TONIGHT, August 20th: Artists’ reception for Trains and Trips from Cement to Cemetery at Heist Gallery, featuring Peter Feigenbaum’s model-railroad-scale depiction of outer-borough NYC in the 1980s, and eerie woodland paintings by Marissa Bluestone.

Friday, August 21st: EAI Project Space at X-Initiative presents a video tribute to the late Merce Cunningham, featuring works by Charles Atlas, Nam June Paik and Shigeto Kubota. Noon-8pm, free.

San Francisco artists Lisa Rybovich Cralle and Jessalyn Aaland’s Good News opens at Painted Bird, with music by Jealousy. 8-10pm. Thru Sept. 11th.

Saturday, August 22nd: The 8th annual San Francisco Zine Fest celebrates small-press and DIY publications from the Bay Area and beyond this weekend. At the SF County Fair Building in Golden Gate Park thru Sunday, August 23rd, 11am-6pm, free.

Sunday, August 23rd:  One of our favorite storytellers, Juliet Wayne, is spinning a 40-minute tale, “The Moron Years,” about her life which is already the stuff of legend. If you haven’t seen her at various performance events around NYC or Philadelphia, don’t miss your chance this weekend. 6pm, Cornelia Street Cafe, $10. (via Jeff Simmermon)

Monday, August 24th: Your last week to catch I Don’t Believe in Miracles, a group exhibition focusing on the natural elements curated by Alana Celii at Space Womb gallery in Long Island City. Open Thursday-Monday.

Tags: Alana Celii, Cornelia Street Cafe, EAI, Good News, Heist Gallery, I Don't Believe In Miracles, Jeff Simmermon, Jessalyn Aaland, Juliet Wayne, Lisa Rybovich Cralle, Marissa Bluestone, Merce Cunningham, Painted Bird, paintings, Peter Feigenbaum, railroad model, SF Zine Fest, Space Womb, storyteller, storytelling, The Moron Years, Trains and Trips from Cement to Cemetery, video, X Initiative.

TONIGHT: San Francisco-based artist Chris Lux’s solo exhibition Give Me Some Peppermint Freedom opens at Jancar Jones Gallery. Lux’s work was accorded this week’s SFBG Pick for his “new rave sensibility.” 6-9pm, free. Through July 18th.

OMG Gallery Aferro Benefit preview, see below for additional details. 6-8pm

Saturday, June 20th: OMG Aferro Art Party Benefit. Gallery Aferro founders Evonne Davis and Emma Wilcox have been consistently supporting and producing some of the strongest emerging artists’ projects that The Totam has come across in recent years. Funds from the sale of artist-donated artworks and crafts at this inaugural benefit event will be used to cover the costs of finalizing Aferro’s status as a non-profit organization. We strongly urge tri-state residents to enjoy an entertaining evening and buy some fantastic work to support an organization promoting a thriving community of artists in and beyond the Newark area.

Everything is Terrible: The Movie premieres at The Silent Movie Theater in Los Angeles. This full-length feature by the group of friends responsible for the popular Everything is Terrible website and YouTube channel promises to be a comic videoclip mashup of weird and epic proportions. One night only. Accompanied by a screening of the 1994 softcore classic, Dinosaur Island. 10:30pm, $10. Tickets here.

Monday, June 22nd: catch Afternoon, the solo project of singer-songwriter Krista Warden at the new Williamsburg music venue Bruar Falls, with Drew Victor. Warden’s accordion, guitar, and bittersweet honky-tonk-tinged vocal sensibility has graced collaborations with fellow Brooklyn notables Drew Victor, Beastheart and Sharon van Etten. 9pm, free.

Tuesday, June 23rd: The opening of X-Initiative’s No Soul For Sale: A Festival of Independents. X has invited more than 30 international nonprofit art spaces to travel to New York City to present themselves, their programs and the artists they support. 1-9pm, RSVP here. Through June 28th.

In conjunction with No Soul For Sale, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) will be unveiling a temporary video project space on X’s ground floor which will be open to the public, bringing new works by emerging artists into dialogue with rarely seen historical treasures from the EAI archives for the summer. Character Witness, the launch program for EAI’s project space, includes works by Kalup Linzy, Alex Bag, Michael Smith, MICA-TV, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, and Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. 6pm, free. Through September 2009.

