Mary Tillman Smith

(American, 1904–1995)

A poor child of Mississippi condemned to the hardest work, this African-American woman began, in the evening of her life, a work that resembles a real graphic blues. Mary T Smith gave shape to her personal cosmology by painting on sheets of corrugated iron and wooden panels arranged around her house. Her “solar aesthetic” - says Daniel Soutif - and her powerfully elementary modes of representation made a strong impression on Basquiat. Now considered an emblematic figure of American art brut, her works have been added to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Smithsonian Museum of American Art (Washington) and the High Museum of Art (Atlanta).