racism, Hidden in Plain Sight collaborated with award winning photographer Richard Frishman. The exhibit is located at LUAG which is inside the Zoellner Arts Center, first floor. The reception and book signing will take place on the lower level. Both floors are accessible by elevator and stairs. Parking is available in the Zoellner parking garage.
*This is a 5x10 event
About the exhibit
Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe presents an exhibition of 58 works by the self-taught Georgia artist, set against the backdrop of the civil rights movement in the South of the 1960s. Rowe (1900-1982) saw art making as a radical act of self-expression and liberation that took many forms including found-object installations, handmade dolls, chewing-gum sculptures, and hundreds of drawings. The focus of her creative output was a "Playhouse" where she welcomed visitors, situated along a major thoroughfare in Vinings, Georgia.
Organized by the High Museum of Art (Atlanta) from their leading collection of Rowe's art, Really Free is the first major exhibition of her work in more than twenty years. The exhibition offers an unprecedented view of how she cultivated her drawing practice late in life, following the deaths of her second husband and her longtime employer. Starting with colorful and at times simple sketches on found materials, the works move toward her most celebrated, highly complex compositions on paper. Through photographs and other references to her Playhouse, the exhibition is also the first to put her drawings in direct conversation with her art environment.
Support for this exhibition and publication is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Major funding for this exhibition and publication is provided by Judith Alexander and Henry Alexander. Generous support for the national tour is provided by Art Bridges.