#sunset screenings

Speaking directly to the camera, artist Howardena Pindell recounts her experiences of racism and sexism as a Black woman in the United States. At times, she shifts to play the role of a white woman, gaslighting Pindell and clamining she is “paranoid.” This groundbreaking video critiques both institutionalized racism, and the mostly white feminist movement of the time. In 1972, Pindell cofounded A.I.R. Gallery, one of the first artist-run spaces for women in the U.S., and Free, White and 21 was first shown in 1980’s Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States, curated by Ana Mendieta. This intensely personal and political film, whose title comes from a rebellious catchphrase often heard in Hollywood movies of the 1930s and 1940s, was a stark departure from the abstract works on paper for which Pindell was primarily known.

See Free, White and 21 in full as part of our Art on the Stoop: Sunset Screenings series, showing each Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday through November 8, now starting at 5pm.

KNOT combines many of the touchstones of Rashaad Newsome’s multidisciplinary practice: spinning decorative jewelry, lavish Gothic architecture, Black ballroom dancing, mathematical knot theories, and a frenetic energy that emerges from the extraordinary dancers and vocalists, as well as the artist’s surrealistic digital collaging techniques. Commissioned for the Brooklyn Museum’s 2014–15 exhibition Killer Heels: The Art of the High-Heeled Shoe, the video heralds the legacy and longevity of Vogue Fem dance’s Black, Latinx, queer, and trans originators and innovators. 

See KNOT in full as part of our Art on the Stoop: Sunset Screenings series, showing each Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday through October 11, starting at 6pm.

In conjunction with his solo show at the Museum, UOVO Prize-winning artist John Edmonds has organized part of program 2 of Art on the Stoop: Sunset Screenings. His selection includes videos by Sara Cwynar, Steph Foster, Ja’Tovia Gary, Glenn Ligon, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, and Ka-Man Tse, which screen Friday and Saturday evenings at 5pm through November 7th.

The three works featured here all explore the reverberations of past cultural artifacts, from early cinema to vintage jewelry boxes. In Soft Film (2016), Sara Cwynar employs plush jewelry boxes, which she sourced from eBay, to explore the cycles of captialism as well as subtle forms of discrimination against women. 

Ja’Tovia Gary’s video An Ecstatic Experience (2015) manipulates historical and contemporary footage—including a 1965 TV show featuring an adaptation of a narrative by a former enslaved woman—to meditate on both the liberating and violent cycles of history. 

For his 2008 video The Death of Tom, Glenn Ligon had originally planned to create a reenactment of the climactic scene of Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 silent film adaptation of the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe. After learning that the film had not been properly loaded, Ligon decided to still use the abstracted footage, suggesting a history that cannot be fully represented and remains unfinished.

For Question Bridge: Black Males, Chris Johnson and Hank Willis Thomas, with Bayeté Ross Smith and Kamal Sinclair, spent years traveling to twelve American cities and towns speaking with 150 Black men, who represented a range of geographic, generational, economic, and educational backgrounds. The varied speakers seem to be in dialogue with one another, their reflections sharing common self-selected themes, usually left unspoken, that challenge generalizations often based on racist systems of oppression and white supremacy. Considering Question Bridge nearly a decade later, and under the changed and newly charged political context of 2020, shifts in priorities and language are notable—and discussions about Black self-definition and self-determination remain incisive and urgent calls. 

Tune in to Screen Time on our Instagram Live, today at 1pm, where Hank Willis Thomas amd Bayeté Ross Smith will discuss Question Bridge: Black Males, and view an excerpt of it out on our plaza as part of our Art on the Stoop: Sunset Screenings series, showing each Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday through November 8, starting at 6pm. 

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