Mary Tillman Smith (1904–1995) was a self-taught painter of the American South who lived and worked in Mississippi most of her life.

She is considered a Southern self-taught artist, a group that includes Thornton Dial and Nellie Mae Rowe.

She transformed her home and garden, an area of approximately one acre, into an immersive outdoor environment—a "highly public form of spiritual autobiography.

Smith's later work consisted of geometric compositions with more colors and interesting juxtapositions of positive and negative space.

These textual parts of her work were cryptic and created a "personal painting vocabulary" which "documented and celebrated her world, both religious and secular.

- artist and musician Lonnie Holley [9] "... As with all advanced improvisation, Smith's was never an unmodulated, let-it-all-hang-out, instinctual process, but rather a mixing of careful planning with retrospective and prospective painterly performance–an act of looking back (in time or space) and looking forward at the painting.

They hung in her closet, compartmentalized, sacred and profane; quiet, solemn spirituals sung by Marian Anderson; boisterous celebrations of life by Louis Armstrong, Little Richard, B.B.

When she felt pious or humble, when she would draw a picture of a simple little house with a tiny lone occupant and accompany it with a statement of ultimate humility—"My name is someone.

The Lord for me he no”—or when she would paint Christ surrounded by spots of blood, she would dress in white–the traditional domestic servant's outfit (it was called a “uniform”) or a nurse's attire—to serve God or to try to heal us all.

A poor, black, uneducated, hearing-impaired daughter of a sharecropper had become a major artist exhibited and collected throughout the United States..." - William Arnett, founder of the Souls Grown Deep foundation.

[10] Called To Create: Black Artists of the American South, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, September 18, 2022 – March 26, 2023, curated by Harry Cooper.