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Nellie Mae Rowe

Nellie's Birthday

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Harlem Renaissance
Discover works from the groundbreaking exhibition The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, which explores the comprehensive and far-reaching ways in which Black artists portrayed everyday modern life.
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About the Artwork

Nellie's Birthday, 1981. Nellie Mae Rowe. Colored pencil, crayon, and graphite on paper. Gift of Souls Grown Deep Foundation from the William S. Arnett Collection, 2014. © 2022 Nellie Mae Rowe / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.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.

Tags

Nellie Mae Rowe
Animals
Figures
Flowers and Plants
Trees and Shrubs
Portraits
Contemporary
Drawings
Works On Paper
20th Century
American Art
Women Artists
African American Artists
Self Portraits
1980s
Nature
Life
Death
Souls Grown Deep

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Met Custom Prints offers exclusive custom reproductions of artworks in The Met collection. Thanks to gallery-quality materials, we create prints as true to the original work as possible, using strict color management protocols and state-of-the-art printing technology.
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