Mary Tillman Smith created hundreds of paintings depicting human figures, and sometimes animals, sometimes surrounded by painted letters spelling out words and phrases. By the early 1970s, Smith was creating and displaying her paintings outdoors in the one-acre yard at her home in Hazlehurst, Mississippi. Some works bear nail holes from how she hung them from fencing and other structures. After years of agricultural work and two marriages that ended in divorce, Smith supported herself and her only son by working as a domestic laborer, cleaning and cooking, and it was during this time that she produced her known paintings.

Smith applied paint to wood and metal surfaces using bold, decisive strokes and vibrant, contrasting colors. An occasional stray brush bristle can be noticed, stuck to the surface of her work. She often painted on repurposed pieces of corrugated metal roofing tile, integrating the uneven surfaces and irregular edges into her balanced, geometrical compositions. Figures appear frontally, often from the waist up. Sometimes multiple figures appear in the same work, or a lone figure may suggest a self-portrait.

Smith was hard of hearing from birth, and by the 1970s she was deaf or experiencing significant hearing loss. She had no contact with the Deaf community, and as a Black child growing up in the South, her access to formal education was limited. She often used unconventional spellings for the words she painted, and she sometimes reversed the direction of letters, such as “S.” This might have been a strategy for allowing the letters and numbers to operate as a code that only she, and perhaps her family members, understood.

Brooke Wyatt, 2024

Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).