Ian J. Forster

Director

Based on Ethan Carr’s award-winning book, "Boston’s Franklin Park" describes the landscape Frederick Law Olmsted designed in 1885 as the centerpiece of a unique municipal park system known as the Emerald Necklace. Weaving together interviews with the author, park advocates, and park users, the film traces its decline, caused by patterns of institutionalized racism on the part of the city of Boston, and the heroic efforts of local residents to save it from ruin. Now, as the city is poised to spend millions of dollars to improve the park, the film presents an important crossroads: “As we look forward to the city—finally, after decades of official neglect—investing major amounts of money in Franklin Park, the question is how should the city move forward?” Ethan Carr, FASLA.

Director

Marking, whittling, struggling, scumbling, contradicting, and abstracting, artist Amy Sillman wrestles with the history and materiality of painting, reinvigorating the medium with new references and perspectives. In her Brooklyn studio, the artist works improvisationally using various nontraditional and ad-hoc tools to scrape, wipe, and wash off the paint she applies to the canvas in an ongoing process of editing and revision.

Director

Riding the New York City subway, artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan makes his way to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), where his 2023 exhibition Walled Unwalled and Other Monologues is underway. Using his unique methods of acoustic investigation, Abu Hamdan explores the potentials and limits of our ability to listen and truly hear. “I’ve dedicated a lot of work to thinking about a politics of listening,” says the artist. “That’s quite different to a politics of speech where everyone should have a voice because where and when those voices are heard is just as important.” At MoMA, museumgoers sit in a darkened room as Abu Hamdan appears projected on a screen, walking to a music stand before delivering the monologue at the heart of Walled Unwalled (2018). The video is one of three works in the exhibition that describe a range of strategies for listening and that make distinct political claims. Rehearsing for the performance After SFX (2018), Abu Hamdan and percussionist Eli Keszler experiment with “playing” different types of doors. In the performance, Keszler’s instrumentation complements a monologue delivered by the artist, both pointing to the nature of sonic experiences and memories as distinct from, and even in excess of, the visual.

Director

Based on the award-winning book by William E. O’Brien, this film by the Library of American Landscape History underscores the profound inequality that persisted for decades in the number, size, and quality of state park spaces provided for Black visitors across the South. Even though it has largely faded from public awareness, the imprint of segregated design remains visible in many state parks.

Emphasizing the events leading to integration in the 1960s, "Landscapes of Exclusion" features commentary by author William E. O’Brien and the architect Arthur J. Clement, who attended a segregated state park as a child. Dramatic images and live footage bring this painful history into contemporary focus.

Director

Artist Aliza Nisenbaum began both her friendship with Veronica Ramírez and her observational portrait painting practice at artist Tania Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement International (IMI) in 2012. Over ten years later, the seeds of friendship, empowerment, and solidarity planted at IMI continue to bloom through their relationship and continued engagement with the community of Corona, Queens through art. Culminating with the opening of Nisenbaum’s Queens Museum exhibition “Queens, Lindo y Querido,” this film follows the development of Nisenbaum’s observational portraiture and highlights the power of a socially engaged art practice to make a difference in the lives of individuals and communities.

Director

Within the iconic spiraling architecture of New York City’s Guggenheim Museum, a series of projected videos drift along the walls and collide with one another: a peregrine falcon soaring in a clear sky, a tall building collapsing in a cloud of smoke, a finger gently disturbing a pool of blue liquid, and more. Bleeding into the museum walls, Sarah Sze’s River of Images (2023) is one of many site-specific works that call attention to the museum’s unique design in Sze’s 2023 exhibition, Timelapse. Throughout the exhibition, the artist emphasizes how both art and architecture impact one’s experience of the world. Her works play off the Guggenheim’s design, drawing the viewer’s gaze to elements like the immense void at the center of the building or the play of light and shadows created by the bay walls. “This is one of the most radical architectures built.” says Sze, “It’s the air, it’s the light, it’s the tilt. It’s all of these things that really create an entirely new inner world when you enter this museum.”

Director

On a rare snowy day in Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico, artist Rose B. Simpson assembles a maquette for a new public sculpture. The three small figures are models for the 12 concrete sculptures that stand nearly 11 feet tall at the Field Farm meadow in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Gazing forward with soft expressions and eyes that are hollowed through the back of their heads, the sculptures embody ancestors watching over the landscape. Simpson’s work stems from these moments of observation and connections to the past, emphasizing the processes of making and becoming in which we discover new ways of being and of healing. Working quickly and intuitively in her studio, the artist shapes her clay sculptures by hand using a technique she developed called “slap-slab.” Each of her clay sculptures is embedded with fingerprints and other evidence of the artist’s hand, leaving traces of the act of making that produced the work. “I’m trying to reveal our deep truth,” says Simpson, “and that deep truth is process.”

