this week in art

DAVID BOWIE WORLD FAN CONVENTION: DERYCK TODD’S BOWIEBALL

DAVID BOWIE WORLD FAN CONVENTION: DERYCK TODD’S BOWIEBALL
Racket
431 West Sixteenth St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Saturday, June 17, 8:00, $96.83
Sold-out convention runs June 16-18
bowieconvention.com
www.bowerypresents.com

In the introduction to his revised and updated 2016 book The Complete David Bowie, Nicholas Pegg writes, “If you want to enjoy David Bowie’s work to the full, keep an open mind. What makes Bowie such a supremely fascinating artist is that his career presents an implicit challenge to conventional notions of creative continuity. He has repeatedly confounded attempts to pigeonhole him as this or that kind of artist, and the result has been one of rock music’s longest and most successful careers.”

While his career came to an end in January 2016 when the man born David Jones in Brixton died at the age of sixty-nine, the fascination with the Thin White Duke continues unabated, with museum exhibitions such as the spectacular “David Bowie Is” at the Brooklyn Museum, the pandemic livestream benefits “A Bowie Celebration” featuring a multitude of music stars, and the release of a series of posthumous live albums and box sets.

Pegg will serve as compère for the 2023 David Bowie World Fan Convention, taking place June 17 and 18 at Racket, the Chelsea club formerly known as the High Line Ballroom, where Bowie curated the inaugural High Line Festival in 2007, putting together a lineup that included Ricky Gervais, Arcade Fire, Air, Laurie Anderson, Deerhoof, the Polyphonic Spree, Daniel Johnston, Bang on a Can All Stars, and others. The convention, which has a bonus VIP day on June 16, features panel discussions, live performances, and a trivia evening; tickets are still available for Deryck Todd’s “BowieBall” Saturday night, with a “Best Dressed Bowie” costume contest, drag and burlesque, dancing, and live performances by vocalist Ava Cherry, musician and writer Jeff Slate, and Bowie DJs TheMenWhoFell2Earth. This year’s convention honors the fortieth anniversary of Let’s Dance and the fiftieth anniversary of Aladdin Sane, two of Bowie’s most popular records.

Below is the full schedule. In addition, Modern Rocks Gallery is hosting a photography exhibit at the Maker’s Studio in Chelsea Market, with pictures by Sukita, Terry O’Neill, Dennis O’Regan, Kevin Cummins, Brian Aris, and Duffy and an exclusive limited edition print of John Rowlands’s “The Archer.” And you can’t go wrong by starting the weekend with Raquel Cion’s one-woman show, Me & Mr. Jones: My Intimate Relationship with David Bowie, at the Cutting Room on Friday night; held in association with the convention, it is a personal and poignant exploration of fandom and the impact Bowie has had on people’s lives.

BowieBall features a costume contest, live performances, lots of dancing, and more (photo by Sam McMahon)

Saturday, June 17
Heroes, Zeroes, and Absolute Beginners, with bassist Carmine Rojas and guitarist Kevin Armstrong, moderated by Nicholas Pegg, 10:00 am

Planet Earth Is Blue, with singer and multi-instrumentalist Emm Gryner and producer and multi-instrumentalist Mark Plati, on “Space Oddity” performance aboard the International Space Station, Toy, the Hours Tour, and more, 11:00

Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fashion, with fashion designer Keanan Duffty and musicians Ava Cherry and Joey Arias, 12:15

Fantastic Voyage, with producer, arranger, bassist, and vocalist Tony Visconti and studio engineer and backing vocalist Erin Tonkon, moderated by Nicholas Pegg, 2:00

Golden Years, with guitarist Carlos Alomar, singer Robin Clark, and bassist George Murray, moderated by Nicholas Pegg, 3:00

BowieBall, live performances by vocalist Ava Cherry, musician and writer Jeff Slate, and Bowie DJs TheMenWhoFell2Earth, a “Best Dressed Bowie” costume contest, drag and burlesque, and more, hosted by Michael T, 8:00

Sunday, June 18
Red Shoes, Blue Jeans, and Glass Spiders, with guitarist Carlos Alomar, singer Robin Clark, and bassist Carmine Rojas, moderated by Nicholas Pegg, 11:00

I’ve Got to Write It Down, with Nacho; Chris O’Leary, author of Pushing Ahead of the Dame; Stephen Pitalo, author of Bohemian Rhapsodies, Thrillers & November Rains; and Nicholas Pegg, author of The Complete David Bowie, moderated by Nacho, 12:15

