Tag Archives: Ja’Tovia Gary

JA’TOVIA GARY — THE GIVERNY DOCUMENT

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I want to corroborate Black women’s reality. Some of us feel safe and some of us do not, but within that spectrum, there’s grief, there’s relief, there’s whimsy. There are feelings of anxiety and apprehension, but also faith and trust. Our inner world is layered and super vast, and I want us to be able to see that depicted on the screen, witness Black women having these interior moments…

I call myself a director who edits, but I’m probably an editor who directs … The idea of handing this over to someone else is so foreign, so counterintuitive. For me, that’s where the real making takes place. So my process is sourcing footage from everywhere, whether that be the internet or some image I’m creating myself or a collaboration with a DP or an archive. But the actual process begins once we sit down at that hard drive, because it’s important for me to have that level of control. — Ja’Tovia Gary, interview with Rooney Elmi, 2019

This week at the AFI FEST presented by Audi, Gary brings her new 40-minute film THE GIVERNY DOCUMENT—which incorporates footage shot in New York City and at Monet’s historic gardens in France.

THE GIVERNY DOCUMENT will be preceded by BLACK BUS STOP, directed by Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold.

THE GIVERNY DOCUMENT—SHORTS PROGRAM 6

Tuesday, November 19, at 7:45 pm.

Wednesday, November 20, at 3:15 pm.

Chinese Theatre

6801 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles.

From top: Ja’Tovia Gary, image courtesy and © the artist and the photographer; Ja’Tovia Gary, The Giverny Document (2019), images courtesy and © the artist.

HILTON ALS — A COLLECTIVE PORTRAIT OF JAMES BALDWIN

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“Troubled times get the tyrants and prophets they deserve. During our current epoch, the revival of interest in author James Baldwin has been particularly intense. This is in part due, of course, to his ability to analyze and articulate how power abuses through cunning and force and why, in the end, it’s up to the people to topple kingdoms.

“As a galvanizing humanitarian force, Baldwin is now being claimed as a kind of oracle. But by claiming him as such, much gets erased about the great artist in the process, specifically his sexuality and aestheticism, both of which informed his politics.” — Hilton Als*

GOD MADE MY FACE—A COLLECTIVE PORTRAIT OF JAMES BALDWIN—a group show curated by Hilton Als, featuring the work of Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Alvin Baltrop, Beauford Delaney, Marlene Dumas, Ja’Tovia Gary, Glenn Ligon, Alice Neel, Cameron Rowland, Kara Walker, Jane Evelyn Atwood, and James Welling—is on view through mid-February.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Metrograph and Als will present a series of films featuring Baldwin through the years, at home and abroad.

GOD MADE MY FACE—

A COLLECTIVE PORTRAIT OF JAMES BALDWIN*

Through February 16.

David Zwirner

525 and 533 West 19th Street, New York City.

HILTON ALS ON JAMES BALDWIN FILM SERIES

Friday and Saturday, February 1 and 2.

Metrograph

7 Ludlow Street, New York City.

See “The Energy of Joy: Hilton Als in conversation with David Bridel and Mary-Alice Daniel,” PARIS LA 16 (2019): 217–221.

From top: Marlene Dumas, James Baldwin, 2014, from the Great Men series exhibited at Manifesta 10 in St. Petersburg, image credit: Marlene Dumas and Bernard Ruijgrok Piezographics; Beauford Delaney, Dark Rapture, 1941, oil on canvas; Alvin Baltrop, The Piers (man sitting), 1975-1986, photograph; Richard Avedon, James Baldwin, writer, Harlem, New York, 1945, © The Richard Avedon Foundation; Ja’Tovia Gary, An Ecstatic Experience, 2015, video still; Jane Evelyn Atwood, James Baldwin with bust of himself sculpted by Larry Wolhandler, Paris, France, 1975 (detail), gelatin silver print. All images courtesy David Zwirner.