Tags: Aferro, Afternoon, Beastheart, Bruar Falls, Chris Lux, clips, Dinosaur Island, Drew Victor, EAI, emerging artists, Emma Wilcox, Everything Is Terrible, Evonne Davis, Gallery, Give Me Some Peppermint Freedom, Jancar Jones, Krista Warden, movie, Newark, No Soul for Sale, non-profit, OMG, SFBG, Sharon Van Etten, Silent Theater, summer, temporary, video, Williamsburg, X Initiative.

In celebration of the extraordinary range of artistic expression in the Muslim world, Asia Society, BAM, and New York University Center for Dialogues proudly present Muslim Voices: Arts & Ideas. Muslim artists and speakers from as far away as Asia, Africa, and the Middle East and as near as Brooklyn will gather for an unprecedented ten-day festival and conference, offering New York audiences the opportunity to experience the cultural diversity and multiple perspectives that represent the Muslim world.

Official festival events will take place at the Asia Society, BAM, and the American Museum of Natural History, with a 2-day, 150-vendor outdoor souk at BAM during the opening weekend. There will be related events and programming around the city and on public television at WNET Channel THIRTEEN, and in celebration, the Empire State Building and Brooklyn Borough Hall will be lit green from June 5—7.  

Our top picks include:

Thursday, May 21st (Festival Partner Event): The Seen and the Hidden: (Dis)covering the Veil- 14 contemporary artists from the Middle East, Europe, and New York, including celebrated graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi, present approaches to the ideas that surround both the literal and metaphorical meaning of the veil. Opening reception from 6-8pm at the Austrian Cultural Forum. Free, through August 29th.

Friday, June 5th: Opening reception for New York Masjid: The Mosques of New York City. Photographer Edward Grazda and CUNY Professor of Architecture Jerrilynn R. Dodds not only documented the mosques and analyzed their architectural forms, but conducted interviews with community members, revealing an alternative image of American Islam in the process. Natman Room at BAM’s Peter Jay Sharp Building, though June 28th.

Monday, June 8th: Shirin Neshat presents a rare screening of Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad’s landmark short film The House Is Black (1962), which has had a profound influence on the New Wave in Iranian cinema as well as Neshat’s work. Neshat will also screen excerpts of her own films. At BAMcafé. 7pm, $10 ($5 for members), reception follows. 

Friday, June 12th & Saturday, June 13th: BAMcafé Live presents contemporary Muslim musicians in concert- Brahim Fribgane and zerobridge perform on Friday night, and Saturday night features global hip-hop by Muslim-American artists such as Dr. Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Kenny Muhammad The Human Orchestra, and Nihan Devecioglu, selected by the fantastic beatboxer and composer Adam Matta. 9:30pm both nights, FREE.

Tags: Adam Matta, American Museum of Natural History, artists, Asia Society, Austrian Cultural Forum, BAM, BAMcafe, beatbox, Brahim Fribgane, Brooklyn, concert, Dr. Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Edward Grazda, Forough Farrokhzad, Iran, Islam, Kenny Muhammad The Human Orchestra, Marjane Satrapi, mosques, Muslim Voices: Arts & Ideas, New York Masjid, Nihan Devecioglu, Shirin Neshat, souk, The House Is Black, The Seen and the Hidden: (Dis)covering the Veil, zerobridge.

Emma Wilcox, Eminent Domain No. 5, 2006, silver gelatin print, 20x24". Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Aferro

TONIGHT Friday, April 24th: The Secret of the Ninth Planet opens concurrently at at Queens Nails Projects and Photo Epicenter in San Francisco. The group exhibit of sixteen artists whose works deal with space, time or travel is presented by graduate students in the Curatorial Practice program at California College of the Arts. 7-11pm, thru May 24, 2009

Saturday, April 25th: Symposium on the Super-8 films of Derek Jarman at the new nonprofit X Initiative (the former Dia space) in Chelsea, with Ed Halter, Chrissie Iles, Gerald Incandela and James Mackay. Moderated by Stuart Comer. 5pm, free, RSVP required.

Wednesday, April 29th: The Guggenheim presents a reception with artist Julieta Aranda in conjunction with her new camera obscura installation, part of the museum’s new Intervals emerging artists series. 6:30-8pm, $5 tickets or free for students/members with RSVP. 

