Nellie Mae Rowe

In this self-portrait, Rowe used colorful inks to transform a black-and-white photograph into an otherworldly image in which she resembles a paper doll. The setting of the photo is her home in Vinings, Georgia, which she fashioned into what she called her playhouse.” Visitors to Rowe’s decorated yard encountered a cobbled pathway of bottle caps, homemade dolls, topiary, and Christmas ornaments hung from trees in an idiosyncratic adaptation of the African bottle tree tradition. “I would take nothing and make something out of it,” Rowe often said.