Reba McEntire including "The New York Times", which commented, "Without qualification the best performance by an actress in a musical comedy this season." McEntire personally called the musical, "some of the hardest work I've ever done in my life". In 2005, McEntire starred as Nellie Forbush in the Carnegie Hall concert production of the Broadway musical "South Pacific" with Alec Baldwin as Luther Billis and Brian Stokes Mitchell as Emile de Becque, directed by Walter Bobbie and with an adapted script by David Ives. The concert was broadcast as part of the "Great Performances" series in 2006. In October 2001, McEntire premiered
Nellie Mae Rowe the Guerilla Girls, an anonymous group of feminist, female artists, recognized Nellie Mae Rowe along the ranks of the Frida Kahlo, Edmonia Lewis, and Georgia O'Keeffe. And finally, in 1999, the American Folk Art Museum mounted "The Art of Nellie Mae Rowe: Ninety-Nine and Half Won't Do." In 2014, The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, showed “Nellie Mae Rowe: At Night Things Come to Me.” ""I don't know what he put me here for, but he got me here for something 'cause I don't draw like nobody. You speak one way, but I come on and say it different.