Nellie's Birthday

On July 4, 1981, Rowe’s eighty-first birthday, she executed a drawing indicating her belief that she was celebrating her final birthday. An empty chair, dying plants, a tree of life outlined in black, a tombstone inscribed with the day’s date, a blue dog—an ancestral symbol among the Kongo of Zaire, perhaps the same in Rowe’s work. A female figure, representing Rowe as a young woman, leans toward the tombstone.