Oscar buzz is in the air…so let’s talk about it!
This month, we’re focusing on Oscar nominated films! Real Art Ways showed eight of the nominated films…and the Oscar Shorts are coming in April.
Join our always-lively Cinema Coordinator Ian Ally-Seals, and sidekick Front-of-House staffer Rae Caldwell, as they get you sharing.
You can register HERE
Any questions please email our Cinema Coordinator, Ian Ally-Seals at iallyseals@realartways.org
Real Art Ways exhibiting artist Catalina Ouyang is joined by writer and art historian Catherine Damman for a conversation surrounding the work in Ouyang’s solo exhibition, THE SIREN. Ouyang and Damman will engage in a dialogue covering the conceptual, formal, and material aspects of Ouyang’s sculptural approach to narrative and history.
This event will also be broadcast on our Facebook page.
Catalina Ouyang’s solo exhibitions include: it has always been the perfect instrument at Knockdown Center (Queens, NY); marrow at Make Room (Los Angeles, CA); fish mystery in the shift horizon at Rubber Factory (New York, NY); blood in D minor at Selena Gallery (Brooklyn, NY); and an elegy for Marco at the Millitzer Gallery (St. Louis, MO). Ouyang has attended residencies at Shandaken: Storm King (New Windsor, NY), the NARS Foundation (Brooklyn, NY), OBRAS (Evoramonte, Portugal), and the Atlantic Center for the Arts (New Smyrna Beach, FL), with residencies forthcoming at the Vermont Studio Center and MASS MoCA. Ouyang is a 2020-21 Studio Artist at Smack Mellon (Brooklyn, NY). Ouyang has received awards from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts, the Puffin Foundation, the Santo Foundation, and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation. Ouyang received an MFA from Yale University and is based in New York.
Catherine Dammanis currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at Wesleyan University and a Core Lecturer at Columbia University. Previously, she held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities and a Chester Dale Predoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art. With the support of a 2020 Terra Foundation for American Art Research Grant, she is at work on her monograph, which radically reconceptualizes the formation of “performance” in the 1970s. Her writing can be found in Artforum, Bookforum, 4Columns, BOMB, Frieze, Art in America, and elsewhere.
Real Art Ways is pleased to host an online panel discussion, followed by a Q&A, on the new documentary M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity.
Artists Chris Klapper and Patrick Gallagher, mathematician Dr. Timothy Goldberg, and musician Rachael Elliott, will join Cinema Coordinator Ian Ally-Seals in a conversation on Escher and how his work has influenced each panelist’s professional practice.
M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity is available to rent through Real Art Ways Virtual Cinema HERE.
About the panelists:
Chris Klapper and Patrick Gallagher collaborate in multidimensional and large-scale multimedia to explore new technologies and use them to express immense ideas on a human scale.
They are currently the 2020-2021 Artists in Residence at FERMILAB – National Particle Physics and Accelerator Laboratory and 2021 UMass Amherst Visiting Artists. Recent projects include PI Project, DATAATADATA: Everything and Nothing at The Invisible Dog Art Center and DATAATADATA:3-Sphere at ODETTA.
Dr. Timothy Goldberg is an Associate Professor of Mathematics in the Donald and Helen Schort School of Mathematics and Computing Sciences at Lenoir–Rhyne University in Hickory, North Carolina. His mathematical interests are primarily in geometry.
Rachael Elliott is a versatile performer who is active in classical, new music, and improvised rock and pop. She is best known as the founding member of the genre-bending music group, Clogs. Ms. Elliott may also be heard on recordings by The National, My Brightest Diamond, and Thomas L. Read, and in films including Turn the River and Colony.
Science on Screen is an initiative of the COOLIDGE CORNER THEATRE, with major support from the ALFRED P. SLOAN FOUNDATION.
