This winning overview of the life of self-taught black artist Nellie Mae Rowe and her white patron, Judith Alexander, also doubles up as a social history of 20th-century Atlanta, Georgia. It throws up a host of fascinating interconnections, the immediate significance and relevancy of which to Rowe’s actual work is sometimes a bit loose. But with directors Petter Ringbom and Marquise Stillwell getting their own hands messy on the creative front, this frieze of poverty, segregation and artistic self-rescue borrows a good deal of the persuasiveness and energy of its central figure.
Born in 1900 to a former-slave father and a seamstress mother, Rowe escaped destitution through art. She made handcrafted dolls in imitation of the characters around her; vibrant drawings that whirled real life and dreams into Mesoamerican-resembling scenes; and even freaky chewing gum sculptures. But she didn’t devote herself to it full-time until the death of her second husband, which liberated her to fully invest in her fantasia – notably her curiosity-shop of an abode, the “Playhouse”, which became an attraction in her Atlanta exurb.
Rowe was finally acknowledged by the art establishment in the late 1970s when artist turned agent Judith Alexander, a kindred, headstrong spirit, began representing her. The latter’s father was Henry Alexander, a segregationist lawyer once deputised to suppress the 1906 race massacre in the city, and who later tried to discredit Jim Conley, a black Atlantan, in the infamous Mary Phagan murder case that resulted in the antisemitic lynching of its central suspect, Leo Frank. It turns out Conley is distantly related to Rowe; so the artist’s accord with Alexander’s daughter isn’t just an unlikely meeting of worlds, the film implies, but a kind of social amnesty for the city.
Perhaps. Intriguing as it is, there are too many crosscurrents for the film to absorb here (especially the complex issue of how Henry Alexander’s Jewishness and racism intersected, which it skips) while it focuses on Rowe’s story. It’s suggested her art was an Afrofuturist-adjacent construction of an alternate reality to her strife-torn surroundings, but it’s just as true it was deeply rooted in the materials and textures to hand, affirmatively reworking the mundane to her pleasing. As she says: “Something out of nothing.” The directors get into the DIY spirit, compensating for the lack of archive footage with dinkily detailed animations of Rowe and the Playhouse. Rowe’s infectious, unstoppable drive to create shows up her categorisation as “folk artist” as a kind of condescension; she’s clearly an artist, period.
• This World Is Not My Own is at Bertha DocHouse, London, from 24 May
