Events & Activities
Movies at a museum? We may not have popcorn, but we do screen thought-provoking movies with themes that often directly relate to our current exhibitions or collections. Screenings are followed by related discussion, often led by topic experts.
Phoenix New Times recently described our No Festival Required series as one of the best ways to spend a Sunday afternoon, so stop by and check it out.
Film
Chuck Close
July 8, Showings at 4pm and 7pm
This feature-length documentary, directed by the late filmmaker Marion Cajori and completed in 2007, examines the working process of acclaimed American painter Chuck Close. The film solidifies Close’s place in contemporary art as a re-inventor of the portrait. The artist's subjects – family, artists, friends – provide insight into his work and their own, rendering a collective portrait of a creative generation.
The film features Close and his wife Leslie, Robert Rauschenberg, Phillip Glass, Arne Glimcher, Brice Marden, Kiki Smith and Kirk Varnedoe, among others.
Presented by the Museum's Contemporary Forum; sponsored by Lisa Sette Gallery.
Harry Gamboa Jr.: 1990s Video Art
July 18, 1pm
Harry Gamboa Jr. is an internationally recognized writer and visual artist. As co-founder of the Chicano art group ASCO (1971 – 1987), he developed such multimedia forms as the “no-movie” and “fotonovela,” which drew attention to the workings of mass culture. In these works, collected here for the first time, Gamboa combined the political influences of the Chicano Movement with the narrative excess of film noir, B-movies, and Mexican telenovelas.
The screening includes El Mundo L.A., L.A. Familia, Mañanamania, Fire Ants for Nothing, Huevitos, Loner with a Gun and Rite of Overpass.
Adult content. This film from the Chicano Cinema and Media Art Series is provided courtesy of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center.
Co-sponsored by the Museum's Latin American Art Alliance
Early Chicano Art Documentaries
August 9, 1pm
This screening includes James Tartan’s documentaries on the first two major Chicano art exhibits: Los Four, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1974, and Murals of Aztlán: The Street Painters of East Los Angeles, at the Craft and Folk Art Museum of Los Angeles in 1981.
Los Four documents the first exhibition of Chicano artists held at a major art museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in 1974. The documentary captures the debates of Los Four (1973 – 1983), an influential Chicano collective (Carlos Almaraz, Gilbert “Magu” Sanchez Lujan, Roberto de la Rocha, Frank Romero), over art, politics, and community. It also reveals their experimentation with spray-can techniques, found objects, and installation art as well as their self-conscious efforts to develop Chicano icons.
The exhibition Murals of Aztlán: The Street Painters of East Los Angeles, at Craft and Folk Art Museum of Los Angeles in 1981, featured portable murals in the gallery space painted by some of the leading Chicano and Chicana artists: Carlos Almaraz, Gronk, Judithe Hernandez, Willie Herron, Frank Romero, John Valadez and the East Los Streetscapers (David Rivas Botello, Wayne Alaniz Healy, George Yepes).
This film from the Chicano Cinema and Media Art Series is provided courtesy of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center.
Co-sponsored by the Museum's Latin American Art Alliance
The Cool School: How LA Learned to Love Modern Art
August 12, 7pm
This film chronicles how Los Angeles came of age in the art world. Narrated by actor Jeff Bridges, it focuses on the Ferrus Gallery and how it groomed LA’s art scene from a loose band of idealistic beatniks into a coterie of competitive, often brilliant artists including Ed Ruscha, Craig Kauffman, Ed Moses and Robert Irwin. The gallery also served as a launching pad for New York imports Andy Warhol (hosting his first soup-can show), Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein.
Cool School deals with a complex web of egos, passions, money and art.
"Smart, jazzy and unafraid to deflate egos, Neville’s fast-paced, finely critical study makes for a pungent intro to a movement now esteemed as a key alternative to the New York AbEx stranglehold." Time Out, New York
Presented by the Museum's Contemporary Forum; sponsored by Lisa Sette Gallery.
Please, Don’t Bury Me Alive!
August 30, 1pm
This 1976 independent film, a slice-of-barrio-life about the dilemmas facing a young Chicano in the spring of 1972 amid the Chicano Movement, was shot and exhibited in South Texas. It outperformed All the President’s Men in some small towns and singlehandedly broke Mexico’s monopoly over the 400 Spanish-language theaters in the U.S. The film inspired an independent film movement in Mexico, where the state controlled the industry, and among Chicano filmmakers in the U.S., who further refined Efraín Gutiérrez’s successful grassroots marketing strategy.
The film is important as an instance of regional filmmaking, as a bicultural and bilingual narrative and as a precedent that expanded the way that films got made in two nations.
Adult content; in English and Spanish with subtitles. This film from the Chicano Cinema and Media Art Series is provided courtesy of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center.
