Upcoming Screenings Online/Week of July 26th

Top Picks for Art Online Week of July 26th
(pardon the formatting, I do not know what is up w/blogger)

Factitious Imprints by Eva Papamargariti

the New Museum/Screens Series Online

July 23rd, 2020-Ongoing/Free

When watching Eva Papamargariti's Factitious Imprints online I became totally fascinated with trying to distinguish the differences in the images I was seeing. Some seemed like whole, computer-generated 3-D animations, others had the feeling of broken videogame landscapes, some felt like a camera was trained on a computer screen adding to the layered modes of digital visual existence lived each day. It becomes hard to parse what is real, what is not, and what is an imitation of a reality. Acidic colors and geometric splotches of footage move around one another, like observing multiple slides through a swirling, anxious microscope--  or a constantly shifting collage-- accompanied by a chilling warbled voice-over detailing the state of things. I won't lie, this one creeped me out in the best way possible, if you have a projector it might be worth pulling it out.

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Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution w/James Lebrecht & Nicole Newnham 

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Film at Lincoln Center/Lincoln Center at Home Online Panel 
July 28th, 2020/5pm (ET)/Free, RSVP

To honor the 30th Anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act, Lincoln Center is hosting an online series called ADA in the Arts. The series includes events like zoom workshops with members of the New York City Ballet and a virtual reading of the fantastical play Death Bites. Also as part of the series, the directors' of the acclaimed film Crip Camp will be part of a discussion, along with other disability advocates, to talk about the past and the future of disability rights. The passionate and purposeful film Crip Camp (which is now streaming on Netflix!) is a documentary about the campers of Camp Jened, a Catskills haven established in the 50s for adults, children and teens with disabilities. In the 1970s, many of the camp attendees went on to become leaders and activists in the fight for equality playing a pivotal role in the passing of the ADA. Captioning and ASL interpretation are available for this event. 

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Tea Time w/Jennifer Reeder, Pipilotti Rist & Maike Mia Höhne

Kunstverein in Hamburg/Online Discussion

July 28th, 2020/9am CT/ Free, limited RSVP

Maike Mia Höhne is the Artistic Director of the International Short Film Festival Hamburg following a long career as curator and head of Berlinale Shorts. Pipilotti Rist is a Swiss visual artist (who is most notable for having been pawned by Beyoncé and) whose work often offers colorfully dark musings on feminity. Jennifer Reeder is a Chicago-based filmmaker whose genre-influenced films are preoccupied with the blood, guts and grittiness of coming of age as a woman in America. These three will come together (I'm assuming with dainty teacups in hand?) to think about "the shift in culture, the framing of gestures, the replacement of the same and a new cooperation." The group represents the exhibition at the Kunstverein in Hamburg titled Being Laid Up Was No Excuse For Not Making Art, an exhibition combining artists of Hamburg with other International artists as they think through contemporary issues. This event is in response to the issue "Humor post-#MeToo," a changing tide these women can perfectly speak to.

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LASER Boston: Exploring the Dream World w/Dr. Steven Brown, Dr. Deidre Barrett & Dr. Mark J. Blechner

swissnex Boston & SciArt Initiative/Talks Series Online

July 29th, 2020/12-1:15pm (EST)/Free w/Registration

"During this LASER talk you will hear from three experts in the arts and sciences on the biological basis of sleep, the theories on our need to dream, and how dreams enter our waking reality in visual art." Panelists include Professor of Chronobiology ("the branch of biology concerned with natural physiological rhythms and other cyclical phenomena" Who knew!?) and Sleep Research Dr. Steven Brown, Psychologist and Author Dr. Deidre Barrett, and Teaching Faculty & Clinical Consultant Dr. Mark J. Blechner. I came across this event due to Barrett's new publication, Pandemic Dreams, a book that surveys over 9,000 recent dreams to look at the patterns, themes and historical similarities to other psychologically damning events that humans are processing each night as they sleep during the Covid-19 crisis. Personally, my dreams have been anxiety-ridden and unrestful, I hope you are sleeping more soundly. You too Google's AI. And you too those having their dreams guided. Shudder. 

