Around 1978 Mary T. Smith began to transform the one-acre yard surrounding her home in the town of Hazelhurst, Mississippi, into a highly public form of spiritual autobiography. Here she has catalogued the revelations and figures of her inner life. She created her outdoor portrait gallery on pieces of plywood and corrugated tin, using only one or two colors for each picture. Some of the pictures represent farm animals, but most contain images of local people, sometimes allegorized, such as “Mr. Beg” (Big), and other human figures rendered in an elemental style that recalls West African ceremonial masks. These powerful presences are interspersed with designs, signs, and slogans that proclaim Mary T. Smith’s relation to God and the world.
Before the world began to “see” her through her art, Smith worked as a tenant farmer, gardener, and household domestic. She married twice. She began artistic work in earnest – to “tidy up her yard” as she says – after she retired in the mid 1970s. Since then, Smith has been indefatigable in creating, maintaining, and encouraging others to visit the site, though recently many of her paintings have been sold or removed from the yard. In 1985 Smith suffered a stroke; her speech and writing were impaired, but this only temporarily interfered with her artistic output of up to two pictures a day.
