Nellie's Birthday
Nellie Mae Rowe American
Not on view
Filled with bright patterns, verdant vegetation, stylized figures, and somewhat indistinct, hybridized animals, Rowe’s fanciful and exuberant imagery offers a view into a private pictorial universe. Nellie’s Birthday exemplifies her unique conflation of fantasy and autobiography. The artist executed this drawing to commemorate her eighty-first birthday, which, owing to her cancer diagnosis earlier that year, she thought would be her last. On the left side of the composition, a Tree of Life (a recurring motif in her work) appears near a figure looking over a grave marker bearing Rowe’s name.
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