You Belong in Rock’n’Roll, with guitarist Kevin Armstrong and producer Tim Palmer, moderated by Nicholas Pegg, 2:00

Brilliant Adventure, with producer and multi-instrumentalist Mark Plati, moderated by Nicholas Pegg, 3:00

Everyone Says “Hi”: Tony Visconti and Friends, with guitarist Carlos Alomar, singer Robin Clark, studio engineer and backing vocalist Erin Tonkon, bassist George Murray, and producer Tony Visconti, moderated by Nicholas Pegg, 4:00

Nacho’s Videos Presents, with Nacho, Ava Cherry, Michael T, TheMenWhoFell2Earth, and more 5:45

Nicholas Pegg’s David Bowie Quiz, the Cutting Room, 7:30

Closing Party, with TheMenWhoFell2Earth DJs, Bowery Electric, 8:00 pm – 2:00 am

KAGAMI

Ryuichi Sakamoto extends his legacy with jaw-dropping Kagami at the Shed (photo courtesy Tin Drum)

KAGAMI
The Griffin Theater at the Shed
The Bloomberg Building at Hudson Yards
545 West 30th St. at Eleventh Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 9, $33-$38
646-455-3494
theshed.org

“I honestly don’t know how many years I have left,” composer, musician, producer, and environmental activist Ryuichi Sakamoto says in the 2017 documentary Coda. “But I know that I want to make more music. Music that I won’t be ashamed to leave behind. Meaningful work.”

The Tokyo-born Oscar and Grammy winner died this past March 28 at the age of seventy-one, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to see him perform live — sort of — ever again. Over the last nine years of his life, Sakamoto battled various types of cancer. Knowing his time on Earth was limited, he continued working, releasing the album async in 2017 and 12 just before his death, composing the scores for such films as The Revenant, Rage, The Fortress, and Love After Love, and preparing the cutting-edge project Kagami, which opens today at the Shed in Hudson Yards.

On the wall outside the theater, Sakamoto writes:

There is, in reality, a virtual me.
This virtual me will not age, and will continue to play the piano for years, decades, centuries.
Will there be humans then?
Will the squids that will conquer the earth after humanity listen to me?
What will pianos be to them?
What about music?
Will there be empathy there?

Empathy that spans hundreds of thousands of years.
Ah, but the batteries won’t last that long.

Ryuichi Sakamoto, director Todd Eckert, and Rhizomatiks work behind the scenes on Kagami (photo courtesy Tin Drum)

Kagami is a spectacular, breathtaking mixed-reality concert experienced with specially designed optically transparent devices, making it appear that Sakamoto is playing live piano, enveloped in augmented reality art. Visitors are first led into a room in the repurposed Griffin Theater with large-scale posters of Sakamoto and a screening of clips from Coda, in which he wanders through a lush forest and the Arctic, searching for the harmonies and melodies of nature. Sitting by a hole in the ice, he dips a microphone into the water and says, “I’m fishing with sound.”

The group of no more than eighty next enter another space, where chairs are set up in one row around a central area with cubic markings on the floor. Each person receives tight-fitting goggle-like glasses and, suddenly, a hologram of Sakamoto appears in the middle of the room, seated at his Yamaha grand piano; he was volumetrically captured in December 2020, during the height of Covid, by director Todd Eckert and his Tin Drum collective, which previously made the mixed-reality installation The Life with Marina Abramović.

The audience is warned before the show starts that the technology is not perfect — it turns out that the hologram is not very sharp, and it’s difficult to understand what Sakamoto says in brief introductions to two of the songs — but it’s jaw-droppingly gorgeous nonetheless. The fifty-minute concert begins with the jazzy “Before Long” from the 1987 album New Geo; as the white-haired Sakamoto tickles the ivories, smoky clouds rise from the floor and float in the air. Near the end of the number, one audience member got up and walked over to the image of Sakamoto at the piano. A few others, including me, soon joined him, and more followed. As Sakamoto played the ethereal, New Agey “Aoneko no Torso” from 1995’s Smoochy, I approached Sakamoto and slowly sauntered around the piano, seeing the maestro from all different angles, close enough to determine the length of his fingernails and follow his eye movement. Even though he’s slightly out of focus, it’s hard to believe he’s not really right there, questioning reality itself as a construct. Although you could walk through him, no one did, as if out of respect.

