Upcoming Screenings Online/Week of September 20th

Top Picks for Online Art Week of September 20th

Joan Snyder: Summer Becomes a Room 

Canada/Zoom Panel Discussion & Q+A

September 20, 2020/5pm ET/free w/registration

American Painter Joan Snyder has been practicing for around fifty years and, like most female abstract expressionists, I have never heard of her. Canada gallery recently opened its first showing of her work and, in conjunction with the exhibition, a panel and Q+A will be happening online. The panel will be moderated by Canada's Director Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle and features curator Mary Schneider Enriquez (Harvard Art Museums), Catherine Morris (Brooklyn Museum) and sculptor Arlene Shechet. The panel will be followed by a Q+A with the panelists in addition to the artist! Looking at the images from the show (Summer Becomes A Room) there is a multi-dimensional quality to the work, moving beyond the canvas to allow for textures to rise slightly from the flat surface with colorful, graphic movement. The abstractions seem to move from shapes to figures, each one embodying its own relationship with the viewer to evoke their personal experience, suggesting symbolic associations but ultimately asking the audience to find their own conclusions and emotions towards her expressive strokes, squirts and sculptured canvases. 

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Smooth Talk (1985) w/Laura Dern, Joyce Chopra & Joyce Carol Oates 

New York Film Festival, HBO/Zoom Talk

September 23, 2020/4:30pm ET/free w/registration (the film is available for rent

The 58th New York Film Festival is upon us! Hurrah! Yet another fest I've never been able to attend but moving the fest partially online has opened up a little bit more possibility in terms of participating in screenings (some available digitally for rent!) and panels. HBO is presenting a series of Free Talks online focused on films new and old. One of the ones I'm pretty interested in revolves around 1985 coming of age thriller Smooth Talk starring a young and (as always) intensely mesmerizing Laura Dern as a woman seeking the approval of men who, unfortunately, ends up attracting the wrong man. Being that the film is inspired by a story by Joyce Carol Oates, I assumed it was a feminist anthem but after doing some light looking online there is some question as to whether Oates is considered feminine as opposed to feminist-- on cursory viewing, this trailer feels a bit final-girl/victim blame-y-- making me extra intrigued by the film's intentions and the talk! The discussion will feature Dern, Oates and Joyce Chopra, the film's Director, and will be moderated by TCM host Alicia Malone.

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Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration

Art History Curatorial Studies Collective Atlanta University Center & Spelman College Department of Art Visual Culture/ Online Presentation & Conversation

September 23, 2020/6:30-7:30pm ET/free with registration

The exhibition Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration is on display at MoMA PS1 curated by Guest Curator Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood, Professor of American Studies and Art History at Rutgers University and author of a recently published book that shares the exhibit's title. The book and show focus on works of art from incarcerated artists and non-incarcerated artists with some relationship to the prison system. The pieces "bear witness to artists’ reimagining of the fundamentals of living—time, space, and physical matter—pushing the possibilities of these basic features of daily experience to create new aesthetic visions achieved through material and formal invention....From various sites of freedom or unfreedom, these artists devise strategies for visualizing, mapping, and making physically present the impact and scale of life under carceral conditions." The images from the show are powerful and the topic of the prison industrial complex is one whose devastating effects ripple outward, these pieces of art representations of its ongoing waves. As part of a Distinguished Lecture series, Dr. Fleetwood will present on the subject followed by a discussion between Fleetwood and MoMA PS1 Director Kate Fowle moderated by Dr. Cheryl Finley, Director of the AUC Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective. 

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