Art+Film at LACMA: Outreach

As LACMA’s curatorial and exhibition programming continues to expand and connect the dialogue between art and film, the museum’s education and public programming works in tandem to offer opportunities for the public to create connections between art and film in their own vision.

The educational component of Art+Film is critical to the mission of the initiative. These programs, sponsored by OneWest Bank, recognize the power of media today and the importance of visual literacy in an age when moving images dominate. The Art+Film Education Initiative LACMA offers both students and teachers hands-on opportunities to use technology for personal expression. Informed by the works of art in the galleries, the offerings—such as Frame x Frame, Through Your Lens, and the Art+Film Teacher Institute—help cultivate media literacy through both looking, analyzing, and making.

Students transforming drawings using animation software in a Frame x Frame workshop.

Funding for art classes and after-school activities have been dramatically cut in Los Angeles. LACMA is an important resource in Los Angeles for art education and hands-on learning. In Frame x Frame: Reimagining the Everyday, teaching artists lead seventh-grade students on a tour of the museum’s galleries. This exploration provides insight into how artists see ordinary objects in a new light. Students are then given an opportunity to reconsider everyday objects from their own lives by exploring the traditional art of drawing and activating it with creative technology.

Through Your Lens

In Through Your Lens, an after-school program that takes place at school sites, middle-school students can explore the practices and strategies used by artists and filmmakers to create works of art. The eight-week-long course provides students with an opportunity to create experimental films inspired by works of art in LACMA’s collection using what they’ve learned throughout the course. In the process, students develop their awareness of the power of the moving image.

Art+Film Teacher Institute

For teachers, the Art+Film Teacher Institute advances interdisciplinary connections between visual art, media literacy, and the core curriculum. Teams work together to create a short film inspired by a work of art from LACMA’s collection. The production process explores the parallels between reading, writing, and filmmaking, emphasizing independent and collaborative art making.

LACMA9 Art+Film Lab, photo by Duncan Cheng

LACMA9 participants at work, photo by Duncan Cheng

The education department’s outreach expands beyond the boundaries of LACMA’s campus. One example of this is the LACMA9 Art+Film Lab, which launched in the city of Redlands in June 2013 with support from The James Irvine Foundation. Through this initiative, LACMA brings to nine cities throughout Southern California free film screenings and hands-on workshops. The lab, designed by artist Jorge Pardo, continues to travel to local cities through September 2014. LACMA9 is currently on hiatus, but returns in January, when it will set up shop at East Los Angeles County in Monterey Park. Through LACMA9, the museum is able to serve the larger Southern California community through film and workshops that harness the creative spirit.

The Art+Film initiative will continue to evolve through education and public programs at LACMA. From film series to workshops to community-outreach events, LACMA is fully committed to highlighting importance of creating a dialogue between works of art and the moving image.

Linda Theung, editor

Silver Screens Turned into Art

It was a basement room occupied by a scattering of mostly silent people staring at a blank wall. Could I really be at New York’s Museum of Modern Art instead of out in the daylight having lunch with friends from work? Emphatically yes, as the lights dimmed and the wall transformed into a silver screen onto which were projected some of the best movies ever made. The next 90 minutes would be an enjoyable schooling in the art of film, and learning how the Nickelodeon tradition from the turn of the 20th century transformed into one of the greatest art forms (when done right) ever known.

Leo S. Bing Theater at LACMA

I was in a museum with art upstairs and film downstairs: galleries and a screening room. This was my introduction to that convergence of forms that today is universally recognized by anyone that understands the inseparability of these two artistic disciplines. Art and film are no longer tied to their separate venues of museum and movie house, but can share collective space at museums like MoMA and LACMA.

I was lucky to get this awareness as a young teenager with a summer job, around the corner from MoMA. My luck doubled when I discovered that the student-membership card to the museum to participate in the film program also allowed me entry into the galleries.

I never would have thought of becoming a museum member if it were not for the film program. School trips to the Met and the Hayden Planetarium, the Natural History Museum, and the Cloisters formed my knowledge base about museums. Even with that, I was mostly ignorant about art except for a few favorite pieces in the Met, and everything at Fort Tyron Park, where the collection of medieval armor at the Cloisters riveted my attention.

As a teenager, I got to show my membership card and return to MoMA’s basement repeatedly during the summer, and to have etched into my consciousness the lasting impression of positive images sunk into the negative space of a mind that never considered movies as cinema or even film, let alone art, but as a way to have fun with friends at Saturday afternoon double features.