Thursday, April 30th: DON’T MISS: Artist talk with Emma Wilcox as part of her solo exhibition Salvage Rights at Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT. Long shadows in Wilcox’s carefully considered, desolate aerial photographs of rooftops and vacant lots seem a literal manifestation of the dark, gray area surrounding land rights issues. Mysterious text-marks upon her landscapes add to a general feeling that the artist is an archaeologist who has discovered evidence of the death-rite of a fallen civilization. Catalog available. 6pm, $3 suggested donation.

Tags: California College of the Arts, Chrissie Iles, curatorial studies, Derek Jarman, Ed Halter, emerging artists, Emma Wilcox, Gerald Incandela, graduate, Guggenheim, Intervals, James Mackay, Julieta Aranda, Photo Epicenter, photographs, Queens Nails Projects, Real Art Ways, Salvage Rights, Stuart Comer, symposium, The Secret of the Ninth Planet, X Initiative.

DON’T MISS: Our City Dreams, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, April 9-12, 2009

(This review is from the New York theatrical premiere at the Film Forum, February 4-27:)

Chiara Clemente’s film opens with grainy, 16mm establishing shots of New York as we see it for the first time, driving into it with our chins tilted up to the sun, looking at the sky rush between the skeleton cables of the Brooklyn Bridge as we’re pumped along the vein, toward the corporeal city. The sun shimmers pink and red along the length of the bridge and the camera turns to the streets, tracking city buses, milling crowds, Columbus Circle, uniformed schoolchildren along the Museum Mile, and the evening lights on the water as night falls. These are the people and places of today’s Manhattan, but through Clemente’s lens, they could just as well have been filmed thirty or fifty years ago, previous generations performing seemingly eternal New York City rituals to the mournful woodwinds and piano of Thomas Lauderdale’s score.

It is in the context of the perpetual metropolis that the filmmaker introduces us to the subjects of her documentary Our City Dreams, a portrait of five iconic female artists representative of the five most recent generations of contemporary women artists, whose creative lives and aspirations have been nurtured and sometimes subsumed by the place they call home.

While following Nancy Spero, Marina Abramovic, Kiki Smith, Ghada Amer, and Swoon in New York and abroad, Clemente was fortunate enough to have made her documentary over a period of time (2005-07) that coincided with a number of important milestones in each woman’s career. During these two years, Swoon had her first solo exhibition, with works commissioned by MoMA and the Brooklyn Museum, and traveled along the Mississippi River with the Miss Rockaway Armada project. Amer began a new body of artwork in Egypt, in addition to becoming a Harlem homeowner for the first time. The Turin Winter Olympics commissioned an installation by Smith, as her retrospective traveled across the country. Abramovic reprised seven seminal performance pieces of the 1970s at the Guggenheim Museum and created a site-specific work during the aftermath of the tsunami in Southeast Asia. Eighty year-old Spero’s installation Kill Commies/Maypole is included in the Venice Biennale for the first time, and she returns to Paris after a thirty-year absence.

We often assume that younger people are more open-minded about the choices they make in life than their forebears, yet the most remarkable element of these artists’ stories as they unfolded was the increasing willingness of each successive, older generation to embrace disparate aspects of their personal and artistic lives. Our City Dreams begins by documenting the immediacy of Swoon’s nascent post-college years, told without much autobiographical background, and concludes with a segment on Spero that encompasses the whole of her family life, artistic background, and career.

The interviews are fluid, not confrontational or staged- it’s as if we are getting to see and hear the best parts of long, ongoing conversations between friends. Clemente seems to have chosen her subjects not only for what their works add to the historical evolution of contemporary or feminist art, but with the awareness that these women’s stories are simply compelling to watch. Her interviews are personal and lovingly conducted, not academic in tone, and she uses different, deliberate visual and musical cues when introducing each artist into the film. For example, at the start of Kiki Smith’s segment, the camera moves around slowly in an impressionistic, close-up study of the colors in Smith’s doorways, and returns to stills of the delicate and contemplative textures in her work throughout- wax casts, closeups of feathers, ‘Eve’ sculptures, crystal stars and delicate chalk drawings on black paper.