Image: “Hand With Mirror” by M.C. Escher © The M.C. Escher Company B.V. Baarn – The Netherlands, courtesy of Zeitgeist Films
Max Early is a recent graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts’ MFA Creative Writing program. He has received fellowships and residencies from Taos Summer Writers’ Conference, School for Advanced Research’s Indigenous Writer, Orion in the Wilderness with the Omega Institute, and Writing By Writers. Early is the author of Ears of Corn: Listen (3: A Taos Press).
He is also an established potter from the Pueblo of Laguna. His clans are Tsina Hanu (Turkey People) and Kwaya Waashch’ee (child of the Bear Clan). Early lives in the village of Paguate, NM.
Cheryl Savageau (Abenaki) poet, a memoirist is the author of Out of the Crazywoods, a memoir that navigates her experience of living with bipolar/manic depressive illness; and three collections of poetry – Mother/Land, an “unhistory” of the Northeast; Dirt Road Home, which was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; and Home Country. She has won Fellowships in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Artists Fellowship Program, and is a three-time fellow at MacDowell. Her children’s book, Muskrat Will Be Swimming, was a Smithsonian Notable Book and won the Skipping Stones Award for children’s environmental literature and the Wordcraft Circle’s Best Children’s Book of the Year award. Savageau mentored Native writers through Wordcraft Circle of Native Poets and Storytellers, and was awarded Mentor of the Year in 1998.
She has taught workshops through Gedakina, and is former editor of Dawnland Voices 2.0. Her work has appeared most recently in Yellow Medicine Review, The Cape Cod Review, and Hinchas de Poésia, and is widely anthologized. She teaches Indigenous literatures and creative writing at the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College.
An open mic will start after the readings by Max Early and Cheryl Savageau. To sign up, please send an email to riverwoodpoetry@yahoo.com
Films and shows can provide entertainment, connection, knowledge, comfort, and conversation.
And, many of us are watching more at home than ever before…so let’s talk about it!
Join us for an hour-long conversation, co-facilitated by cinema coordinator Ian Ally-Seals and front of house staffer Rae Caldwell
Have essential viewing to share?
Looking for recommendations?
In this open-ended chat, everyone will have space to share and connect. We hope you can join us!
You can register HERE
Any questions please email our Cinema Coordinator, Ian Ally-Seals at iallyseals@realartways.org
Films and shows can provide entertainment, connection, knowledge, comfort, and conversation.
And, many of us are watching more at home than ever before…so let’s talk about it!
Join us for an hour-long conversation, facilitated by our always-lively Cinema Coordinator Ian Ally-Seals, and sidekick Front-of-House staffer Rae Caldwell.
In this open-ended chat, everyone will have space to share and connect. We hope you can join us!
You can register HERE
Any questions please email our Cinema Coordinator, Ian Ally-Seals at iallyseals@realartways.org
Karen Skolfield’s book “Battle Dress” (W. W. Norton) won the 2020 Massachusetts Book Award in poetry and the Barnard Women Poets Prize. Her book “Frost in the Low Areas” (Zone 3 Press) won the 2014 PEN New England Award in poetry. Skolfield is a U.S. Army veteran and teaches writing to engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; she’s the poet laureate for Northampton, MA for 2019-2022. Learn more about her work at www.karenskolfield.com
An open mic will start after the reading by Karen Skolfield. To sign up, please send an email to riverwoodpoetry@yahoo.com
Real Art Ways and ART PAPERS partner to celebrate two events—- the closing day of the group exhibition, Statues Also Die, and the launch of the Fall/Winter 2020 journal, Monumental Interventions.
Artists Jeffrey Meris and Marisa Williamson will join ART PAPERS guest co-editor TK Smith, and RAW guest curator, Sarah Fritchey, in a conversation around artists who reject, subvert and revolutionize conventional traditions, concepts and materials of monument-making. Focusing on the sentient body as a receptacle for memory, a site of action, and the vessel through which we come to experience the world— the panelists will explore questions of absence, presence, memory, refusal, vulnerability, mutability, and agency. Drawing from Smith’s extensive research and writing on the history of monument-making, memorials, and the Black body, we will consider how artists are looking to ephemeral forms and new symbols to shape the future of monument making.
