Background
Mary Tillman Smith was born in 1904, in Brookhaven, Mississippi, United States, to an African-American sharecropping family. She grew up in the town of Martinville and was the third of thirteen children.
1987
Mary Tillman Smith. Photo by William Arnett, 1987.
1987
Mary Tillman Smith. Photo by William Arnett, 1987.
1987
Mary Tillman Smith. Photo by William Arnett, 1987.
1987
Mary Tillman Smith. Photo by William Arnett, 1987.
Mary Tillman Smith in her house.
Mary Tillman Smith was born in 1904, in Brookhaven, Mississippi, United States, to an African-American sharecropping family. She grew up in the town of Martinville and was the third of thirteen children.
As Mary had a serious hearing impairment, school was consequently a strain on her. She was able to get to the fifth grade, a significant accomplishment, considering that the educational limit even for no handicapped blacks in the area was seventh or eighth grade. As a child, Smith preferred to stay apart from her siblings and draw in the dust on her own.
While still in her teens, after divorcing her first husband, Mary went to work for a white family in Wesson, a few miles from Martinville, where she lived in their house. Mary washed, cooked and cleaned for them. She remained with them for a few years. Later, after settling down in Hazelhurst, Mississippi, Mary worked on the land and as a cook till her retirement in around 1978.
As for her artistic career, Mary started to paint in the late 1970's. She worked in her home and garden, which she made into an outdoor art environment. Mary painted figures on corrugated tin and mounted the portraits on her fence, her dog pen, or her son's garage. In the mid-1980's, her vegetable garden included scarecrows, made of tin, bicycle parts, paint can lids and painted faces.
After a stroke in 1985, Smith produced only two paintings a day. As her work output slowed, she earned less money and she stopped painting in 1991. Mary stood her ground until 1995, when she died penniless at the age of ninety-one.
Mary's works were shown at many exhibitions, including "Outside the Mainstream: Folk Art in Our Time", High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia (1988), "Treasures To Go", traveling exhibition, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. (from January 2000 to May 2003), "Art brut live", DOX — Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague (2015), "Revelations: Art from the African American South, de Young", Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco (2017) and many others.
Mary often created her work with the use of easily available materials, such as corrugated tin and plywood. Early in her career, she applied only one or two colors of paint. One of Smith's most preferred themes was to create portraits of her family, friends and neighbors. Some of her works depict figures with their arms upraised, and these paintings are often identified with ecstasy or spiritual enlightenment.
Later in her career, Smith created geometric compositions, applying different colors and featuring interesting juxtapositions of positive and negative space. Some her works featured text.
Also, by means of her works, Mary expressed her love for Jesus. She painted numerous portraits of him and conceived a variety of ways to depict the Christian Trinity.
Smith was fascinated by patterns and designs, which became, for her, conveyors of information. She could present an idea to the world by writing a slogan on a painting. Or she could express the same sentiments with a script like a constellation of tin or wood fragments. Or she could identify the thought with her private and altogether consistent symbolism: the circle within a circle; or a sunburst like aura; or a series of vertical or horizontal strips; or a seemingly random dot pattern; or words, that were not words at all, but were words — for example, Buzyk = Jesus (on one occasion).
Painted and written scripts and slogans were also an integral part of her oeuvre. Though Smith was capable of legible printing and cursive writing, she wrote on many of her paintings with inscriptions, that were seemingly unintelligible.
Written inscriptions, vigorous brushwork and virtuoso color were not her only expressive tools — Mary 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 by juxtapositions of the spiritual and the mundane. These dresses reflected her every mood and thought.
Quotations: "Anybody, that tells that big a lie, I can’t stay with."
An honest, unassuming woman, who made friends easily and who wore her humility as a badge, Mary frequently shared her wisdom with her visitors.
Physical Characteristics: Since Mary was extremely hard of hearing, her ability to communicate with people around her was limited. In 1985, Smith suffered a stroke, that left her speech and writing impaired.
Quotes from others about the person
"In the South there were many women, who labored as farm hands. Meeting Ms. Smith, witnessing her handiwork and sensitivity and her praising the Lord in her everyday actions, touched me. I could feel all that power she put into her work. She had a hard life... She painted so boldly and on any material she had. She surrounded herself and her yard with her work. She couldn’t hear very well, but she could say whatever she needed to say with a paintbrush and she had a smile, that would melt your heart." — Lonnie Holley, an artist and musciain
In 1922, Mary left home and entered into a brief marriage with a man, named Gus Williams. The marriage lasted two months. After she caught him deceiving her, she left. Later, in the 1930's, Smith married John Smith, a sharecropper. However, her second marriage also didn't last long.
After the divorce with her second husband, Mary settled down in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, to live on her own. In 1941, she gave birth to her son, Sheridan L. Major, though she did not marry his father. Mary brought her only son up alone.