There is a satisfying joy in watching long, uninterrupted takes of each artist preparing for and making work in their homes and studios. The camera lingers just as much on the technical aspects of pieces being created as it does upon the presentation of completed works; the repositioning of a collaged mouth, a maquette for a carpet, bodies training in harsh weather, the repetition of a printmaking roller across linoleum or wood, and the carving and cutting of paper, clay and metal. The artists’ familiarity with Clemente, combined with the filmmaker’s intuitive understanding of the creative process, goes beyond what is normally seen in documentaries on artists, providing us with a heightened sense of communion with her subjects.

Smith speaks about not having the confidence to become an artist until after her father passes away, and the experience of casting her mother’s fingers at her funeral. Amer discusses her mother’s legacy of oppression, Abramovic belittles the physical weakness of the women students who had come to Thailand to participate in a performance, and Swoon freely admits that being represented by an art dealer has changed the course of her work “quite a bit”.

However, despite the frank nature of these conversations, the idea of companionship for the women Clemente follows is not directly addressed until she reaches Spero’s story. This choice may have been made in order to more clearly delineate their artistic achievements, but in constructing intimate portraits of their lives, leaving out their thoughts about finding or not finding meaningful partnerships is somewhat puzzling.

With the exception of Leon Golub’s major role in Spero’s life as fellow artist, activist, husband and father (and to a lesser extent, the inclusion of clips featuring the performer Ulay in Abramovic’s story,) none of the other women elaborate on the idea of companionship, instead choosing to make statements about the sacrifice of personal relationships that seem to promulgate the singularity of their vision:

“I need to be alone- I’m a strange person- I feel that a family becomes your life…. I’m too consumed, I’m too in love with making things.” - Swoon

“Then I realized that… art was my priority. And my mom was telling me, you’ll never get married! You are too involved in art.” - Ghada Amer

Perhaps by growing up the daughter of a successful male artist with access to the kind of support network that few women receive, and that many men take for granted, Chiara Clemente has been able to see alternatives to forfeiting companionship and family for one’s work. There is subtle, yet notable evidence of a wistfulness for a more comprehensive resolution to this dilemma when we see her camera pan over the images of happy neighborhood children featured in Swoon’s work, and follow a small child playing in the empty gallery at Amer’s show while the artists rebuff the notion of having families of their own in voiceover.

There are additional autobiographical details incorporated as we move from Amer’s to Smith’s to Abramovic’s segments; we hear Smith’s receptiveness to making changes in her life when she says, ”I’m much more comfortable with myself now, than I was when I was twenty-something…you don’t want to stay the same- you don’t want to be attached to your past in a way that you try to stay there…life is moving along and you’re kind of moving along with it.” But because Spero was the only artist to expound upon the realities of supporting a family, making work that was independent of her husband’s, and being a feminist activist against the war, each artist whose story led up to Spero’s seemed to lack a similar consummation of what it might mean to fully realize the possibility, as Spero has, of achieving a balance between art and life. In the narrative arc of Clemente’s gorgeous film, Nancy Spero’s story reads as an ideal resolution of the challenges and choices that younger generations of women continue to face while attempting to stay true to their creative vision.

Our City Dreams trailer and website

Tickets online or at Yerba Buena Center box office

Tags: April 2009, Chiara Clemente, documentary, female artists, Film Forum, generations, Ghada Amer, Kiki Smith, Leon Golub, Marina Abramovic, Nancy Spero, Our City Dreams, Swoon, Yerba Buena Center.

Following the opening of two installations at Location One this week, Laurie Anderson’s new solo performance, Transitory Life—a collection of adventure stories, poems, and music drawn from her life’s work, has been created specifically in response to the themes of the Guggenheim’s The Third Mind exhibition. These pieces reflect a sensibility she attributes to her “practice of attention” and interest in Buddhism. Set within the intimate space of the museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright-designed theater,Transitory Life promises to be a uniquely personal and compelling opportunity to experience Anderson’s world-renowned performance work.

(If you have time to visit the Guggenheim before the performance, don’t miss experiencing the theatrically spare, meditative work of James Lee Byars as part of The Third Mind exhibit, as well as 2008 Hugo Boss Prize recipient Emily Jacir’s solo exhibition in the upstairs gallery.)

Guggenheim Museum

Thursday, March 12, & Friday, March 13, 8pm. $30; $25 for members; $10 for students under 25. Tickets

Tags: Emily Jacir, Guggenheim, Hugo Boss Prize, James Lee Byars, Laurie Anderson, Location One, Third Mind, Transitory Life.

