Timeline

1900

W. E. B. Du Bois curates an exhibition on Black life for the Exposition Universelle that includes data visualizations such as this map detailing Black land ownership in Georgia, which shows that only 1,863 acres of Fayette County where Rowe lived were owned by Black individuals around the time that she was born.

1904

Excerpt from Atlanta Journal-Constitution coverage of the Atlanta Art Association’s charter petition, November 18, 1904.

1906

White mobs attack African Americans in Atlanta, resulting in riots that attract international attention.

1909

Ida B. Wells becomes one of the founding members of the NAACP, established in 1909.

1914

World War I disrupts European immigration to the United States and leads to new economic opportunities for African Americans in urban centers. A period known as the Great Migration (1916–1970) begins as around six million Southern African Americans who are also fleeing the racial terror in the region relocate to the north and west.

1915

The Birth of a Nation is released, contributing to the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, beginning with a cross burning atop Stone Mountain, Georgia.

1915

Jewish American Leo Frank is kidnapped from prison and lynched. Frank’s defense team includes the father of Judith Alexander, the Atlanta gallerist who later champions Rowe.

1917

Flat Rock African Methodist Episcopal Church, the historic congregation adjoining the cemetery where Rowe would eventually be buried, is burned down and subsequently rebuilt.

1924

The first major exhibition of American artists without academic training takes place as Early American Art at The Whitney Studio Club.

1924

A three-year drought begins in Georgia, adding to the devastation of crops wrought by boll weevils and forcing many farmers in communities like Rowe’s native Fayetteville to search for new work.

1925

The Harlem Renaissance—associated with publications such as this special issue of Survey Graphic edited by Alain Locke—flourishes, bringing unprecedented visibility to both historic African and contemporary African American artists.

1930

Another historic drought that lasts through 1931 further devastates Georgia farmers, who are also reeling from the effect of the 1929 stock market crash on cotton prices and bank failures.

1933

Eugene Talmadge, a staunch segregationist and White supremacist who supported the disenfranchisement of African Americans, is elected for his first of three terms as Georgia governor.

1937

William Edmondson, a sculptor from Nashville, Tennessee, becomes the first Black artist to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

1939

The Baltimore Museum of Art hosts one of the first major surveys of contemporary Black artists in the United States, which is attended by more than 12,000 people during its brief two-week run.

1940

The drawings of Montgomery, Alabama, self-taught artist Bill Traylor are displayed at the New South Gallery. Four decades later, the High Museum makes its first major acquisition of work by a Southern self-taught artist with a group of thirty of his drawings.

1943

Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States enters World War II. By the summer of 1943, inequities in the segregated armed forces and war industries lead to racial protests and violence in cities across the country in the early 1940s.

1945

A 1945 report from the Women’s Bureau of the US Department of Labor states that of the 7.5 million Black women working, over a million are—like Rowe—in “domestic and personal service.” The lack of regulation and disproportionate representation of Black women in this industry inspires advocacy from activists such as Claudia Jones, who publishes influential articles such as 1949’s “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!”

1945

Klansmen lynch taxi driver Porter Flournoy, an African American man of Rowe’s generation who also moved to Atlanta after growing up on a farm elsewhere in Georgia. A marker has recently been erected on the site of Flournoy’s murder on Ponce de Leon Avenue.

1946

After voting in the first election in Georgia held without a statewide ban on Black voting, World War II veteran Maceo Snipes is shot by a White man and denied treatment, leading to his death. Days later, two Black couples, Roger and Dorothy Malcom and George and Mae Murray Dorsey, are lynched. These murders make national headlines and devastate Black communities in Georgia, leading seventeen-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. to publish a letter to the editor in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution decrying the immorality and danger of racism.

1952

Atlanta Mayor William B. Hartsfield incorporates Buckhead, the wealthy White community that abuts Rowe’s Vinings house, into Atlanta as a response to how the increasing number of African Americans who moved to Atlanta since the 1930s had caused “white flight” to suburbs such as Buckhead.