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Gerhard Richter: Painting After All (2011) by Corinna Belz

The Metropolitan Museum of Art/ Online Stream

Ends July 31st, 2020/Free

Gerhard Richter is one of those artists who always haunts the edges of my waking life. I think I first saw his out-of-focus photorealistic paintings on the walls of a museum and had to stand within inches of it to accept that it was in fact a painting. Then, years later, I was enamored with a strange abstract painting with layers of color revealing themselves through jagged scrapes against canvas-- I almost didn't believe it was the same painter who made the figurative perfection I had previously seen. I started to watch this documentary and had to stop immediately upon realizing how deep and close the film gets into his process and studio life, just like his paintings the film deserves full attention. 

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The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (2011) by Chad Friedrichs

Unicorn Stencil Films/Online Stream

Ends July 31st, 2020/Free

In the mid-1950s a complex of 33 apartment buildings representing peak modern architecture rose in the city of St. Louis, Missouri. Hoping to revitalize rundown, overcrowded areas of the city, Pruitt-Igoe was a beacon of hope for many. The project almost immediately began to collapse upon its opening, the long list of reasons why--things like subpar maintenance, design flaws, rapid depopulation-- debated and studied for decades following. The film is made by Missouri-based documentarian Chade Friedrichs whose works are often deep dives into archival material revealing plain truths hidden in plain sight. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth dispells some of the rumors surrounding the housing project's demise while offering up the larger systemic and political issues that led to Pruitt-Igoe's ultimate 1972 implosion. 

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Culture Capture: Terminal Adddition (2019) by New Red Order: Adam Khalil (Ojibway), Zack Khalil (Ojibway), Jackson Polys (Tlingit), Bayley Sweitzer

Walker Art Center, Walker Cinema/part of INDIgenesis Film Series Online 

Ongoing/Free

INDIgenesis was a film series that was supposed to open at Minneapolis' the Walker in March, a showcase of contemporary "Native filmmakers and artists." The piece highlighted here, Culture Capture: Terminal Adddition, is one that deals with how the past is immortalized through art and contemplates the current trend of toppling the monuments of certain historical narratives. The film questions the growing movement to dismantle statues and wonders if maybe there is another approach. As stated in the film "Signs like these conjure realities and create national identities," image-making systems are the building blocks of communication, society, equality, this film another addition-- another crafted truth-- added to the chain of meaning instead of a quick-fix eradication (a process of disappearing ingrained in so many of the horrors of the past). The first time I heard of a defaced statue was when I was in Columbia, South Carolina. Perfectly chiseled into the stone below a bronzed Strom Thurmond (a racist senator against integration) were the names of his children. Someone said that vandals had added to the list, scratched in a rudimentary scrawl, the name of the hidden child he fathered with his family's 16-year old Black maid, his daughter Essie Mae. Essie Mae's name was officially carved into the red granite in 2005.  

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Please send recs for upcoming weeks to: donnak3[at]gmail[dot]com

Upcoming Screenings Online/Week of July 19th

Top Picks for Art Online Week of July 19th

Broadcast: Alternative Meanings in Film & Video, Chapter Three by Various Artists
Gagosian/Online
June 30-July 20, 2020/Free

This new installment of the Gagosian gallery's ongoing film series, which has been unfurling throughout lockdown, is just as eclectic as its predecessors. Timothy Leary's iconic “turn on, tune in, drop out" is the loose, guiding thematic framework for the series, a phrase whose meaning skews somewhat during virus culture. Works including Sterling Ruby's Hiker (1993) (with an anxiety-producing voyeuristic screech) and Man Ray's classic cinépoéme Emak Bakia (1926) (an example of the dawning post-WWI avant-garde film movement whose title translates to either "Leave me Alone" or "Give Peace") are just some of the masterpieces on offer. Be warned: Steven Perrino's "turned on" Guitar Grind (1995) is loud af when it begins. 