DON’T MISS: On the occasion of the exhibition DARKNESS DESCENDS: Norwegian Art Now at Chashama and the Pulse Art Fair during Armory Week, the Norwegian invasion continues with a weekend-long musical extension at the experimental performance venue Monkeytown, organized by Signe Prøis and Christina Vassallo. 

The Norwegian preoccupation with darkness is a common thread uniting the musicians and artists included in this showcase. Of special note are this Saturday’s performances by Eivind Opsvik and Aaron Jennings, and visuals by Michelle Arcila:

Eivind Opsvik 
Bassist/composer/record label owner Eivind Opsvik blends a daring variety of jazz, progressive rock, classical, ambient and electronic influences—from Neil Young and Pink Floyd to Brian Eno—in his music. His main projects consist of his band Overseas, his duo Opsvik & Jennings, and his solo bass project.  He’s also currently a member of a number of other cutting-edge New York bands like The UP, Kris Davis Quartet, David Binney’s Out of Airplanes w/ Bill Frisell, Tone Collector, Tony Malaby’s Paloma Recio, Rocket Engine and Ben Gerstein Collective. 

Eivind Opsvik has an unusual gift for writing small, poignant pieces of music. The color and mood of his music, along with its rhythmic patterns, bleed over into pop, and the sound has a sheer, weightless quality.  -Ben Ratliff, New York Times

The solo set will be accompanied by visuals by Michelle Arcila.

Opsvik & Jennings

Led by the bassist Eivind Opsvik and the guitarist Aaron Jennings, with Brian Drye on Farfisa organ and Dave Christian on drums, this group advanced a series of tuneful provocations, self-contained and pregnant with detail. And appropriately… balanced precision against a spirit of wonder. -Nate Chinen, New York Times, March 4, 2009

Accompanied by a slideshow of photographs by Beathe Rønning.

Halvor Bodin
Artist and graphic designer Halvor Bodin is known for his visual work with Satyricon, Darkthrone, Thorns and Bjarne Melgaard. Combining a fierce visual aesthetic with a danceable and eclectic mix of electronic music, dubstep, nu jazz, dub and electrois, his DJ set will be accompanied by live mixed black & white excerpts from his own video works and found imagery. 

Bathroom Sound Series: Thora Dolven Balke’s The Wave, 2008. 6 min.

MONKEYTOWN 

Admission: $10, $10 minimum
Showtimes: 8 & 10:30pm
Reservations are recommended

Tags: Aaron Jennings, Armory week, Art, Beathe Rønning, Brian Drye, Chashama, Christina Vassallo, Darkness Descends, Dave Christian, DJ, Eivind Opsvik, Halvor Bodin, jazz, Michelle Arcila, Monkeytown, music, New York Times, Norway, Norwegian, Opsvik and Jennings, Pulse, Signe Prøis, Thora Dolven Balke.

Trevor Paglen, Four Geostationary Satellites Above the Sierra Nevada, C-Print, 48 x 60 inches. Courtesy Bellwether.

Though the focus is on the art fairs this week, The Totam has still found plenty of concurrent happenings to provide balance to the collector frenzy that usually descends upon the west side of Manhattan:

TODAY, March 4th: The New Museum and Creative Time present It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq, a new commission by British artist Jeremy Deller. A revolving cast of participants including veterans, journalists, scholars and Iraqi nationals have been invited to take up residence in the New Museum’s gallery space with the express purpose of encouraging discussion with visitors to the Museum. Through March 22nd.

Thursday, March 5th: Armory Arts Week opens to the public at Pier 94 in New York. In addition to special projects like Kenny Scharf’s customized, donut-delivering golf-cart being mounted onsite, sister fair VOLTA NY will present curated invitational projects and a launch event for Humble Arts Foundation’s Collector’s Guide to Emerging Art Photography. Public events include tours of arts districts in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. Contemporary art fairs exhibiting during the same week include Pulse, SCOPE, Fountain, Bridge, and PooL. Through March 8th.

The discards of industry and technology found in Sergio A. Fernandez‘ photos form a unique counterpoint to Dana Gentile’s collages, which focus on modern agriculture. Opening at Kris Graves Projects, 6-9pm.

Friday, March 6th: Bay Area artist Trevor Paglen’s spacescapes and other astronomy-themed works open in New York at Bellwether Gallery, in conjunction with his SECA Award exhibit at the SF MoMA.