Alone, but not all alone, in the dark. Free of outside influences. Mesmerized. Hungered. Stimulated by sights and sounds that made history. Narcotized by unstable nitrate films that could have only two possible paths: to dissolve or even explode, and to be stolen from culture that way, or be preserved by philanthropists or filmmakers like Martin Scorsese that understood the importance of preventing the theft of film from the world of art. Forgetting nothing. Preserving those images as a series of unsprocketed flickers across the screen of my memory. Learning that film was art.

Discovering Murnau’s silent masterpiece Sunrise that still haunts decades later, never setting in my mind. Witnessing Jimmy Cagney in White Heat shout “top of the world, Ma!” as he was executed, or being frightened by the train coming straight off the screen at me in The Great Train Robbery that, in 1903, was the first movie that told a story driven by narrative and became an important historical point in the evolution of the art form. Learning that Thomas Edison invented more than the light bulb. Watching Wings, the movie that won the first Academy Award ever given by the newly formed Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for Best Picture of the year. Another historical first. Hearing cracking voices of silent stars that tried to transition to talkies, but failed. Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford among those casualties. Discovering new stars that moved me with their words. Learning that Norma Shearer made the transition from silents to talkies through the skillful intercession of her MGM sound department-manager husband Douglas that tweaked her voice recording just enough to make her one of the few stars of both silent and sound films.

Later my movie-film-cinema-art education moved from that basement screening room at MoMA to the Walter Reade and Dan Talbot venues that were some of the premiere art houses in the country, where the French auteur New Wave was shown when it was really new, and was the first time I heard art and film mentioned in the same phrase. After that, a click to the next generation and the phenomena of expanded cinema involving artists like Hans Richter who was an artist that influenced film.

Over the years, not only at MoMA but at LACMA, where I was drawn to the Ron Haver–curated film program in the Bing Theater, and Filmex, the singular film festival organized by what were popularly called the two Garys: Esert and Abrams, my love of movies morphed into a love of art, made seamless because one venue provided both creative expressions.

The best kind of twofer: art and film that intersected unexpectedly in my life and became a template for me and many others who love both of these expressions of creativity, that could drive a convergence that has empowered museums to expand their collections and programming and curatorial interests to include what had once been derided as the flickers.

It all started for me in that museum basement and in those galleries. At an art museum that imprinted the coexistence of art and film onto my mind. Founded and funded by philanthropic Rockefellers, exhibiting the works of early explorers in the art of mixing light and motion, kinetically presenting themes that were otherwise displayed one dimensionally on gallery walls a few floors above. A convergence of art and film that decades later is taken seriously by museums and philanthropists, preservationists and scholars to the benefit of all to enjoy art and film together.

Tim Deegan, director of guest services, public engagement

Art+Film at LACMA: Part II

Two major exhibitions at LACMA this fall touch upon the theme of Art+Film: Under the Mexican Sky: Gabriel Figueroa—Art and Film and Agnès Varda in Californialand (opens Sunday, November 3). A third, Masterworks of Expressionist Cinema: “The Golem” and Its Avatars, looks closely at the legend of the golem as it is represented in film, art, and popular culture. Today’s Unframed expands upon yesterday’s post, as curators Timothy Benson, Rita Gonzalez, and Britt Salvesen talk with Unframed’s Scott Tennent about the current exhibitions that bind art and film.

Scott Tennent: Rita and Britt, you co-curated Under the Mexican Sky: Gabriel Figueroa—Art and Film, which is currently on view. Figueroa was a celebrated cinematographer in Mexico who worked from the 1920s to the 1980s. How did you use the context of an art museum to present his work?

Gabriel Figueroa, Film still from Enemigos, directed by Chano Urueta, 1933, © Gabriel Figueroa Flores Archive

Rita Gonzalez: Britt and I were really interested in how we could present Figueroa to an audience that might have more familiarity with Mexican art. They’re more accustomed to the muralists, the great modernist painters, and photographers of Mexico. We really wanted to situate Figueroa’s aesthetics and technical accomplishments in relationship to that art lineage. Figueroa knew artists like Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, and was part of those circles. In fact Rivera referred to Figueroa as “the fourth muralist” alongside that group.

Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Gabriel Figueroa reviewing light tests for the film Sonatas, directed by Juan Antonio Bardem, 1959, Gabriel Figueroa Flores Archive, © Estate of Manuel Álvarez Bravo

Britt Salvesen: And they influenced each other mutually. Although this exhibition has one person’s name on it, and it’s his story we tell throughout, it’s also a story of creative networks. It’s a challenge to think of how to present the art of cinematography in an art museum. When someone like Figueroa emerges with a really strong vision, that’s a story we want to tell—but in the medium of narrative film that vision also has to be linked to the vision of a director, which is also quite strong.