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Short New Play Festival: Private Lives w/Jeremy O. Harris, Theresa Rebeck + Others
Red Bull Theater/Live Stream
July 20, 2020/7:30pm (EDT)/Free, donations welcome

A series of ten-minute plays written by emerging playwrights will be presented online under the theme Private Lives, inspired by Noël Coward's comedy of the same name. Two pieces commissioned by Jeremy O. Harris, the dapper Yale grad behind the award-winning Slave Play and more recently co-writer of Janicza Bravo's much anticipated A24 film Zola, and Theresa Rebeck "the most Broadway-produced female playwright of our time" anchor this evening of performances alongside work from six chosen newcomers selected from over 500 submissions. The lineup includes Matthew Park's Plague Year which focuses on a Medieval family in quarantine during the bubonic plague and Mallory Jane Weiss's Evermore Unrest featuring a lone woman penning a letter to her ex-boyfriend from her honeymoon suite. 
 

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Vintage: Families of Value (1995) by Thomas Allen Harris & 
Black Families Through Queer Eyes Panel w/Thomas Allen Harris, Shari Frilot & Rajendra Roy
Bisexual.org, Black Public Media + Others/Online Film Screening & Panel
Film: July 21- July 23, 2020/12pm (EDT) 
Panel: July 22, 2020/6pm (EDT)/ Free, RSVP 

Thomas Allen Harris' 1995 debut feature Vintage: Families of Value is a collective experimental documentary. Shot over five years, the film takes the lives of three sets of Black Queer siblings and asks them to share their familial relationships from their own individual perspectives, including that of the director and his younger brother. What results is a kaleidoscopic approach to autobiographical visual storytelling through a range of techniques-- a home movie media collage. For the film's 25th Anniversary, a panel featuring the Director, Chief Curator of Sundance's New Frontier program Shari Frilot and MoMA Film Curator Rajendra Roy will "place Vintage within the broader contexts of 1990's Black Queer experimental filmmaking and current activism."

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Last Light (2020) by Carmen Argote
Hammer Museum/Online Screening + Q&A
July 21, 2020/6pm (PDT)/Free, RSVP

Carmen Argote's photo/video piece Last Light emerges as a direct response to  Covid-19 and its discontents. Argote captures the bigger and smaller pictures all at once by looking both inward and outward. Through moving and still images she roams the desolate streets of L.A., her current home, exposing her thoughts and visions. As mentioned in her artist statement: "I explore notions of home and place. I respond to architecture and site to reflect on personal histories and on my own immigrant experience. My practice uses the act of inhabiting as a starting point, working within a space and its cultural, economic, and personal context as a material. I work at a human scale and in relationship to how my body inhabits space." A Q&A will follow the screening with the always brilliant Erin Christovale. 

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Consensual Hallucinations: Early Online Writing from the Thing BBS Archives &

Phantom Threads: Restoring The Thing BBS

Rhizome/First Look: New Art Online 

Consensual Hallucinations/July 21, 2020/2pm (EDT)

Phantom Threads/July 23, 2020/2pm (EDT)/ Free, RSVP

The closest I came to The Thing BBS experience was mid-2000s Williamsboard, a place for the horny gentrifiers, aspiring DJs, trolls and "artists" of Williamsburg, Brooklyn to convene to find jobs, noods and apartments. The Thing BBS came from a much more idyllic time of the internet taking advantage of the sudden global era of near-instant communication to define a new, sprawling definition of artistic community. The site became a space for creatives to engage in discussions of cultural theory, muse on artistic practice and share work all through the slow modems of the day. Just as interestingly, there has been a more recent push to begin to preserve this, and other, web-art outfits and pieces for art history's sake. This two-part event will look at the writing and creation of The Thing BBS and also the process of its preservation. I hope no one archived Williamsboard.