Over the next several songs, ranging from “The Seed and the Sower” and the title track from the 1983 film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, “Andata” from async, “Energy Flow” and “Aqua” from 1999’s BTTB, and “MUJI2020” from the “Pleasant, somehow” campaign about humanity’s responsibility to the environment, raindrops created ripples in a pond at our feet; diagonal neon lights hovered ominously over our heads; snowflakes fluttered by; multiple screens projected archival black-and-white footage of old cities and a snowstorm; and a tree grew out of the piano, its roots then digging far into the ground, mimicking the circulatory system. The highlight was when the Griffin became like the Hayden Planetarium, with stars and constellations everywhere and the spinning earth underneath, making me feel like I was floating in the air, a wee bit dizzy until I let the music bring me back.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the technology is its ability to essentially allow you to see right through anyone standing in front of you. At a concert with a real pianist, if a tall person gets in your way, you can’t see the performer. But here, they are like ghosts; you can make out their outlines but still have a clear path to Sakamoto. Of course, the other people are actually there, so you have to avoid bumping into them by using your peripheral vision.

Kagami means “mirror” in Japanese, and the show certainly makes you look at who you are both as an individual and as part of the greater environment. The special effects cause sensations reminiscent of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s thrilling Infinity Rooms, which use lights and mirrors to extend visions of our universe. The presentation is no mere money grab by an estate trying to resurrect their dead cash cow with posthumous holographic tours. Kagami is an intricately designed multimedia installation that the artist was deeply involved in; Sakamoto fashioned his own unique legacy, pushing the boundaries yet again, playing one last concert that can last forever, or at least as long as the planet he so loved and protected is still here and the batteries last.

FREE TICKET ALERT: RIVER TO RIVER FESTIVAL 2023

Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith will present Zero Station at R2R 2023 (photo courtesy LMCC)

RIVER TO RIVER FESTIVAL
Multiple downtown venues
June 9-18, free
Some events require advance RSVP beginning June 1 at noon
lmcc.net/river-to-river

The twenty-second annual River to River Festival runs June 9-18, ten days of cutting-edge art, dance, music, tours, and participatory events at such locations as the Seaport, the Clemente, Governors Island, and Battery Park City. Everything is free, although advance RSVP is recommended or required for several happenings; tickets are available beginning June 1 at noon.

This year’s festival is also a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), the sponsoring organization that has been a resource for independent artists since 1973; many alumni are involved in R2R 2023 to honor that milestone.

This year’s lineup includes Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith continuing their exploration of hypersexualization, trauma, and othering in Zero Station. Antonio Ramos and the Gangbangers stage the dance-theater ceremony CEREMONIA, focusing on cultural misappropriation and reappropriation. Seventeen artists will share one-on-one encounters through a lottery in Lotto Royale. Scholar and historian Linda Jacobs will lead walking tours of Little Syria on Washington St. And Guinean musician and activist Natu Camara will close things out with a grand finale concert in Rockefeller Park.

Tickets are sure to go fast, so don’t hesitate if you want to catch any of these unique and special presentations. Below is the full schedule.

Friday, June 9
through
Friday, June 30
Exhibition: “El Camino: Stories of Migration,” by Nuevayorkinos, Fulton Market building windows at the Seaport, opening June 9 at 4:00

Saturday, June 10
and
Sunday, June 11, 11:00 am – 5:00 pm
Participatory Tape Installation: Mahicantuck, “River that flows two ways,” by Marta Blair, Belvedere Plaza, Battery Park City

Saturday, June 10
and
Sunday, June 11, 1:00 – 6:00
Performance Lottery: Lotto Royale, one-on-one encounters with luciana achugar, Lauren Bakst, Amelia Bande, Raha Behnam, mayfield brooks, Moriah Evans, Julia Gladstone, Nile Harris, Niall Jones, Jennifer Monson, Elliot Reed, Alex Rodabaugh, nibia pastrana santiago, Keioui Keijaun Thomas, ms. z tye, Mariana Valencia, and Anh Vo, RSVP required

Saturday, June 10
through
Sunday, June 18
Studio Residency and Public Program: Archive Barchive, by AUNTS, with talks, performances, toasts, and other gatherings, Studio A4, the Arts Center at Governors Island

Marta Blair invites the community to participate in River to River installation (photo courtesy Marta Blair)

