This World Is Not My Own review – fascinating study of black artist Nellie Mae Rowe

Rowe escaped destitution through art in 20th century Atlanta in this busy but intriguing story of an unsung artist who made beauty from the mundane

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.

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