MAMA-Girl

Photographs by Mark Atkinson

“If my hand can’t get in the glue, I’m in trouble.” MAMA-Girl

On view through May 10, 2025, at Old Dominion University’s Baron and Ellin Gordon Art Galleries in Norfolk, Va., is the exhibition MAMA-Girl!, honoring the life and work of Eastern Shore artist and pastor Mary Elizabeth “MAMA-Girl” Onley (b. 1953 – d. 2018). The show features a diverse collection of some 150 artworks and objects from her studio, along with sounds from her work environments, never-before-seen video footage, her studio tools, and autobiographical art books and handwritten sermons, generously shared with the public by more than a dozen lenders from Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina.

I’ve been asked by many why I chose to create a MAMA-Girl exhibition, and the answer is quite mystical. It has been an experience that I did not expect and that still holds great meaning. When I began working at ODU as Executive Director for the Arts in 2015, longtime art professor Ken Daley mentioned that an artist called “MAMA-Girl” had visited campus in the past to give workshops. I was curious and found TV station WHRO’s eight-minute Curate episode and fell in love with her on the spot. MAMA-Girl was gregarious, free, funny, creative, spiritual, and deep, and she reminded me of my mom and felt at once like family.

Fast-forward an incredibly busy eight years, during which I pursued nothing MAMA-Girl related, and she just started being increasingly on my mind. At a point when I was thinking of her daily, the phone rang. I answered, and my friend Andy Fine said, “Cullen, I think we ought to do a MAMA-Girl exhibit.” “Funny you should say that,” I replied. I would not learn until later that I wouldn’t get to meet MAMA-Girl, as she had died several years prior.

The Fines connected me with other collectors whom they knew, and those collectors connected me with others. I reached out to MAMA-Girl’s daughter and son, and we ran public promotions inviting all collectors to contact us. There were bumps in the road along the way, but I didn’t feel that this was something we should give up on.

While in the deepest part of working on the show, my body started waking at 3:30 in the mornings, and I didn’t know why. MAMA-Girl’s daughter Sandra Reid-White said, “That was her time of the morning. Always the early bird.” David Rogers, MAMA-Girl’s son, who formally apprenticed with her through the Virginia Folk-life Program, said, “She chose you.” So, I accepted it and tried to be open and listen and feel what she wanted in the show. I wept writing labels while listening to early-morning crickets like what she heard when she rose for gathering her crew to work in the fields. She endured so much in her life and persevered like a champion.

She was called “MAMA-Girl” as a child by her grandmother and grew up on the Eastern Shore of Virginia in the town of Painter, harvesting crops with her grandparents and cousins, and enjoying being outdoors, sharing family time, earning money, and meeting new people in Accomack County, Northampton County, and Maryland. Allergies and seizures prevented her from retaining the information that she needed for completing schoolwork, so she dropped out of 10th grade at 18 years of age.

Crops that MAMA-Girl picked in the fields over the course of decades included cabbage, cucumber, pepper, radish, strawberry, string bean, squash, white potato, and many varieties of greens – collard, kale, mustard, spinach, Swiss chard, and turnip. She also planted tomato and set out sprouts of sweet potato. She was a strategic thinker who earned recognition for her skill as a farm-crew leader, competing with her workers to see who could pick the most. Some on her crew liked excessive chitchat, and in their distracted state they would miss crops in their rows. MAMA-Girl later went behind them with her children and picked what was left, adding to her yield.

She would go on to bring such shrewdness into her art business, and it served her well. Although she excelled tremendously at working in the fields, health problems thwarted those efforts, too. Her seizures in the fields became so severe that fellow workers thought she had died. She could hear them but could not respond. MAMA-Girl described not recognizing the spirit in the fields, where she had prowess in her work. It wasn’t until she lost that livelihood and didn’t know what to do with her life that she invited the spirit’s guidance. After a time in Virginia Beach Psychiatric Center, she asked her guiding spirit to give her something that no one had ever done, and she received the beginning of an answer – newspaper.

Learning through trial and error while also learning to listen increasingly to that spirit, she endured the skepticism and discouragement of naysayers. Yet, with the encouragement from others, MAMA-Girl went on to win the hearts of art collectors across the country and beyond. She also achieved financial freedom in the process.

