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.