Copies of the ART PAPERS journal are available for purchase on their website, and at Real Art Ways for $10 each. You can preview the journal here.
About the panelists:
TK Smith is a Philadelphia-based writer, art critic, and curator. Most recently, Smith co-edited Monumental Interventions, the Fall/ Winter 2020 issue of ART PAPERS that explores where the concerns of art intersect with those of monument and memorial. He is the curator of Virtual Remains, a group exhibition of Atlanta-based artists opening at the Atlanta Contemporary in 2021. He is currently a PhD candidate in the History of American Civilization program at the University of Delaware, where he researches art, material culture, and the built environment.
Sarah Fritchey is a curator and writer based in New Haven, CT. She has curated projects at UMass Amherst, Queens College, The African American Museum in Philadelphia, and Franklin Street Works. Sarah is a contributor to ArtForum.com, Hyperallergic, Art New England Magazine, and Big Red & Shiny. Her practice focuses on under-represented histories, and the cultivation of an exhibition space as a site for cultural exchange, debate, education and experimentation. Born and raised outside of Philadelphia, Sarah holds an M.A. in Curatorial Studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and a B.A. in Comparative Literature and Studio Art from Hamilton College, NY.
Born in Haiti in 1991 and raised in the Bahamas, Jeffrey Meris is an artist who earned an A.A in Arts and Crafts from the University of The Bahamas, a B.F.A in Sculpture from Tyler School of Art, and an M.F.A in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2019. Meris is currently a 2020 NXTHVN Studio Fellow.
Marisa Williamson is a project-based artist who works in video, image-making, installation and performance around themes of history, race, feminism, and technology. She has produced site-specific works at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello (2013), Storm King Art Center (2016), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2016), the University of Virginia (2018), and SPACES Cleveland (2019), and by commission from Monument Lab Philadelphia (2017), and the National Park Service (2019).
Six Connecticut poets who published new books during the time of the pandemic and have not yet launched their books into poetry audiences will read selections and introduce their work:
Ben Grossberg—Director of Creative Writing at the University of Hartford, reading from My Husband Would, which, set at the crossroads of middle age, investigates love and family—both the families we are born into and those we create for ourselves.
Debra Sansone—Teacher and Healer, reading from Third Eye on the Prize, about consciousness, creation, and mindfulness—poems which mine the rich lode to be found in the incongruities between appearance and reality.
John Stanizzi—Literature instructor at Manchester Community College, reading from P.O.N.D, a daily journey in verse and photographs to a pond near his home where he reveals the secrets of nature hidden in plain view.
Julia Paul—President of the Riverwood Poetry Series and elder law attorney, reading from Staring Down the Tracks, which gives voice to those affected by addiction, a diverse demographic often harshly judged and silenced by shame.
Nancy Kerrigan—psychiatric nurse practitioner and therapist, reading from Lucky Enough: A Journey, which traces a life shaped by an Irish Catholic youth in Chicago and on through the trials and joys of her adulthood.
Rennie McQuilkin—Connecticut Poet Laureate from 2015-2018 and winner of the Connecticut Center for the Book’s Lifetime Achievement Award, reading from Coming Through, the fourth in a series of books written in the face of mortal illness, looking for ways to prevail despite the multiple crises we face.
There is no open mic this month.
Artist Shannon VanGyzen is joined by dancers and choreographers from the Hartford Dance Collective and drag artists Coleslaw and Severity Stone in a conversation surrounding “Family Reunion”, a collaborative performance.
Each choreographer chose one of VanGyzen’s sculptures included in her solo exhibition “Homebound” and crafted a piece exploring the conceptual and formal aspects using a diverse range of approaches. Each vignette performance is connected through a series of appropriated readings curated and read by Krystle Brown.