MAMA-Girl often side-eyed her surroundings, staying aware of all around her. She had a loving way, a protective nature, and she also could be fierce. When she was a small child, other children would run and ask her to break up quarrels, and she did. She defended herself from sexual predators and threatened to end the lives of transient fieldworkers when they brought drugs around her children. In Virginia Beach Psychiatric Center, fellow patients gathered behind her when a “big, tall, and healthy” man began breaking glass with his fists. “You can save me,” a woman said to MAMA-Girl, who talked with the man. He backed off.

Part of her artist origin story lies with gallerist, artisan, and nationally recognized textile designer Mary Miller. After MAMA-Girl began making pieces, her daughter Sandra’s home was filling up with them, and it became clear that something needed to happen. So, Sandra booked a booth at a summer beach-front street fair in Cape Charles, Va.

Mary Miller writes of Mary Onley, “She sat with some friends under a canopy with a fantastically colorful array of paper sculptures – people and animals and watermelons and biblical scenes. And there was an anatomically correct milk cow, all black and white and ready for the milking barn. We chatted a bit, looked at everything. Smiles all around. It didn’t take more than five minutes to decide that the cow was coming home with us. We were halfway through a decades-long career in fine crafts, and we had seen a lot of wonderful work. We knew that the creator of the black and white cow was not only an artist, but a creator who was fully immersed and comfortable in the world that was her inspiration.

“We bought the cow, and Mary told us that this was the very first sculpture to be sold! We knew it would not be the last. After more conversation, and explaining our professional life, we asked if she’d like to spend some time with us and talk about setting up a business for her work. A few days later she called, and we arranged to sit around our dining room table with her family and help get her show on the road. Business licenses, sales tax collections, tax deductions, copyrights, record keeping, preparing slides and promotional photos, creating a display, all learned in record time. Then came the matter of naming the business. There was much silence. I asked Mary if her family had a pet name for her. More silence. Finally, it came out – they had called her MAMA-Girl since she was little. We knew the name was perfect for the world she created with her work. She shyly agreed. And Mary Onley became MAMA-Girl, the artist. The rest is a wonderful history of Mary’s art being shared with the world. Our gift was watching it happen.”

MAMA-Girl said she knew she was doing something but did not know that it was art. Mary Miller told her that it was good art. MAMA-Girl was surprised that Mary wanted to buy something, and throughout her art career she never lost that sense of surprise each time a customer made a purchase. She originally named her brand “MAMA-Girl African American Folk Art” and in time omitted the African American designation as she had Native American ancestry on her father’s side and because her inclusive orientation transcended notions of race.

Much of her work reflected her lived experiences. She had some relationship deprivation, as she was an only child, and her parents were not around. She always wanted a family and did have four children of her own and raised two other children as well. Many pieces that she made were of mothers and children, and in various paintings she depicted females with different skin colors assembled under or around or in a tree, which may convey nurturing and unifying diverse communities and families inspired by her visions. Still other works show groups of people coexisting peacefully in different contexts.

Her Grandma Mae raised her and had chickens and a clam-shell driveway. Kids being naughty would toss shells to make the chickens leap into the air. This later would become a sculpture. Long-legged roosters behaved like guard dogs in the yard, and MAMA-Girl’s children never got to eat young chickens but did have chicken soup made with old chickens. MAMA-Girl’s grandfather, Paul, raised pigs, and in an early piece she drew these figures before painting them. Eventually she became comfortable painting freehand. MAMA-Girl loved flowers and beautifying her yard. She made centerpiece bouquet sculptures and later favored individual flowers when her time was limited.

Virginia’s Eastern Shore has bounties of land and sea – among them, oysters. Shown in the exhibition is a sculpture of skilled workers shucking oysters. By looking at the bodies and facial expressions in the piece, with its great attention to detail, one can begin to get a sense of a social scene. Working near one another allowed for camaraderie, gossip, and, despite the dirty nature of the work, the attempts at outdoing one another with stylish clothing. Different personality types often were present at the table, including the comedian, the fighter, the one who slept around, the wholesome one, and the alcoholic, nipping (at times not so) secretly throughout the shift.

