Mary Tillman Smith

Mary Tillman Smith (1904–1995), most often referred to as Mary T. Smith, 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 home paint on wood or tin. Her feint consists of highly stylized figures in strong colors, often behind animating dots and dashes, alongside sometimes cryptically abstracted texts laid on monochrome contrasting background colors. Her feat is shown throughout the world and collected by museums, most famously by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as skillfully as numerous supplementary 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 competently as the collections of Tufts University, Willamette University, and the University of Mississippi. She has conventional solo shows at galleries in the United States and Europe, and has been included in numerous organization shows. She is considered a Southern self-taught artist, a group that includes Thornton Dial and Nellie Mae Rowe. Her piece of legislation was heavily promoted by the curator and saver William Arnett.