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Idiot Prayer by Nick Cave (musician)
Alexandra Palace/Pre-recorded livestream performance
July 23, 2020/Various time zones/$20
  

The second Nick Cave album I bought was The Boatman's Call, a solemn, quiet, dark, brooding, sparse work that completely reframed what my teenage brain thought music had to be (Black Hair breaks down the pieces of melody and meter into wisps of repetition, Idiot Prayer a pulse-like dream pushing the wayward ballad forward with dispassionate grace). More recently, Cave has been using his writing to speak eloquently, honestly, hopefully through his online collaborative platform The Red Hand Files. After having to cancel his live tour, this alternative pre-recorded solo show will stream live, staggered across different time zones to bring his melancholy love to his admirers. Side note: The equally prolific Susie Cave has been selling her delicate, decadent The Vampire's Wife face masks online, freshness and beauty folded in their neo-Victorian gothic ruffles.

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Landfall (2020) by Cecilia Aldarondo

Philadelphia Latino Film Festival, co-presented with ADOCPR, Philly Boricuas and Third Horizon Film Festival/ Online Stream, Q+A, DJ Set

July 25/7pm (EDT)/Free, Taking Donations

Firelight Media has been doing an unbelievable series called Beyond Resilience that explores the ways in which film seeks to find the "strength and expression through the collective" especially in times of deep crisis. The entire series has been beyond inspiring to listen and learn from. One of these events is where I first heard Cecilia Aldarondo speak about her film Landfall, a documentary that was filmed in Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane María. The film looks at the natural disaster but also other, under-reported disasters that flooded the area (namely the economic devastation and the opportunistic outsiders descending upon the region) and also the positive, communal aspects of rebuilding and rethinking-- ideas with a new dimensionality given the past few months. The clip from the film shown at Firelight's zoom roundtable was an intimate, knowing cinéma vérité, a camera that melted into the scene with an easy familiarity only found in expert filmmaking. Excited to see this and to support the many organizations coming together to present this Philadelphia Premiere.

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Please send recs for upcoming weeks to: donnak3[at]gmail[dot]com

Upcoming Screenings Online/Week of July 12th

Top Picks for Art Online Week of July 12th

Curator Zoé Whitley Interviews Artist Titus Kaphar
Design Emergency, Special Edition/Instagram Live
July 13, 2020/11am (EDT)

Scrolling through Instagram I stopped short on an arresting painting: a pastel haze with two women standing behind strollers, children cut out, absent from the spaces they should are meant to be in. The work is by Titus Kaphar, whose art recently graced the cover of Time Magazine. From his site: "His practice seeks to dislodge history from its status as the 'past' in order to unearth its contemporary relevance...Open areas become active absences; walls enter into the portraits; stretcher bars are exposed; and structures that are typically invisible underneath, behind, or inside the canvas are laid bare to reveal the interiors of the work. In so doing, Kaphar's aim is to reveal something of what has been lost and to investigate the power of a rewritten history." This discussion is part of the Design Emergency series founded by MoMA curator Paola Antonelli and Design Critic Alice Rawsthorn, an ongoing, fascinating "investigation into design's response to Covid-19." 

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Rot by Kathleen Ryan
Karma/Online Viewing Room
July 8-August-30, 2020/Free

A lot of these art exhibits online are underwhelming. Galleries seem to put too much in between the work and the UX. This is why Karma's stripped-down videos of Kathleen Ryan's pieces in her show titled Rot are extra appealing as they draw attention to the details, capitalizing on the online format by providing an up-close view one might not be able to get in the gallery, alongside a deep-dive essay by curator Jenelle Porter. Ryan's pieces are reminiscent of that chintzy beaded fruit that my retro hairdresser has on her Formica waiting room table but these pieces are adorned with precious, earthly gemstones cum craft-store jewelry beads intricately transformed into molding fruit. There is something so unfathomable in the construction of these pieces with their tiny pointillism and eerie Oldenburg charm-- I'm really taken with the craft and the larger picture does feel so in keeping with the spirit of 2020...

