“Ibis Mummy,” animal remains, linen, from the Ibis cemetery at Abydos, Egypt; excavated by the Egypt Exploration Fund. Late Period to Ptolemaic Period, 410–200 BCE (photo by Gavin Ashworth / Brooklyn Museum)
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, December 2, free, 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org
The Brooklyn Museum honors World AIDS Day and looks at what’s to come in the African diaspora in its monthly free First Saturday program in December with “From Ancient Egypt to the Afrofuture.” There will be live music by Daví, Everyday People featuring DJ mOma and Jade de LaFleur, and Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber, performing a Sun Ra tribute; a curator tour of “Soulful Creatures: Animal Mummies in Ancient Egypt” with Edward Bleiberg; an artist talk and tour of “Ahmed Mater: Mecca Journeys” with Ahmed Mater and Catherine Morris; a hands-on art workshop in which participants will create headdresses inspired by the museum’s ancient Egyptian collection; the scholar talk “Everything in the Future Is Black” with Makeba Lavan exploring the work of Wangechi Mutu, Octavia Butler, George Clinton, Janelle Monae, Erykah Badu, and others; teen pop-up gallery talks on Ancient Egyptian art; screenings of Terence Nance’s short films They Charge for the Sun, Swimming in Your Skin Again, and Univitellin, followed by a talkback with Nance; “Alternate Endings, Radical Beginnings” short films by Mykki Blanco, Cheryl Dunye and Ellen Spiro, Reina Gossett, Thomas Allen Harris, Kia Labeija, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, and Brontez Purnell, curated by Erin Christovale and Vivian Crockett and commissioned for Visual AIDS’ annual Day With(out) Art in honor of World AIDS Day; and a feminist book club discussing Angela Y. Davis’s “Working Women, Black Women, and the History of the Suffrage Movement,” hosted by Glory Edim of Well-Read Black Girl in conjunction with “Roots of ‘The Dinner Party’: History in the Making.” In addition, the galleries will be open late so you can check out “Roots of ‘The Dinner Party,’” “Soulful Creatures,” “Rodin at the Brooklyn Museum: The Body in Bronze,” “Proof: Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Longo,” “Arts of Asia and the Middle East,” “Infinite Blue,” “A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt,” and more.
A sleeper hit at Sundance that was named Best First Film of 2014 by the New York Film Critics Circle, The Babadook is a frightening tale of a mother and her young son — and a suspicious, scary character called the Babadook — trapped in a terrifying situation. Expanded from her 2005 ten-minute short, 
“I’m a natural person to write about a voyeur because I’m a voyeur myself,” award-winning, bestselling journalist Gay Talese says in Myles Kane and Josh Koury’s Voyeur, which is getting a bonus screening at the New York Film Festival on October 15 prior to debuting on Netflix on December 1. The documentary makes a voyeur of the viewer as well as it follows the thirty-five-year journalistic relationship and offbeat friendship between Talese, longtime New York Times and Esquire writer and author of such books as Honor Thy Father and Thy Neighbor’s Wife, and Gerald Foos, the owner of a Colorado motel who claims he spent decades spying on people from a special crawl space he built above the rooms. In January 1980, Foos, owner of the Manor House Motel, wrote a letter to Talese, offering him a story about what he was doing; Foos considered himself a researcher, not a pervert or a peeping Tom. Using archival footage, news reports, and new interviews, Kane and Koury follow Foos, his second wife, Anita, and Talese as the journalist prepares to write a major piece for the New Yorker in advance of the release of his latest book, The Voyeur’s Motel. New Yorker articles editor Susan Morrison considers Foos a disturbed sociopath in need of attention, while Grove/Atlantic senior editor Jamison Stoltz and publisher Morgan Entrekin have their doubts about the veracity of Foos’s eerily specific tale. So as questions arise about key facts and Talese’s professional ethics, Foos wonders if he should have remained silent — “I’m used to private spaces, places that nobody could see me and I could see them,” he explains — and an angry Talese faces a potentially tarnished legacy.