The filmed version by Laine Rettmer is viewable for free HERE.
Please register using this link.
Many of us are watching more at home than ever before.
We are thinking it will be fun and interesting to invite people to take part in a conversation, facilitated by our enthusiastic Cinema Coordinator, Ian Ally-Seals.
What are you watching? What do or don’t you like, and why? What do you think we should be watching next? It’ll be a conversation-sized group.
You can register HERE
Any questions please email our Cinema Coordinator, Ian Ally-Seals at iallyseals@realartways.org
Real Art Ways is proud to partner with Connecticut Children’s to present the 2020 Global Health Film Festival.
Join us for free live screenings at the times below. No registration is necessary for online screenings (11/30, 12/1 & 12/2). Registration is necessary for in-person screening (12/6) at Real Art Ways. Instructions below.
UnMasked: We All Breath
Hosted by Juan Salazar MD
UnMasked tells the story of three young South African doctors who contract multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR TB). These women endured years of harrowing side effects caused by the MDR TB treatment and narrowly escape death from a disease that is as old as the plague. This documentary follows these brave, resilient women as they claw their way up from the depths of despair to create new lives for themselves.
Attend the film screening HERE (at the scheduled time)
In the Name of Your Daughter
Hosted by the film’s director, Giselle Portenier
In The Name Of Your Daughter is the inspiring and intimate verité story about some of the bravest girls in the world, children like feisty 12-year old Rosie Makori who ran away from her home in Northern Tanzania to save herself from female genital mutilation (FGM) and the child marriage her parents had planned for her. Set in the stunning landscape of East Africa’s Serengeti district, this is ultimately an inspiring and hopeful story of brave young girls standing up for their human rights and fighting for change in their community.
Attend the film screening HERE (at the scheduled time)
For Sama
Hosted by Hareem Park MD
Prix L’Œil d’Or for Best Documentary at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival.
Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary at the SXSW Film Festival
FOR SAMA is both an intimate and epic journey into the female experience of war. A love letter from a young mother to her daughter, the film tells the story of Waad al-Kateab’s life through five years of the uprising in Aleppo, Syria as she falls in love, gets married and gives birth to Sama, all while cataclysmic conflict rises around her.
Attend the film screening HERE (at the scheduled time)
City of Joy
Hosted by Adam Silverman MD
CITY OF JOY follows the first class of women at a revolutionary leadership center in eastern Congo called City of Joy, from which the film derives its title, and weaves their journey as burgeoning leaders with that of the center’s founders (Dr. Denis Mukwege, 2016 Nobel Peace Prize nominee, women’s rights activist Christine Schuler-Deschryver and radical feminist Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues) – three individuals who imagined a place where women who have suffered horrific rape and abuse can heal and become powerful voices of change for their country.
Real Art Ways is proud to partner with Visual AIDS for Day With(out) Art 2020 by presenting TRANSMISSIONS, a program of six new videos considering the impact of HIV and AIDS beyond the United States.
Thursday, December 3 at 7 PM
Register HERE
We invite you to a community conversation featuring Heather Harris (Clinician, Planned Parenthood of Southern New England) and Shawn Lang (Associate Chief Executive, AIDS CT), moderated by Real Art Ways’ Visual Arts Manager, Neil Daigle Orians. You are invited to join the conversation discussing how HIV and AIDS impact Connecticut, using TRANSMISSIONS as a starting point for a local perspective. Registration for this event is required.
Beginning December 1, the video program will be available to view online at visualaids.org/transmissions.
TRANSMISSIONS brings together artists working across the world: Jorge Bordello (Mexico), Gevi Dimitrakopoulou (Greece), Las Indetectables (Chile), George Stanley Nsamba (Uganda), Lucía Egaña Rojas (Chile/Spain), and Charan Singh (India/UK).