Director

In a darkened gallery, artis Alex Da Corte appears projected on the wall in Slow Graffiti (2017) as Boris Karloff, performing as both the actor himself and his 1931 role as Frankenstein's monster, blurring the lines between actor and character. In his work, the artist never appears as himself, but rather, embodies the larger-than-life characters who influence or intrigue him: Mr. Rogers, the Wicked Witch of the West, Marcel Duchamp, and the Pink Panther are but a handful. Studying these characters who exist in worlds of fantasy and cartoon and integrating them into his own expansive artistic vision, Da Corte hopes to gain a deeper understanding of them and learn new ways of thinking.

Director

In her studio in New Jersey, artist Amy Sherald paints portraits that tell a story about American lives. Her face just inches away from a canvas, the artist carefully applies stroke after stroke, building her narrative through paint. “I really have this belief that images can change the world,” says Sherald, a belief she acts upon in her compelling paintings, which depict everyday people with dignity and humanity. Following the tradition of American realists like Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper, the artist uses her paintings to tell stories about America. Searching for models, settings, and scenarios that would convey the kinds of stories she wanted to tell, Sherald began to populate the world of her paintings with everyday people in everyday situations.

Director

In his hometown of Loíza, Puerto Rico, artist Daniel Lind-Ramos looks on as drums beat the rhythms of bomba music, intricately costumed figures parade up and down the street, and community members dance and celebrate together. Inspired by his town’s diverse and inventive culture, the artist’s work reflects the history and energy of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. Many of his materials come from the island itself; Lind-Ramos combs the beaches and streets of Loíza for palm fronds and other plant life, items that wash up on the shore, and discarded, everyday materials that speak to the story of the Caribbean. These objects take on new and multiple meanings within the artist’s work, folded into narratives about immigration, natural disaster, and colonization that often transform them. His sculptures often reference real-life experiences he interprets and reinvents, alluding to historical events, cultural practices, and religious iconography. “My intention with this approach, among other things,” says the artist, “is to remember.”

Director

Considered the dean of South African photography, David Goldblatt’s near-six-decade-long career chronicled and critiqued the country’s tumultuous modern history. Interspersed with scenes of Goldblatt touring the sites of past and current photographs, this segment surveys the artist’s extensive body of work; his earliest projects captured the desperate lives of African gold miners and critically probed white Afrikaner privilege and his more recent series examined the country’s changing politics through the evolution of its architectural structures. Goldblatt’s work is a testament to the power of photography as a means of social criticism. This segment was filmed and edited in the months prior to Goldblatt’s passing in June 2018.

Director

Joyful and courageous, Zanele Muholi photographs Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex individuals in South Africa, driven by an intense dedication to increasing the visibility of one of the country’s most vulnerable communities. The artist shares the personal motivations behind an ongoing self-portrait series that allows them to own their voice, identity, and history as a queer Zulu person. From a portrait session in the Johannesburg townships to a gallery opening in Cape Town, Muholi photographs LGBTI individuals, in the hopes of eradicating the stigma and violence that has pervaded queer communities in South Africa.

Director

Since the late 1960s, the British-born artist Phyllida Barlow has experimented with non-traditional, modest materials like cement, fabric, plaster, plywood, and metal to create colossal sculptures and installations that occupy, challenge, and interrupt physical spaces.

Director

A signature artist of his generation, the sculptor Anish Kapoor poetically transforms stainless steel, stone, wax, PVC, and colorful pigment into transcendent and mystifying forms that provoke fundamental questions about perception, consciousness, and spirituality. Capturing the iconic public sculpture Cloud Gate, popularly known as “The Bean,” in Chicago and a major retrospective in Beijing, this film is an intimate portrayal of a world-renowned artist.

Director

Artist Richard Mosse documents humanitarian crises and environmental catastrophes by making the unseen visible. This film follows Mosse and his collaborators Ben Frost and Trevor Tweeten as they travel across the world to film under-reported world events in zones of conflict, repurposing surveillance technologies and scientific tools to capture stories and scenes that evoke deeper understanding and motivate audiences to act. In locations like the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where over 50 armed groups are engaged in combat, or along paths of migration from the Middle East and North Africa into the European Union, the artist works to bring attention to conflict and suffering around the world. “My power, if I have any,” says Mosse, “is to be able to show you the things that I’ve seen in a more powerful way than perhaps the pictures you’ve seen in the newspaper of the same thing.”