1952

A decade after debuting annual exhibitions at Clark Atlanta University that bring unprecedented visibility to Black artists in the city, Hale Woodruff completes his Art of the Negro mural at the Trevor Arnett Library, which canonizes artists and intellectuals of Africa and its diaspora.

1954

The Supreme Court Case Brown v. Board of Education decides that the racial segregation of schools is unconstitutional, although the integration of public schools in Atlanta does not begin until 1961.

1956

Judith Alexander founds her first gallery in Atlanta, showing the work of contemporary artists including Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, and Emma Amos.

1965

The Voting Rights Act is passed, outlawing discriminatory practices adopted especially in Southern states to maintain the disenfranchisement of African Americans after the Civil War. Rowe makes this tribute to voting, despite her skepticism that she could safely or effectively cast her own vote.

1965

The Watts Rebellion unfolds in Los Angeles in August, leading a group of Black artists working there to experiment further with the practices of reuse and assemblage. Among these artists is Betye Saar, who will travel to Atlanta a decade later and visit Rowe.

1968

The Atlanta Memorial Arts Center opens, honoring the memories of the more than one hundred Atlantans who died returning from a cultural tour of Europe in a tragic 1962 plane crash. Gudmund Vigtel, who is hired to helm the High Museum, formalizing its processes and profile as a major Southern museum, begins his twenty-eight-year tenure as director.

1968

Shirley Chisholm is elected as the first Black Congresswoman and, four years later, makes a bid for president, which includes visits to Atlanta. Chisholm’s speeches and articles of this era bring attention to how, beginning from the moment they are born, Black women are dually oppressed by systems of patriarchy and racism.

1968

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, who Rowe had brushed shoulders with in Vinings—Dr. King’s uncle was a preacher there—is murdered. Rowe honors him by keeping the cover of an album commemorating the March on Washington hanging by her bed.

1970

Just as Rowe was declaring her own independence from a lifetime of caring for the well-being and homes of others, activist Dorothy Bolden and the National Domestic Workers Union succeed in establishing Maids’ Honors Day.

1971

Faith Ringgold and other artists establish the Ad Hoc Women’s Art Committee and protest the Whitney Museum of American Art because ninety-five percent of the artists included in its biennial exhibition are men.

1971

Photographers including Judith Alexander Augustine and Melinda Blauvelt begin photographing Rowe and her Playhouse.

1973

Rowe and her Playhouse are featured in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, producing an influx of visitors that leads Rowe to begin keeping a guestbook.

1973

Maynard B. Jackson is elected for his first of three terms, becoming the first Black mayor of Atlanta. In 1982, Rowe is honored alongside Jackson in a ceremony held at Atlanta Symphony Hall.

1976

David Driskell’s Two Centuries of Black American Art, the largest survey of African American art in history, opens at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, traveling to the High in 1977. Although Driskell did not feature Rowe’s work in the exhibition, he importantly included other self-taught artists within his presentation.

1976

Two of Rowe’s drawings are featured in Missing Pieces: Georgia Folk Art, 1770–1976 at the Atlanta Historical Society. This bicentennial exhibition has a significant impact in demonstrating the often overlooked historical folk art of the South as well as introducing contemporary self-taught artists such as Rowe and Howard Finster.

1976

After serving as Georgia’s first governor to govern and run on an antisegregation platform from 1971 to 1975, Jimmy Carter is elected President of the United States.

1978

After seeing Rowe’s dolls in a group exhibition at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (formerly Nexus artists’ cooperative), Judith Alexander commits to representing Rowe and gives Rowe her first solo exhibition in Atlanta.

1979

Rowe experiences air travel for the first time, alighting to New York City to view her one-woman exhibition at the Parsons-Dreyfuss Gallery.

1980

The High Museum of Art purchases this piece by Rowe, making it the first major museum to collect her work. Around this time, Rowe pays her first visit to the High Museum.

1982

Rowe is featured in a one-woman exhibition at Spelman College.

1982

Rowe’s work is presented in the groundbreaking exhibition Black Folk Art in America, 1930–1980, organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, which travels to six other institutions over the course of the next three years.

1982

In her obituary for Rowe, Atlanta art critic Cathy Fox notes how Rowe died “at the peak of her career.”