The program does not intend to give a comprehensive account of the global AIDS epidemic, but provides a platform for a diversity of voices from beyond the United States, offering insight into the divergent and overlapping experiences of people living with HIV around the world today. The six commissioned videos cover a broad range of subjects, such as the erasure of women living with HIV in South America, ineffective Western public health campaigns in India, and the realities of stigma and disclosure for young people in Uganda.
As the world continues to adapt to living with a new virus, COVID-19, these videos offer an opportunity to reflect on the resonances and differences between the two epidemics and their uneven distribution across geography, race, and gender.
Rhonda M. Ward, New London, CT Poet Laureate, has organized poetry readings for 17 years. Her poetry has appeared in print and online, most recently in the Cape Cod Poetry Review and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day project. Appearances include UMass Dartmouth, Bowery Poetry Club, UConn Avery Point, and the International Women’s Arts Festival in Kendal, Cambria UK. Art/Poetry Collaborations include Pamela Gordinier, The Question; and Ana Flores and Diane Barcelo, Poetry of the Wild.
Ms. Ward was selected by the Foundation as an artist-in-residence for their Bulgaria artist exchange in 2015.
An open mic will start after the reading by Rhoda Ward. To sign up, please send an email to riverwoodpoetry@yahoo.com
The new critically acclaimed documentary will be available to rent through our Virtual Cinema starting Wednesday, November 18.
Thursday, November 19 at 8:30pm EST, join the livestreamed discussion hosted by the Coolidge Theatre and moderated by CNN Commentator Van Jones. The discussion is available on the Coolidge Theatre YouTube Channel.
Joy Buolamwini, Founder, Algorithmic Justice League
Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble, Author, Algorithms of Oppression
Clare Garvie, Researcher, The Perpetual Lineup
Shalini Kantayya, director of Coded Bias
Kade Crockford, Director, Technology for Liberty Program, ACLU
Alvaro Bedoya, Founding Director, Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law
Modern society sits at the intersection of two crucial questions: What does it mean when artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly governs our liberties? And what are the consequences for the people AI is biased against? When MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini discovers that most facial-recognition software does not accurately identify darker-skinned faces and the faces of women, she delves into an investigation of widespread bias in algorithms. As it turns out, AI is not neutral, and women are leading the charge to ensure our civil rights are protected.
“This clear-eyed documentary explores how machine-learning algorithms can perpetuate society’s existing class-, race- and gender-based inequities.” – Devika Girish, New York Times
“Shalini Kantayya’s Coded Bias effectively brings to light a modern civil rights issue that can be proven with data.” – Nick Allen, RogerEbert.com
Forbes’ themes will include poetic narratives about the immigrant experience, writing in poetic forms and traveling. He’ll read from his book Providencia as well as providing context for the virtual audience.
Sean Frederick Forbes is an Assistant Professor-in-Residence of English and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Connecticut. His poems have appeared in Chagrin River Review, Sargasso, A Journal of Caribbean Literature, Language, and Culture, Crab Orchard Review, and other publications. In 2009, he received a Woodrow Wilson Mellon Mays University Fellows Travel and Research Grant for the travel to Providencia, Colombia. Providencia, his first book of poetry, was published in 2013. He serves as poetry editor for New Square, the official publication of The Sancho Penza Literary Society for which he is a founding member. In 2017, he received first place in the Nutmeg Poetry Contest from the Connecticut Poetry Society.
An open mic will start after the reading by Sean Frederick Forbes. To sign up, please send an email to riverwoodpoetry@yahoo.com
Mario Pavone is an important friend of Real Art Ways. Pavone has been performing with us for almost as long as our doors have been open, and he is going strong!
We are celebrating the master musician, bassist, and composer’s 80th birthday with our friends at the Litchfield Jazz Festival. Pavone will be joined on stage by pianist Matt Mitchell and drummer Tyshawn Sorey. The performance is free to the public, accessible through the Litchfield Jazz Festival Facebook page.