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A Dream is What You Wake Up From (1978) by Larry Bullard and Carolyn Y. Johnson
Lightbox Film Center/Online
July 7-17, 2020/$10 24hr. Streaming Rental
 

A Dream is What You Wake Up From uses documentary and dramatic scenes of labor, neighborhoods, home and school coupled with personal voiceovers of three families in late 70s New York. What emerges is a multitudinous portrait of the Black American experience, lives unfolding across different planes of concern. The juxtaposition of fictions, nonfictions, observations and perceptions allows for an exploration of realities, possibilities, and struggling hopes, an elliptical view of what it means to be a Black family in this particular time and place. Shot on luscious 16mm and featuring a soundtrack by pianist Onaje Allan Gumbs (who recently passed away) the film is a meditation on the resilience and strength needed in order to thrive in America's contradictions, sentiments being loudly echoed today.

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Notes On Digging (inspired by 2020 piece Reaching Towards Warmer Suns) by Kiyan Williams
The Shed/Up Close Online
July 12, 2020/6pm (EST)/Free

In video-diary format, Artist Kiyan Williams will discuss their relationship with digging in the dirt, dirt being a medium often found in the artist's gritty, grounded yet elegant sculptural and performative practice. As part of a 2020 residency, the artist produced the piece Reaching Towards Warmer Suns, giant earthen arms extended skyward on the banks of the James River in Virginia, a location pivotal in the formation of oppressive American histories; deep roots can reach into the heavy soil, transform both the beautiful and the ugly burdens found within and produce lightness through acts of shared creativity. In this talk, Williams will speak on the installation and research that went into the making of this piece in addition to the connection they find with the earth and how it can act as a recovery method for intersectional violence.

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The Giverny Document (Single Channel) (2019) by Ja'Tovia Gary

Courtesy of the Artist/Youtube
Begins July 6, 2020/Free

As I spoke about earlier on the blog, The Giverny Document is an incredible work that should not be missed. Artist Ja'Tovia Gary stated in a recent Instagram post: "Last year I made an experimental documentary about Black women’s safety. A bulk of my work has found its place within a gallery and museum context as it relates to exhibition/ distribution. This is a double edged sword that often restricts access to the very audience I am committed to reaching. This particular work will be different. I’d like as many Black women as possible to view this film so I’ve made THE GIVERNY DOCUMENT (Single Channel) available on YouTube at this time. No fanfare, no press release, just get into if you can. And let me know what you think. She loves a sound, good faith critique!"
 

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Jim Henson's World: Creature Makers with Peter Brooke and Jason Weber

Museum of the Moving Image/Live Online Talk
July 18, 2020/7pm (EDT)/Suggested Donation $10 + RSVP

Once I met a couple who had worked alongside Jim Henson, the two spoke of operating puppets in The Dark Crystal and the foibles of making Kermit the frog ride a bike but, most memorable to me was the reverence and palpable love that one could feel in their words when speaking of Henson and his vision, a feeling of love that comes forth through every creation from his prolific studio. Henson's spirit lives on in his Creature Shop, a space that continues to champion innovation and play. In this talk, the Creative Supervisors of the Shop, located in New York and Los Angeles, will discuss how they continue Henson's tradition as puppeteers, thinkers and makers. This event is part of the larger, ongoing museum show titled The Jim Henson Exhibition full of lovers and dreamers. 
 

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Please send recs for upcoming weeks to: donnak3[at]gmail[dot]com

Upcoming Screenings Online/Week of July 5th

Top Picks for Art Online Week of July 5th

Free, White and 21 (1980) by Howardena Pindell
ICA Boston/ Online
Ongoing/Free

Howardena Pindell speaks frankly to a camera about her encounters with racist aggressions she experienced throughout her life from childhood through adulthood. Her white-faced counterpart refutes her perception with blatant disregard: "You know you really must be paranoid those things never happen to me..." Shot on video, the piece is unnerving, a slight static-y glitch skirts the bottom adding to the unease, a mild warp to the screen echos the unsettling truths that Pindell speaks. The film also questions the biases in art itself, a recognition of how the intention of a work and the reading of a work are formed by one's own personal knowledge, how dominant cultures can measure one's success: "if your symbols aren't used in a way that we use them then we won't acknowledge them." This is a must-watch.