Sunday, June 11, 11:00 am
Tuesday, June 13, 11:00 am
Thursday, June 15, 11:00 am
and
Saturday, June 17, 3:00
Walking Tours: Little Syria, New York: Walking Tours of Washington Street, with Linda Jacobs of the Washington Street Historical Society, Washington St. & Battery Pl., RSVP recommended

Monday, June 12, 7:30
Performance: Zero Station, by Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith, Flamboyan Theater, the Clemente, RSVP recommended

Thursday, June 15, 7:00
Performance: CEREMONIA, by Antonio Ramos and the Gangbangers, La Plaza, the Clemente, RSVP required

Friday, June 16, 4:00
Performance: Talk to Me About Water, by Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Lower Gallery, the Arts Center at Governors Island, 110 Andes Rd., RSVP required

Friday, June 16, 7:00
Performance: duel c, by Andros Zins-Browne, Outlook Hill, Governors Island, RSVP required

Saturday, June 17, noon – 6:00
Open Residency: LMCC’s Workspace Open Studios, 101 Greenwich St., RSVP recommended

Saturday, June 17, 4:00
Poetry in the Park: al Qalam: Poetry in the Park featuring New York Arabic Orchestra, with Hani Bawardi and Rita Zihenni, the Battery Labyrinth

Saturday, June 17, 6:30
Performance: River to River 2023 Closing Concert with Natu Camara, Rockefeller Park, Battery Park City

YOSHIKO CHUMA AND THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS: SHOCKWAVE DELAY

Ursula Eagly is one of many collaborators in Yoshiko Chuma’s Shockwave Delay, which explores war and utopia (photo © Julie Lemberger)

SHOCKWAVE DELAY
La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club
The Ellen Stewart Theatre
66 East Fourth St. between Second Ave. & Bowery
June 1-11, $35-$40 (use code FAM10 for $10 tickets)
212-475-7710
www.lamama.org

In her artistic statement for her latest show, Shockwave Delay, Bessie-winning multidisciplinary artist and creator Yoshiko Chuma explains, “My work has been called ‘choreographed chaos.’ I have intentionally avoided presenting an ordered universe in my work because I don’t see an ordered universe in my life. I don’t usually think of myself as a choreographer. Sometimes, I think of myself as a counterpoint composer, pitting note against note, placing several singular voices in parallel motion, creating a new harmony. Sometimes, I still consider myself a journalist because my work tends to begin with an outside point of view. I’m interested in the little personal issues of everyday life and how they can affect survival. It is a struggle for me to expand my concepts into something larger that an audience can share. I am always looking for a twist or a variance. Some people have called my work ‘spectacle,’ but I don’t think in these terms. ‘Organized happening’ is a term that might better suit me.”

Running at La Mama June 1-11, Shockwave Delay should be a fascinating “organized happening,” in part a culmination of a forty-year oeuvre but not a retrospective. The world premiere consists of ten unscripted docudramas overlapping twenty chapters melding sound, text, and movement, considering war and utopia in relationship to the circle of life through music, film dance, and theater, early iterations of which have been staged at numerous venues over the last handful of years. It will be performed by a rotating cast of actors (Jim Fletcher, Eileen Myles, Kate Valk), dancers (Agnê Auželyte, Ursula Eagly, Claire Fleury, Mizuho Kappa, Stephanie Maher, Miriam Parker, Emily Pope, Owen Prum, Ryuji Yamaguchi, Yoshiko Chuma), musicians (Robert Black, Jason Kao Hwang, Christopher McIntyre, Dane Terry, Aliya Ultan), and other special guests, ensuring that every performance will be unique. The team also includes visual artists Tim Clifford, Claire Fleury, Elizabeth Kresch. Jake Margolin & Nick Vaughan, Van Wifvat, and Kelly Bugden and photographers Hugh Burckhardt and Julie Lemberger. The June 11 finale will be followed by an auction of archival items accumulated by the School of Hard Knocks since its founding in New York City in 1982. In addition, forty artists and collaborators will be named to Chuma’s “Final Exam: Graduation.”

