By Bob Arnold
Mary Tillman Smith, an African American folk artist born in Brookhaven around 1904 or 1905, started painting to decorate her yard in Martinsville community near Hazlehurst and was discovered by curator and collector William Arnette who promoted her work.
The third of 13 children, she lived most of her life in Copiah County, growing up in a hard working sharecropper family that grew tomoatoes, cabbages and beans, which they wrapped, packed and shipped. Her father was able eventually to purchase a house and land.
A speech impairment made it difficult for people to understand her, and she made it only through the fifth grade in school, which in itself was something of an accomplishment since even African Americans without disabilities rarely made it beyond the eighth grade. Excluded by schoolmates from activities, she found an outlet in drawing.
In her teens, Smith left home for a short marriage of a few months to Gus Williams, and then settled down in Wesson, where she did cooking and cleaning for a white family, and had another short-lived marriage with John Smith. a sharecropper who had been shortchanged by $1,000 in a year-end settlement with a landowner. Smith had discovered the problem and made it known to the landowner who told her husband to get rid of his wife.
Smith moved to Hazlehurst, where she had a son (Sheridan L. “Jay Bird” Major). She did not marry her son’s father, but he provided her land and a house, where she started her career in art to decorate her property. She used discarded materials collected from a nearby dump as her canvasses. She painted folkart pictures of people and animals, sometimes accompanied by religious sayings or self-reflections, on used tin scraps and wood. She used strong colors with animating dots and dashes. It was said she sometimes wore clothing to compliment the message of a piece. She filled her yard with her expressions, and constructed out buildings, a table, benches and a make-shift studio. She lined her fence and and space within with colorful folkart paintings and thoughtful sayings.
In 1987, Arnette tried to convince the state to preserve her yard as an important cultural site, but was rebuffed because “Smith was an eccentric whose art did not fall under any folklore category.” Nevertheless, her work has been featured in solo shows in the U.S. and Europe, and her pieces are owned by all the major galleries, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Several universities have her pieces, including Tuft University, Willamette University and the University of Mississippi. Her works have been, and continue to be, showcased in group shows.
Smith’s health declined around 1990 and she painted less frequently. She died penniless in 1995, and her artwork has been removed from her old Martinsville property.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Throughout the 2023 Copiah County Bicentennial year, Wesson News will feature sketches of past and present visual artists, musicians, authors and photographers who are natives of the county. They will be excerpted from Tricia Nelson’s reporting in A Shared History: Copiah County, Mississippi 1823-2023 edited and compiled by Paul C. Cartwright and available through Cartwright for $25 plus $5 for shipping at 3 Waverly Circle, Hattiesburg, MS 39402. Nelson is a Crystal Springs writer who contributes to the Copiah County Monitor.