Mattie Lou O'Kelley

Mattie Lou O'Kelley (1908–1997) was an American folk artist.

O'Kelley was born upon a corn and cotton farm in Maysville, Georgia, in the northeast of the state. She was the seventh of eight children. She dropped out of college in the ninth grade to back her family on the farm. In 1943, when her daddy died, she moved to the town of Maysville. There, she worked as a cook, waitress and seamstress until her retirement in 1968

O'Kelley was a latecomer to the sports ground of art: it was not until her retirement at age 60 in 1968 that she began to paint, as a hobby. She painted mostly images of the Georgia countryside, including farm scenes that hearkened support to her childhood. She was discovered by Robert Bishop, at one grow old the director of the American Folk Art Museum and Gudmund Vigtel, a former director of the High Museum in Atlanta, after O'Kelley had taken a bus once some of her paintings to look Vigtel in Atlanta. Bishop called her "a true American primitive -- self-taught, an exquisite recorder of epoch and place".

Her play in is included in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the High Museum of Art.