In creating her works, specific events or interactions further inspired the inclusion of particular animals. She occasionally picked crab meat before heading to the fields to pick vegetables. Working for Obediah Sample (b. 1939 – d. 2024), she and other crab pickers were paid by the pound. One piece in the show depicts a private order, with professional pickers working at a residence. Prominent farmer John Henry “Jackie” Duer III (b. 1934 – d. 2020) offered a black-and-white cat named Rock to MAMA-Girl. Fearful of cats, she still had compassion and adopted Rock even though he had scratched Jackie’s wife. MAMA-Girl began observing Rock’s poses and movements and eventually grew to love sculpting and painting cats. “I’m scared of them,” she always maintained.

Blue Heron Realty Company asked MAMA-Girl to make a blue heron. She then added these river-fishing birds to her portrayals of life on the Eastern Shore, and they sold well. She saw Belted Galloway cows while at the Fearrington Folk Art Show in North Carolina and took to painting and sculpting them. She also felt inspired by the town there and wanted a town of her own, “Colorsville.”         Mornings in the fields came with sounds of bullfrogs in nearby irrigation ponds, said by elders to call the rains. When her work was in demand, she had to find ways of streamlining her processes and producing more pieces. She would make the frogs ten at a time, using different base colors, then painting spots – older frogs with more spots, and younger ones with fewer spots. Working outdoors and in the sunlight helped glue and paint dry fast, allowing her to speed production.

Her work also draws from the mystical and spiritual, beyond Christianity. An African woman approached at an event and said she hadn’t realized that Mami Wata was in America. MAMA-Girl was a vessel of this powerful female water spirit, the woman declared. MAMA-Girl’s spirit told her to make a mermaid.

Some current events found their way into MAMA-Girl’s work as well. She was afraid that the United States would not accept a Black president, but she gradually grew excited about the possibility and, in her way, painted it into existence prior to the 2008 election by portraying the White House, then adding the Obama family occupying it along with a dog and watermelon trees. She continued making variations on this theme following the election. One of these Obama Family paintings is in the collection of Child Savers, a mental health and child development center in Richmond, Va.

Perhaps the single most bounteous visual element in MAMA-Girl’s body of work is watermelon. Raised on agricultural land, she spat watermelon seeds onto the ground and had opportunities to see that what had come out of her mouth was growing into something alive, nourishing, and reproductive. For her, conversation was like this, too. Planting word seeds in other people was her calling, and she did that through selling art in person and through preaching. Watermelon chickens, cats, fish, suns, angels, people, cake, tombstones, flowers, vines, trees of life, and plain watermelon slices – each of these appear in the exhibition.

Early on in her art career, MAMA-Girl’s husband would bring wire clothes hangers home for use as structural supports in sculptures, but after she badly punctured the palm of her right hand with the tip of a hanger, she abandoned that method. “I’ll never forget that hole,” she said. She also abandoned traditional papier-mâché ingredients including flour because they attracted pests. “Bring it to my hands,” she prayed, asking the spirit to reveal techniques that she should use. “I’ll do what you say, and go where you send me.” In time, she was traveling and filling orders across the country and beyond, meeting people and making good money. She said that what was most exciting to her was seeing people smile and feel joy.

Nature’s uncompromising ways showed her that she needed to improve her construction methods. When pieces are outdoors in the sun and wind for eight hours on market days, hot glue can melt, and objects can topple and tear. Some early works in the exhibition show signs of deterioration. While she had no one from whom to learn technique, she did receive encouragement from her admirers to keep trying, and she discovered ways of making her pieces physically stronger, such as using a unique support mechanism, and coating dried hot glue with Elmer’s glue. When not in creating mode, she rolled paint-blotted paper towels with a toothpick and filled containers with them and rolled newspaper into dowels to have them ready for her next pieces. The dowel became a key part of her sculptural work, both aesthetically and structurally.

She also did not like to see things go to waste. She painted watermelon men on newspaper wrapped around campaign signs promoting her son, David Rogers, for Sheriff of Accomack County. When a hotel was going out of business and had framed artwork available for the taking, she glued newspaper to the glass and painted on the paper. Time is not wasted if one does the right thing with it, and MAMA-Girl did not believe in sitting idle.

She met many narrow-minded naysayers. “When pigs fly” was a sentiment expressed at the idea of her – a high school dropout and crop picker – transitioning from the fields to a life as a successful artist. Bucking out of that conceptual pen, she found wealth, lived comfortably, and had the freedom to travel the country, vastly widening her customer base and social network. She told people about where she was from and later received visitors at her studio.