Saturday, March 7th: Past, Present, Future of Food at the Bushwick Library. As part of the Arts in Bushwick Festival, librarian Nate Hill and cook Gabe McMackin will engage in an open public discussion exploring how Brooklyn and Bushwick in particular went from being a rich agricultural community to the desert it is today, and talk about what people can and ARE doing to grow food locally. 1-4pm. Free.

The Yerba Buena Center for Contemporary Art’s Screening Room in San Francisco presents a double bill of films by Chinese directors, distributed by Strand Releasing: Wayward Cloud by Tsai Ming-Liang, and Help Me Eros, by Lee Kang-Sheng. 7pm. Advance tickets available, or with gallery admission.

Sunday, March 8th: The last day to catch the adaptation of Adam Mansbach’s novel Angry Black White Boy at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco, a satire about race, Hip-Hop pop culture, identity and violence in the 21st century. 8pm, $15-25.

Monday, March 9th: As part of its recent project/exhibition, Branding Democracy, The Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School presents The Rogue State- a panel lecture on fundamental (in)divisibility of sovereignty using philosophy, history, and art as a framework. 6:30-8:30pm. $8

still from The Wayward Cloud, 2005

Tags: Angry Black White Boy, Armory Show, Art Fairs, Arts Week, Bellwether, Branding Democracy, Bridge, Collectors, conversations, Creative Time, Dana Gentile, fairs, Fountain, Gallery, Guide to Emerging Art Photography, Help Me Eros, Humble Arts Foundation, Intersection for the Arts, Iraq, Jeremy Deller, Kris Graves Projects, lecture, Lee Kang-Sheng, New Museum, novel, play, Pool, Pulse, SCOPE, screening, SECA Award, Sergio A. Fernandez, SF MoMA, Strand relasing, The Rogue State, Trevor Paglen, Tsai Ming-Liang, Vera List Center, VOLTA, Wayward Cloud, Yerba Buena Center.

Don’t miss a final opportunity to see Third World Newsreel‘s New Filmmakers Series as part of MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight programming. The young filmmakers of color who have participated in TWN’s filmmaking workshops, or whose works are being distributed by TWN, are making socially relevant films that directly engage the communities they live in, providing a deeper understanding of the cultural and economic pressures faced by diverse populations in the greater New York area and beyond.

Tonight’s 6pm program presents the feature-length documentary, Dreams Deferred: The Sakia Gunn Film Project, directed by Charles B. Brack. Fifteen-year-old Gunn was fatally stabbed at a Newark bus stop in 2003, after she rejected her killer’s advances. Gunn’s killer admitted calling the teenager a “dyke” and pleaded guilty to aggravated manslaughter with bias intimidation. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Poster for Hanna Rose Shell and Vanessa Bertozzi's Secondhand (Pepe), 2007. Image courtesy filmmakers.

The 8pm program is made up of a series of six short films that bring attention to a variety of individuals and communities in New York City. The films range from Vanara Taing and Lottie Porch’s uplifting look at the Inspirational Choir of Riverside Church, to ManSee Kong’s Here to Stay, about an elderly Chinatown neighbor in his SRO organizing against rising rents, to Jennifer Fasulo and Manauvaskar Kublall’s PRIMETIME: Fighting Back Against Foreclosure, an explanation of the complexities of subprime mortgages and their impact on two young families in Brooklyn. An additional film, Secondhand (Pepe), traces the historical path of the secondhand clothing industry between its roots in the Jewish tenements of New York to its present-day commodification in Haiti.

Organized by Sally Berger, Assistant Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art; William Sloan, independent curator; and Sara Rashkin, filmmaker and independent curator, including TWN in MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight series provides an all-too-rare opportunity for young filmmakers with important, engaging stories to tell about real community issues to have their voices heard in a broadly respected venue. In addition, these films form an important starting point for audiences who frequent venues like MoMA to hopefully enter into a dialogue with the under-represented neighbors around them.

Tags: Charles B. Brack, Chinatown, Documentary Fortnight, Foreclosure, Inspirational Choir, Jennifer Fasulo, Lottie Porch, Manauvaskar Kublall, ManSee Kong, MoMA, mortgages, new filmmakers, pepe, Primetime, Riverside Church, Sakia Gunn, secondhand, Shell and Bertozzi, social issues, Third World Newsreel, Vanara Taing.