Della Wells

b. 1951 · Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA

Milwaukee’s collage storyteller started making art at forty-two and built Mamboland, a paper country where Black women hold all the power.

The life

Wells was born in Milwaukee in 1951. As a child she invented stories and characters from her mother’s recollections of growing up in North Carolina between the 1920s and 1940s, an escape from an unstable family life shaped by her mother’s mental illness. She began making art in earnest at forty-two and has since produced over two thousand works. She founded the artists’ advocacy group ABEA in 2004, was named Milwaukee’s Artist of the Year in 2016, and her life inspired the play Don’t Tell Me I Can’t Fly, staged at the Kennedy Center.

The work

Collage above all, alongside drawings, folk-art dolls and collaborative quilts. Most of her torn-paper scenes are set in Mamboland, an invented country where Black women rule and hold the strength to counter oppression and cultural erasure, woven through with personal folklore and subtle symbols from the civil rights struggle. Her work shows across America and Europe, presented at the Outsider Art Fair by Milwaukee’s Portrait Society Gallery.

Why we love them

She turned a hard childhood’s escape hatch into a sovereign country with its own citizens. Entry requirements: scissors and nerve.

Go deeper

• Della Wells at the Outsider Art Fair
• Portrait Society Gallery
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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