Mary Tillman Smith

Mary Tillman Smith (1904–1995) was a self-taught painter of the American South who lived and worked in Mississippi most of her life. She created bold, colorful, and expressive paintings, usually using house paint on wood or tin. Her work consists of highly stylized figures in strong colors, often with animating dots and dashes, alongside sometimes cryptically abstracted texts laid upon monochrome contrasting background colors. Her work is shown throughout the world and collected by museums, most famously by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as numerous other museums including the High Museum of Art in Atlanta; the de Young Museum of Art in San Francisco; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Birmingham Museum of Art; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum; as well as the collections of Tufts University, Willamette University, and the University of Mississippi. She has received solo shows at galleries in the United States and Europe, and has been included in numerous group shows. She is considered a Southern self-taught artist, a group that includes Thornton Dial and Nellie Mae Rowe. Her work was heavily promoted by the curator and collector William Arnett.

Life Smith was the daughter of sharecroppers. Smith was the third of thirteen children and at an early age was identified as deaf. She completed a fifth-grade education, despite the isolation and loneliness that came with not having access to the hearing world around her. Throughout her childhood, Smith "found an outlet in drawing."

In 1985, Smith suffered a stroke that left her speech and writing impaired. She was slowed down to producing only two pieces of work a day after her stroke. She died in 1995. Her work was also very personal in nature. One of her favorite themes was to paint portraits of family, friends and neighbors.

"... As with all advanced improvisation, Smith's was never an unmodulated, let-it-all-hang-out, instinctual process, but rather a mixing of careful planning with retrospective and prospective painterly performance–an act of looking back (in time or space) and looking forward at the painting. One untitled work contains sequential applications of black paint, then orange, then more black, and then red paint. Their effect restrains the orange, the piece's most aggressive color. A resulting tension between the black and the hot colors is tightened by the use of black both to underpaint and to partially efface the orange figures. Notice as well that all five faces’ features are created with different combinations of colors. Written inscriptions, vigorous brushwork, and virtuoso color were not her only expressive tools; she also could dress her message. An interesting relationship existed between Smith's wardrobe and her art. In her closet, Smith kept an extensive dress collection defined, as was her yard, by juxtapositions of the spiritual and the mundane. These dresses reflected her every mood and thought. They hung in her closet, compartmentalized, sacred and profane; quiet, solemn spirituals sung by Marian Anderson; boisterous celebrations of life by Louis Armstrong, Little Richard, B.B. King. When she felt pious or humble, when she would draw a picture of a simple little house with a tiny lone occupant and accompany it with a statement of ultimate humility—"My name is someone. The Lord for me he no”—or when she would paint Christ surrounded by spots of blood, she would dress in white–the traditional domestic servant's outfit (it was called a “uniform”) or a nurse's attire—to serve God or to try to heal us all. When she painted a portrait of a friend with orange and green house paint, or other lively multicolor tributes to her dogs and cats, or when she felt like chastising us for our shortcomings (“On face is all righ to face wont do” or “The Lord know ho is good and ho is baid and ho tells lies”), she came out in explosions of color, flashing, zigzagging, speaking her piece, standing her ground. She stood her ground until 1995, when she died at the age of ninety-one. A poor, black, uneducated, hearing-impaired daughter of a sharecropper had become a major artist exhibited and collected throughout the United States..." - William Arnett, founder of the Souls Grown Deep foundation.

Selected exhibitions Called To Create: Black Artists of the American South, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, September 18, 2022 – March 26, 2023, curated by Harry Cooper.