I hope no one is counting on me to keep them up with culture. I stared at the Times critics' lists of the year's best art, theatre, dance, pop music and so on in Sunday's paper, and my eyes and my ears glazed over.
But then! Right in the middle of "Best Art of 2022" -- holding its own amid Chilean sculptures, Winslow Homer, Buddhist spiritual "power tools," Matisse, and the "Northern Renaissance precision and frugality . . . met by caustic harshness based in Surrealism and American popular culture" of Jim Nutt -- was "Pig on the Expressway."
The best-known of the masterpieces of Nellie Mae Rowe. "Pig on the Expressway," let me tell you, puts an expressway in perspective. It is felt-tip pen and pencil on available paper, which you’d think would fade, but it is in a Nellie Mae Rowe show currently at the Brooklyn Museum, and there it was in the Times, bold as bronze. Nellie Mae Rowe talked to me once. Ever since then she has been all I need to know about the cutting edge.
It was in 1982, shortly before she died at 82. We were in her house, a two-room shack in Vinings, Georgia. She was surrounded by work finished and in progress. "That's a cat standing in a peach," she said. "That one, that's a blue thing I drawed, with long claws. I just drawed the animal. I don't know what he is. But it's him.
"I can just look and see something on the wall. Be so plain to me. And if I got a pencil, I draw it. You know what? Sometimes asleep at night. And using my pencil. Wake up and find what I drawed. People try to tell me what they want me to draw. That ain't on my mind. That's on theirs. I got things on my mind to draw that's different from everybody else's."
She had also sewed rag dolls the size of small people, different from everybody else's rag dolls, and she was saving her chewed gum in coffee cans until there was enough to make chewing-gum figurines.
Cancer had enfeebled her somewhat, but she was still up and around and doing the work. For many years she had sold her paintings for a few dollars -- people would drive by and happen to see some of her overflow -- but she had lived to know that drawings of hers were hanging in major museums around the world, and the Alexander Gallery in Atlanta was getting fair prices for her new work. So she no longer had to live in that shack, but she was determined to, for as long as her health allowed. "It's my playhouse," she said.
I asked her two dumb questions.
“When people started showing up from all over to see your work and pay well for it, were you surprised?
She gave me a startled look.
"Well yeah!" she said.
“Were you pleased?”
She gave me a perhaps even slightly more startled look.
"Well yeah!" she said.
But she went on to a point that was just as obvious to her. "I'm not trying to make a rich person out of myself, Nooo. I'm doing what I love to do. I'm not grasping. I'm living in the Lord's hand.
"People used to call me a hoodooer. Come to have their fortune told. I said, 'I don't know what a hoodooer do. I can't tell you a thing but to do what I do: Go to God.'
"Cause I want to be sho', when he give me my little wings, I'm ready to fly to heaven on them. But I don't think he's ready for me to start flappin' 'em yet.
"My Daddy lived in slavery time. Said they used to feed the people from a trough like the hogs. And now they say people went to the moon. I don't know. We all put on this earth to do different things. Maybe some was put on it to go to the moon. I ain't saying anything against 'em.
"But, you know, you could tie a string around me. Under my arms. And lift me up and stand over there and take a picture and say, 'See. Nellie went to the moon.'
"I don't know. Lot of folks believe it. But I just can't get it in my mind. Not yet. When I do, I’ll draw it."
More, more, more. Strip-mine your old stuff. It's gold.
Her show was the best thing I've seen in (today's) New York, followed closely by a companion show at the BMA by Duke Riley