Ángel Corona Villa, film still from Dias de otoño, directed by Robert Gavaldón, 1962, © Gabriel Figueroa Flores Archive

Tennent: Seeing the list of people Figueroa worked with—directors as disparate as John Huston and Luis Buñuel—says something interesting about Figueroa.

Salvesen: Sometimes Figueroa’s vision was aligned with his director’s, and sometimes they were at odds. Figueroa and Emilio Fernández were really in sync, each pushing the other to really vivid iconography of the legacy of the Mexican Revolution, among other things. When Figueroa worked with Luis Buñuel, they had a bit of disparity in their viewpoints—Buñuel not being interested in this monumentalized version of Mexico and wanting something grittier, more ambivalent, surreal. Yet both collaborations produced numerous films. So in some cases the tension was productive.

Ángel Corona Villa, Pedro Armendáriz in a still from the film La escondida, directed by Robert Gavaldón, 1955, © Televisa Foundation

Tennent: Britt, Gabriel Figueroa is one of two exhibitions you’re co-organizing this fall. The other, with Tim, is Masterworks of Expressionist Cinema: “The Golem” and Its Avatars. Can you elaborate on that title?

Salvesen: The tale of the golem is a folk tale set in medieval Prague, when Jewish residents were being persecuted by a Christian ruler. To defend themselves, a rabbi created a figure out of clay and, using incantations and spells, animated that figure. It then rampaged through the city to protect the Jews from persecution.

You can imagine any number of variations on that tale. It’s also a great metaphor for the act of artistic creation.

Tennent: So you’re taking that figure and showing it across cultures and eras?

Paul Wegener (director), Germany, 1874–1948, Carl Boese (director) Germany, 1887–1958, Film still from Der Golem: Wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem: How He Came into the World), 1920, written by Paul Wegener and Henrik Galeen, produced by Paul Wegener, B&W, silent

Timothy Benson: All the way up to contemporary comic books. The film The Golem, from 1920, is by director Paul Wegener, who is very devoted to this story line—this is the third of three films he made on the subject. And he plays the golem. It’s an incredible immersion. That figure, the way it’s styled and costumed, has appeared again and again in artistic and popular culture since then—including The Simpsons.

Tennent: This is your second Masterworks of Expressionist Cinema exhibition, following last year’s on the films Metropolis and Dr. Caligari. Will there be more in the series?

Salvesen: Next fall we have planned a much larger show about German Expressionist cinema, which is coming to us from the collection of the Cinémathèque Français but can be augmented with holdings of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, since many of the émigrés from the German Expressionist era ended up in Hollywood. That will be a chance to make connections to film noir and contemporary cinema. Everyone from Tim Burton to David Lynch to Guillermo del Toro cite this influence.

Dave Wachter (illustrator), United States, born 1975, Steve Niles (writer), United States, born 1965, Matt Santoro (writer), United Stated, born 1976, Page from Breath of Bones: A Tale of the Golem, no. 2 (July 2013), private collection, Los Angeles, © 2013 Steve Niles, Matt Santoro, and Dave Wachter

Tennent: The Academy have been frequent collaborators, lenders, and copresenters of our film programs and exhibitions. They are presenters of the Gabriel Figueroa exhibition and also presented Stanley Kubrick. And, of course, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures is slated to open right next door in 2017 or 2018. How will the presence of the Academy Museum influence your thinking about film at LACMA?

Salvesen: They’re an incredible resource. This interval while they consider the formation of their museum from the ground up—from staffing to exhibition programming to build-out—is a great time for us to be working together, getting to know each other, our collections, approaches, and priorities. We’ll be able to be in sync and complementary when they’re open, and offer an incredible range. There will be nowhere else in the world where a visitor can encounter that in-depth material relating to the industry and its guilds, and the specificity of Hollywood and its influence worldwide over at the Academy; and only steps away come to see exhibitions where in some instances related materials are interpreted differently, where alternative models are presented, where we can show a spectrum in dialogue with each other.

Benson: The overlap is tremendous. There are levels of expertise, issues of preservation, even knowledge of the technical aspects of filmmaking that enrich our understanding of what artists are doing.

Gonzalez: And there’s a tremendous curiosity among filmmakers to go into a different realm. Agnès Varda is a prime example. She spent 40 years of her career mostly making films for a film audience. In the beginning of the 2000s she started to be invited to contemporary art spaces and biennials. She decided that she was going to become an artist at the ripe age of her mid-70s.