Photo by Steve Laschever
We invite you to join us for an online conversation with the film directors, Marlon Johnson and Anne Flatté, film participant Albert Shumake, and Real Art Ways Cinema Coordinator, Ian Ally Seals. At the heart of this documentary is a drum line in Louisville, Ky., that offers children a chance to engage with Black art and history. Together our panelists will discuss music and mentorship in the African American community.
Register for the event HERE.
Marlon Johnson is a nine-time Emmy award-winning producer and director. He has worked on award-winning documentary films exploring music and cultural issues like Symphony in D (2017) and Emmy- winning Sunday’s Best (2010). The Ford Foundation commissioned Marlon to direct the documentary Breaking the Silence (2006) which chronicled the rise of HIV infection in the Black-American South.
Anne Flatté is a filmmaker whose work highlights stories about music and community. She is director and producer of Symphony for Nature (PBS, 2018), the web series Music Makes A City Now (YouTube/PBS.org), and producer of Serenade for Haiti (World premiere, DOCNYC 2016). She co-produced and edited Music Makes A City (2010), and the TV version for broadcast (PBS, 2014).
Albert Shumake is the River City Drum Corps Executive Director and has been involved in the drum corps since his own childhood. He is featured in the film.
“We believe every child needs the chance to connect with the arts, and this film tells the story of what results when that connection is fostered.”
– Marlon Johnson and Anne Flatté
Edward “Nardie” White devoted his life to leading the African-American drum corps he co-founded with Zambia Nkrumah in Louisville, Kentucky three decades ago. RIVER CITY DRUMBEAT follows this creative community of mentors, parents, and youth making their way in a world where systemic forces raise obstacles to fulfilling their dreams.
“The film listens for this community’s heartbeat, finding its steady pulse just as expected: healthy and strong.” – New York Times
River City Drumbeat is available to rent in our Virtual Cinema.
Exhibiting artist Shannon VanGyzen’s sculptures contort furniture to contain movement, kind of like dancers.
We reached out to the Hartford Dance Collective and drag artists Coleslaw and Severity Stone to introduced them to Shannon’s work and to see what would happen.
The dancers, in various combinations and with an array of dance styles, will perform with each of Shannon’s sculptures.
This performance is supported in part by an Artist Engagement Fund from the National Performance Network.
In addition to a Livestream, the performance will also be documented in an edited format by filmmaker and artist Laine Rettmer.
All performers have recently tested negative for COVID-19, specifically for this performance. Those who are performing in groups have been in quarantine “pods” in the time leading up to the performance. Hartford Dance Collective and Real Art Ways have worked together with the safety of staff and artists during the filming of this performance in mind.
· Anthony Bennett—Pastor at the Mt. Aery Baptist Church in Bridgeport, CT
· Steven Hernandez—Director of Connecticut Commission on Women, Children, Seniors, Equity and Opportunity
· Mike Keo– Photographer and Founder IAMNOTAVIRUS Capaign
· Frederick-Douglass Knowles II— Professor of English at Three Rivers College and current Poet Laureate of Hartford, CT
· Marilyn Nelson—Poet, University of Connecticut Professor Emeritus, and former Connecticut Poet Laureate
· Elizabeth Neptune—President, Neptune Advantage serving Passamaquoddy and other Native American tribes
. William Tong, CT State Attorney General
· Taylor Bryan Turner-Assistant Regional Administrator, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Boston, MA
· Representative Mary Jane Wallner-New Hampshire State Representative
· Elaine Zimmerman—Poet and U. S. Region 1 Administrator of Children and Families Boston, MA
Poems will engage with legacy, presence, questions, evidence and/or resistance. There will be time for discussion with our readers following the presentation.
Thank you for joining us to forward a climate of respect, diversity and dignity. We reach out virtually for the safety and health of all.
Riverwood Poetry Series will resume its open mic next month, Tuesday, November 10th.