She described getting into “a great big fuss” with the spirit telling her to paint a pig green. Finally succumbing, she felt amazed that the pig was the first thing a customer insisted on purchasing the very next day. She resisted customer requests for flying pigs, too, but eventually agreed to try making them.

When chickens weren’t selling well, the spirit told her to put boots on them. Booted chickens sold out. As a manual laborer with no health insurance, MAMA-Girl learned just how essential it was to care for her feet, and she marveled that so many people spent so much time caring for their faces instead. It is interesting to note the number of boots and shoes throughout the exhibition.

The show also includes artifacts of her profession. Inside the front door of her trailer was the art studio. Original artworks occupied the walls, and there was much glue and acrylic paint and newspaper about. Her worktable and chair appear in the exhibition, along with a painted cart on which she would place small finished pieces. Alongside creating pieces from scratch, she painted on surfaces such as coat racks and shelves in her space. A zebra returned by a customer for repair still bears unpainted newspaper, while small crabs reveal that she painted pieces white before adding color. Atop a mannequin is her first attempt at a hat, which she modeled at the Richmond Folk Festival. She also used perforated strips from the edges of dot matrix printer paper to make hats, which accentuated the sprocket holes. Beneath her artist smock are pants, painted at the encouragement of her son Alvin.

At the opposite end of MAMA-Girl’s trailer was her chapel, where she prayed and preached when not preaching at churches. The whereabouts of her pulpit are now unknown, and the exhibited interpretation was made for MAMA-Girl! based on photos and video footage of the original, which she adorned differently over time.

Some of MAMA-Girl’s favorite pieces to make involved stories from the Bible. She portrayed variations of the Garden of Eden, Christ’s final Passover meal in a large upper room, Noah and his ark, and Jonah in the belly of a great fish, among others, often featuring women and Eastern Shore foods such as crabs and watermelon. She made a nearly life-sized “Last Supper” sculpture complete with table, chairs, napkins, utensils, dinnerware, foods, and people. It has eluded our team of sleuths, so if you have information about its location, please let us know!

A Bible passage that resonated deeply with MAMA-Girl was Psalm 100: “Make a joyful noise.” Her great-uncle Al would sing spiritual songs to her as a child, and her grandmother took her to church. There she saw a woman “get happy” and knew she wanted to be just like that woman. Later MAMA-Girl enjoyed partying and was inconsistent in her churchgoing for a time. Her faith grew after her husband died of a massive heart attack in 1999. She listened increasingly to the spirit’s instructions and appreciated choirs and others who made a joyful noise. She also became a licensed Reverend, hand-wrote her sermons and activities, and preached to others. Her certificate of license uses the pronouns him, he, and his. MAMA-Girl endured resistance to the idea of her preaching as both untrained and a woman, but she pursued that calling and said she would have chosen it over art if she’d had her way.

She received commission requests, sometimes for whatever she wanted to make, and at other times on topics of a personal nature. An example of the latter began when prolific folk-art collector Claude Jones III and his wife Jane met MAMA-Girl at an art market. As a surprise for Claude’s birthday, Jane commissioned a sculpture of the Little Grove United Methodist Church where their son was christened. They had lived in Frisco, N.C., across the street from that church. It was built in 1939, in part with wreckage from the 1933 Outer Banks hurricane, one of many storms during the most active Atlantic hurricane season on record.

MAMA-Girl agreed to make the sculpture for Claude. In the interim, Jane fell ill with congestive heart failure, and on the night that the Riverside Hospital doctors in Newport News pronounced her fit to return home, she died.

Grieving, Claude was working with the funeral director the next day when MAMA-Girl called asking for Jane. Claude shared news of Jane’s passing, shocking MAMA-Girl, and MAMA-Girl shared news of finishing the commission, surprising Claude, who raced to the Virginia Beach gallery where she was then, to pay her and collect the piece. It has remained a cherished part of his collection. Later, Claude commissioned pieces titled “Surfer Claude” from every folk artist he knew, including MAMA-Girl, who decided to make both a sculpture and a painting depicting Claude surfing waves.

“I love 3D,” MAMA-Girl said. “Painting pictures? I don’t care that much, but I love 3D. If my hand can’t get in the glue, I’m in trouble.” Toward the end of her life, MAMA-Girl did not have the strength to sculpt, but she drew and started showing eyes as closed. She passed on her business and brand to her apprentice-son, who still makes and sells pieces in her style alongside works of his own design.