The Southern Circuit Film Tour continued last Thursday evening at The Plaza Arts Center, where a small but engaged crowd watched “This World is Not My Own,” the fifth of six scheduled free showings for the 2024-25 schedule.
“This World” revealed the folk art of Atlanta’s Nellie Mae Rowe (190082), the daughter of a sharecropper and former slave, discovered by Atlanta-born but New York-based art collector and gallerist Judith Alexander (1931-2004), who eventually became Rowe’s close friend and art agent.
Rowe was self-taught with few outside influences and created hundreds, perhaps thousands of pieces, including paintings, drawings, handmade dolls, and sculptures, typically using found objects or whatever other materials she had handy, including some artworks carved from collections of her own chewing gum.
Prior to meeting Alexander, few people beyond friends, family members, and passersby to her crowded, art-covered “Playhouse” in Vinings had ever seen Rowe’s work. Still, now some of her pieces are on display in Atlanta’s High Museum of Art and in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.
Attending the screening in Eatonton was Cathi Perry, Rowe’s great-grandniece and president of the Judith Alexander Foundation, with her sister Cheryl Mashack, a board member of the foundation.
“After Judith passed away, the Judith Alexander Foundation was put together,” Perry explained to the audience after “This World” concluded. “And as a part of that, we tried to figure out, how do we keep the legacy of these two women alive and share it with the rest of the world? And this film is part of that. It was like, what better way than to do a film?”
The unique documentary, six years in the making, combines archival footage, including sports and newsreels with home movies, along with animation and scripted scenes, was put together by executive producer and director Marquise Stillwell, director, writer and cinematographer Petter Ringbom, and writer and producer Ruchi Mital, who won an Emmy Award in 2014 for Outstanding Sports Documentary.
Perry and Mashack both recalled visiting Rowe’s “Playhouse” as children, where nothing was off limits.
“Any and everything that was up there, she would allow you to play with if you wanted it. She would take a broom, knock it down, let you play with it,” Mashack recalled. “So, it was like bringing a kid to Wonderland, where nothing was off limits. It was a wonderful thing. And you knew you better do that while you were there because you knew you weren’t doing that when you got home.”
The final free showing in The Plaza’s presentation of the 2024-25 Southern Circuit Film Tour begins at 7 p.m. next Wednesday, April 16, when “North Putnam,” addresses the pressures and issues faced by and within a rural Indiana school district and its community.