Agnès Varda’s film Mur Murs (Mural Murals), 1980, © ciné-tamaris

Tennent: In partnership with The Film Foundation, LACMA helped to restore four films by Varda, which have screened. Can you say more about the related exhibition, Agnès Varda in Californialand?

Gonzalez: The films that have been restored are four of five films she shot in California. I was wondering, how can we activate this restoration? How could we do something in the galleries? I started thinking about a work I had seen by her in 2007, where she had literally transformed the celluloid remnants of a film that she could no longer send on the road because it was too far deteriorated. She transformed into an artwork—a beach cabana. For her, this was about creating a space for reflection and a space for the memory of this film—which was actually a sour memory because the film was a huge failure commercially! When I asked her if she would do it again here in Los Angeles, she said “Oh, well I did make another huge failure when I came to Los Angeles and tried to break into Hollywood.” She made the film LIONS LOVE ( . . . AND LIES) with the two producers of the musical Hair, and the Warhol superstar Viva. It was the darling of the midnight movie circuit, but for Columbia Pictures that’s not what they were shooting for! So again she has transformed that.

Still from the short film Uncle Yanco, Agnès Varda, 1967, © ciné-tamaris

Tennent: So Varda has really become a perfect example of how the worlds of art and film are not so distinct.

Gonzalez: She’s always argued that those worlds should be more porous. Artists have always driven this.

Benson: It’s this fluidity that artists have, and Hans Richter is another example—someone who worked completely as an artist at one point in his life, and during the 1930s especially was a professional filmmaker running a film studio.

Tennent: Artists don’t draw the same lines that academia draws.

Agnès Varda’s short film Black Panthers, 1967, © Agnès Varda

Benson: Especially today, in the most recent generations of artists. Training was often very traditional, even post–World War II. MFA programs were overly specialized, and artists finally decided to ignore that. One day they would make a video, another day they would make a painting, another they would do photography. We really need to benefit from this creativity and what it tells us about the world we live in.

Gonzalez: And our partnership with Film Independent takes that even further. [Film Independent curator] Elvis Mitchell has been a great role model in pushing the agenda for a broader understanding and appreciation of pop culture. Film is just one part of it. There’s also television, YouTube, and all the content developing on the web.

Salvesen: The channels of distribution have been breaking down, and it connects with what we were saying about how things are made; how they are shared and displayed also evolves. This is now a time when a museum can insert itself into those networks and become a significant site for thinking about film.

Art+Film at LACMA

In anticipation of LACMA’s upcoming celebration of Art+Film honoring artist David Hockney and filmmaker Martin Scorsese, this week Unframed focuses on LACMA’s Art+Film initiative, which presents the moving image in the context of an art museum through exhibitions, film programs, and educational outreach initiatives. LACMA continues, through its extensive programming, to explore and promote the strong connections between film and art from all periods and cultures.

This is first in a two-part series. Today, three LACMA curators discuss the relationship between art and film, and tomorrow, we go more in depth about the current exhibitions that touch about the relationship between the two media.

Gabriel Figueroa, Film still from María Candelaria, directed by Emilio “El Indio” Fernández, 1944, © Gabriel Figueroa Flores Archive

LACMA embarked on its Art+Film initiative beginning in 2010, presenting numerous exhibitions such as Tim Burton and Stanley Kubrick, establishing the annual Art+Film Gala, and creating education programs that bring film to the community. Unframed‘s Scott Tennent spoke to curators Timothy Benson, Rita Gonzalez, and Britt Salvesen about how the museum looks at the art of film, including three exhibitions on view this fall: Under the Mexican Sky: Gabriel Figueroa—Art and Film, Masterworks of Expressionist Cinema: “The Golem” and Its Avatars, and Agnès Varda in Californialand (opens Sunday, November 3).

Viva!—Rado—Ragni—Varda in Hommage to Magritte, Agnès Varda’s film LIONS LOVE (. . . AND LIES), 1968, © Max Rabb / Agnès Varda

Scott Tennent: From a curatorial point of view, the three of you have been the most involved in exhibitions at LACMA that might fall under the “Art+Film” umbrella. So let’s start with the biggest question: why art and film? What was the impetus, from a curatorial perspective?

Britt Salvesen: Upon arrival here in fall of 2009, one of the clear messages I got from [LACMA director] Michael Govan was his conviction that film is one of the key art forms—maybe the key art form—of the 20th and 21st centuries. That really encouraged me, coming from photography, to open my thinking more broadly to the moving image.