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[Alien] Star Dust (2019) by Victoria Vesna
Harvestworks/Online 
July 7, 2020@2pm (PTD)
RSVP via Leonardo the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology

This piece premiered at the Natural History Museum in Vienna on the cusp of the Covid-19 lockdowns, this presentation is an online version meant to be viewed while home in isolation. The piece is a guided meditation of sorts that will take viewers through the cosmos of space dust, connecting human beings to their primordial matter, reminding of the imperceptible yet awe-inspiring specks of space, humanity and earth that constantly move amongst one another. The sound in this piece adds to the meaning as a layered collage of space noise, ambient noise, cultural expressions, and radio waves of unknown origin emanate out into the world-- headphones suggested. In this piece, the interconnectivity of people and planets becomes reduced to invisible, tiny bonds, a theme made even more powerful during a viral pandemic of potentially deadly droplets.

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Cincinnati Goddamn (2015) by April Martin and Paul Hill
Wexner Center for the Arts/Now: Film/Video
June 1-July 9, 2020/Free

Cincinnati Goddamn deals with the multiple killings of African American men at the hands of police officers in Cincinnati, Ohio: 15 people were killed from 1995-2001. By focusing on two specific murders, that of Roger Owensby Jr. and Timothy Thomas, the film shows the spectrum of responses and personal experiences-- a conglomerate of media coverage, interviews with victim's families, witnesses recounting disturbing memories, journalists and scholars weighing in, wrenching police officer accounts. The stripped-down nature of the film's construction (interviews, news footage, a soundtrack to provide tension and emotional nudges) allows for individual stories to tell that of a collective, slowly building an intricate structure of history and abuse that lead towards a slight hope found in reform. The story of the film is, unfortunately, familiar but it is the achingly personal aspects that cause a viewer to sink deeply into it, a glaring memorial of lives lived, lost and forever changed.

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King of Arms Art Ball (Annual) by Rashaad Newsome
LACMA Art + Technology Lab, SOMArts Cultural Center, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art/ 
Youtube Live
July 10, 2020@8pm EDT/Suggested Donation
Pre-Recorded, Live Zoom Judging + Virtual Dance Party

House-ballroom has a long history of acceptance, change and passion-- a vehicle that moves far beyond death drops. Artists Rashaad Newsome has staged the King of Arms Art Ball since 2013, using the art of vogue to move through themes of imagination and power. The purpose of the event is for performers to embody the creativity of others, to transcend beyond vogue as a means of self-expression and show how movements can be used to express or ignite movements, as Newsome says "How do we decolonize our imaginations? How do we use them in the service of our own well-being or as a form of resistance?" This year's categories include a nod to work by artist Barkley L. Hendricks and a Shade Competition highlighting improvisation. Prior to July 10th, contestants submitted applications to compete, the lineup was chosen and performances, interviews and show preparation were pre-recorded to be rolled out via social media leading up to the event. A panel will view and judge live performances via Zoom, along with digital backgrounds made by Newsome, a live DJ, an afterparty-- there is a lot going on, details here!

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The Protest T-Shirt Store II (2020) by Various Artists
Hester Street Fair/Online
July 1-15, 2020/$40 per made to order shirt
"All purchases benefiting organizations that are fighting racism and improving the lives of Black and Indigenous people." BLM, NY/ACLU/Innocence Project

I think I got hooked on art t-shirts via Sonic Youth band t-shirts in my youth, unknowingly sporting Pettibon, wishing to own a piece of Richter or Mike Kelley. Mainly due to lack of fund$ I only buy them when in support of a cause or artist worth supporting or when the message is one I feel the need to subversively strap onto my body while walking around small Missouri towns ("Abuse of Power Comes As No Surprise" or Planned Parenthood anything). This gallery of meaningful art t-shirts is the second installment of Hester Street Fair's Protest T-Shirt Store, featuring a wide range of artists and designers and a wide range of messages and movements. From Zach Grear to Elise McMahon, these shirts, literally, make the perfect statement.

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Please send recs for upcoming weeks to: donnak3[at]gmail[dot]com