Untitled (Chewing-Gum Sculpture)

Object Details

Artist/Maker

Nellie Mae Rowe

Date

before 1978

Medium

Chewing gum, plastic flowers, marker, plastic beads, and hair on trivet

Dimensions

9 1/2 x 5 1/2 x 6 inches

Credit

Gift of Judith Alexander

Accession #

2001.7

Chewing gum was a way Rowe had been advised to treat ongoing headaches, which she called “the jumping in her head”; she kept what was left over, kneaded it into creature shapes, and chilled them in the freezer. Their once minty smell is something that artist Betye Saar, who visited Rowe after seeing one of her works at the California Museum of Art and Craft in the late 1970s, still remembers.