Co-sponsored by the Museum's Latin American Art Alliance
The Man Who Painted Everest
September 6, 1pm
Artist Tony Foster is an acclaimed watercolourist who works in some of the world's most beautiful and inaccessible places. Not for him are the more convenient methods of working from photographs or sketches: he believes that great art can only be created by actually being present, and to this end, he made an arduous journey from Kathmandu to 17,000 feet up Mount Everest, to paint a landscape few have ever seen.
This revealing documentary follows Foster in his sixties as he battles altitude sickness, physical exhaustion, the threat of Maoist insurgents and exceptionally hazardous terrain to set up a huge canvas and paint the extraordinary scene before him.
A Walk into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory
September 9, 7pm
This film deals with a darker side of the Warhol Factory. Director Esther Robinson’s riveting personal inquiry into the 1966 disappearance of Danny Williams, a promising young filmmaker who was Andy Warhol's lover and Robinson's uncle, features never-before-seen interviews with surviving Warhol Factory members and astonishing footage from Williams’ recently discovered films.
"First-time director Esther Robinson proves that a dash of subjectivity in documentary isn’t always a bad thing, showing a remarkable clarity of vision and thirst for knowledge in her superb [film]." Time Out
Presented by the Museum's Contemporary Forum; sponsored by Lisa Sette Gallery.
Frontierland
September 20, 1pm
This film examines the multiple points of cultural contact between the U.S. and Mexico. From the Santa Barbara Fiestas and South Carolina’s kitschy “South of the Border” tourist complex, to a Mexican Beatles cover band and Chicano rap, it reveals the borderlands as a laboratory of hybridity that continues to ignite the popular imagination of each nation. Working at the boundaries of experimental film and documentary travelogue, it weaves together found footage, interviews, performance art and music video, creating a masterful commentary that is at once poetic, disturbing and hilarious.
Includes appearances by Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Aztlán Underground, among others.
Adult content; in English and Spanish with subtitles. This film from the Chicano Cinema and Media Art Series is provided courtesy of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center.
Co-sponsored by the Museum's Latin American Art Alliance
Arizona Opera Film Series
In its fifth year, The series is composed of three films that relate to Arizona Opera's 2009-2010 season, running from October 2009 to May 2010.
Salome Carlos Saura, 2002
July 19, 1pm
The biblical story of Salome has been the source of inspiration for such visionaries as playwright Oscar Wilde, composer Richard Strauss, painter Titian to filmmaker Ken Russell. In this film Spanish filmmaker Carlos Sauro brings the temptress to life with heart-pounding flare. Her infamous dance of the seven veils is ingeniously translated into the passionate language of flamenco.
The film garnered a Goya, Spain’s Oscar for Best Song while the film was given the award for Best Artistic Contribution by the Montreal Film Festival.
In Spanish with English subtitles.
La bohème
August 23, 1pm
Puccini's heart-rending story of young 19th Century bohemians, rich in spirit but short on funds, is brilliantly restaged in post-war 1950’s Paris. In this filmed version of his opera production, recorded live at the Sydney Opera House, Luhrmann dresses his leads in leather and t-shirts but keeps the love between the poet Rodolfo and the seamstress Mimi alive with vitality and passion.
“From beginning to end, La bohème Baz-style sizzled.” BBC News
In Italian and English with English subtitles.
Rent
September 27, 1pm
Set in New York City's gritty East Village this rock opera follows a group of bohemians struggling to live and pay their rent. With love as their only resource these starving artists dream of success and acceptance while enduring the obstacles of poverty and illness. Rent was inspired by Puccini’s La bohème and gave voice to a new generation on Broadway.
Rent garnered both a Pulitzer and Tony Award.
Other Performance
Downtown Chamber Series
July 26, 2pm
July 29, 7pm
Performed amidst works from the Museum’s contemporary collection, these concerts feature works for piano and strings including Ludwig von Beethoven’s String Trio Op. 9 No. 1, Claude Debussy’s Violin Sonata and Johannes Brahms’s piano quintet.
Susan Fishman, piano
Anna Kazepides and
Leslie Frey, violins
Mark Dix, viola
Richard Bock, cello
Tickets: $10. Limited seating. Call (602) 254-1491 for more information.
Classical Meets Jazz, Part II
September 2, 7pm
Red Rocks Music Festival returns to the Museum! The Russell Schmidt Jazz Trio and Festival artists David Ehrlich, violin, Nancy Buck, viola, Jan Simiz, cello and Teresa Ehrlich, piano, perform works by Gabriel Fauré, Paul Schoenfeld, Harold Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael, Antônio Carlos Jobim and Victor Young.
Cost: $25 adult, $10 students; $5 discount for Museum Members.
For tickets or more information, visit redrockmusicfestival.com or call (602) 787-1577.