Timothy Benson: We’re also taking the lead from artists. The general interest in the last 20 years in visual culture—we’re all awash in images and moving images—made us rethink some of the artists who developed during the evolution of film. Hans Richter is an artist who worked with film and painting on equal terms, but there are other people, like Max Beckmann for example, who scholars are looking at again and thinking about how film inflected what he was doing and how he saw things. I think it is part of a wider direction, which I think LACMA is leading, which reflects a much broader kind of thinking among scholars and curators. It’s part of a very important reappraisal of the last hundred years or so of the evolution of our traditional areas of art and realizing how they’re interrelated, not only with film but with popular culture.

Hans Richter, Dreams That Money Can Buy, 1948, Musée National d’Art Moderne

Hans Richter, Filmstudie (Film Study), 1928, © Hans Richter Estate

Rita Gonzalez: Being in Los Angeles is also really important, realizing our proximity to the film studios. Even during Pacific Standard Time [the 2011–12 Getty-sponsored initiative that explored the history of art in Los Angeles at 60 different venues in Southern California], film played an important role. So many artists were responding to film culture. Here at LACMA there is not a curatorial department for film.

Viva!—Rado—Ragni—Varda in Hommage to Magritte, Agnès Varda’s film LIONS LOVE (. . . AND LIES), 1968, © Max Rabb / Agnès Varda

Tennent: Britt, you head the Prints and Drawing department and the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department; Rita, you are a curator of contemporary art; and Tim, you oversee the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies. How do those backgrounds affect your approach to film exhibitions?

Benson: I realized recently, looking at Max Liebermann’s war imagery, that the imagery he presented was already available in photography. For example, one of his images was based on a photograph that was widely available in the press at the time. It made me think that print curators need to think about this—that we should be aware of what people were looking at on a daily basis. Certainly these artists’ contemporaries saw their images already knowing the photographs. It’s a mediated vision that even traditional artists such as Max Liebermann would have been working from.

Hans Richter, Dreams That Money Can Buy (still), 1944–47,© Hans Richter Estate

Salvesen: A related thing we’ve talked about is the material culture of film. It’s not just the film works themselves that we’re interested in, but the broader visual culture around them—posters, advertisements, stills, or other interpretations or responses that happened in different media. That’s something that an encyclopedic museum like LACMA can delve into.

Gabriel Figueroa, scene from the film La Perla, directed by Emilio Fernández, 1945, © Televisa Foundation

Gonzalez: I think what’s been exciting in the exhibitions that have happened up to this point is that, as a group of curators, we’re trying out new curatorial models for presenting film in an art museum, as opposed to the venues one might be accustomed to, like a cinematheque.

Stay tuned to Unframed throughout the week for more on Art+Film at LACMA.

10th-Annual Muse Costume Ball Contest Winners

The 10th-annual Muse Costume Ball took place this past Saturday, and L.A.’s ghouls came dressed in their best. The party started with Clairy Browne and the Bangin’ Rackettes performing in front of Chris Burden’s Urban Light, after which the costume contest winners were announced onstage. The judges, Judianna Makovsky (The Hunger Games), Julie Weiss (Hitchcock), and Daniel Orlandi (Down with Love), selected winners in three categories.

Clairy Browne and the Bangin’ Rackettes

LACMA’s Meghan McCauley played MC as the ghost of Marlene Dietrich.

LACMA’s Meghan McCauley announcing the winners.

As you can see, the competition was quite fierce. We had Tron versus The Shining‘s possessed twins versus a marionette and a puppeteer battling for the Best Black-and-White Costume.

Nominees for best costumes near the stage.

The victors in this category were Marina and Ronni Kappos.

Best Black and White: The Shining Twins, by Marina and Ronni Kappos

Franken Berry, a 1971 creation by General Mills, beautifully combined Mary Shelley’s famous story of a science experiment gone wrong with a morning tradition: cereal. The commercial for the breakfast food featured a voice actor in the guise of Boris Karloff, who played Frankenstein in both Frankenstein (1931), The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), and The Son of Frankenstein (1939).

Nathan Anderson won the Best Classic Movie Monster theme in his interpretation of this pink and kid-friendly version of the creature.

Best Classic Movie Monster: Boris Karloff’s Franken Berry, by Nathan Anderson

Finally, the winner of Best Ghost of Hollywood Past went to Spencer Robins, who came costumed as Robert Muldoon incarnate from Jurassic Park. In Robins’s interpretation of the character, Muldoon apparently survives the famous attack by the velociraptor, which was preceded in the movie by his last words, “Clever girl.”

Best Ghost of Hollywood Past: Jurassic Park, by Spencer Robins

Below are photographs highlighting the festivities of the evening.

Just hangin’ out.

A few creative costumes, including Sharknado, with LACMA’s Meghan McCauley.

We need a drink.

Linda Theung, editor