The Osaka-born Chuma adds, “It has been seventy-nine years since WWII, but Japan still smells of occupation, as if it is a US colony. The United States is my home, but the country’s aggressive influence over the world intrigues me artistically. In the sixties and early seventies, there were a growing number of anti-American and anti-war demonstrations in Japan. I was swept up in this sentiment and attended and ultimately led a number of demonstrations. A demonstration is a like a ‘production,’ and this was truly where I received my artistic training. I was not the type to stand in front of a microphone and rally the crowd, so I did the publicity papers for the demonstrations. I was a silent agitator. I still am an agitator, both silent and not so silent. Art can be revolutionary, but is not always. Art must be guided, and there are limits. I can organize people in space, but it’s hard to organize people in life.”

There’s no telling what might happen at each show, so don’t delay to get tickets to what promises to be a series of unpredictable and awe-inspiring events.

WANGECHI MUTU: INTERTWINED AND IN CONVERSATION

Wangechi Mutu, Shavasana I, bronze, 2019 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Who: Wangechi Mutu, Vivian Crockett, Margot Norton
What: Discussion about current exhibition “Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined”
Where: New Museum Theater, New Museum, 235 Bowery at Prince St.
When: Thursday, June 1, $10, 6:30 (exhibition continues through June 4, $12-$18)
Why: In the catalog for “Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined,” cocurators Vivian Crockett and Margot Norton discuss various elements of the exhibit, which is named after a 2003 watercolor with collage on paper in which two figures have human bodies and animal heads. The Nairobi-born, New York City–based multimedia artist responds, “Multitudes of stories need to be listened to and taken into consideration. I still have a lot of heartache about how schools teach and marginalize so many histories and art. I’m thinking about the association between animals and primitivity and between so-called ‘inferior’ or ‘lower’ creatures and that which is female and African. I’m a big lover of animals and nature. Why do we insult one another with the names of these incredible creatures that we share this world with? Coming from Kenya, where we still have so much natural beauty, it’s hard to express how powerful that is. You have to take into consideration how small humans are and how symbiotic our relationships with nature and with each other really are.”

On June 1 at 6:30, Mutu, whose multidisciplinary, immersive Banana Stroke at the Met was a highlight of Performa 17 in 2017, will be at the New Museum to talk more with Crockett and Norton about the exhibit, which consists of more than one hundred paintings, sculptures, collages, videos, and drawings, incorporating such elements as red soil, pulp, bells, bones, beads, shells, and glass, filling all six levels of the New Museum. Her hybrid works mix art historical references and pop culture with sociocultural themes dealing with race, femininity, myth, colonialism, immigration, Afro-futurism, and the African diaspora. The human and natural world both fight and envelop each other through an interconnectedness she depicts in fascinating visual stories.

In the seventh-floor Skyroom, the bronze sculpture Shavasana I is all by itself, a life-size figure on the ground, feet in high heels and hands extended, the rest of her form covered by a woven yoga mat; the title references śavāsana, the corpse pose that takes its name from the Sanskrit word for “dead body.” The large-scale Crocodylus sculpture features a futuristic being riding atop a crocodile that is revealing its huge, sharp teeth; the two figures meld into one at the back. In the Subterranea collage series, Mutu has placed a different character in each of its six parts, their arms outstretched amid sci-fi-esque branches, sinews, and flowers. In the thirteen-minute black-and-white video Eat Cake, a disheveled Mutu wears a long gown and sits under a tree in a forest, bending down to eat a chocolate cake, shoveling bites into her mouth with her hand, evoking Miss Havisham from Great Expectations, but here caught up in consumerism, racism, misogyny, slavery, and humanity’s destruction of land.

In the six-minute Cutting, Mutu, seen from a distance, silhouetted against the setting sun in a Texas border city shortly after 9/11, uses a machete called a panga to chop repeatedly at a log; the panga is not only a farm tool but was also wielded by Rwandan militia during the genocide there. In the animated The End of eating Everything, Santigold portrays a creature reveling in consumption and greed in a world that needs explosive renewal. On June 4, Eat Cake, The End of eating Everything, Amazing Grace, and the extraordinary My Cave Call will be screened in the New Museum Theater.

Red gouges in the wall in the shape of Kenyan lakes make it seem like the natural world is bleeding in Moth Collection, in which seventy-five feathered moth-human hybrids are arranged in chalk boxes, referencing colonization, genocide, institutional education, self-destruction, and categorization. “There’s something vast and unknowable or inexplicable about how all of us fit together,” Mutu says in the catalog. “The amount of creatures that have been killed to study and understand is also obscene. There’s this hypocrisy in trying to understand something, conserve it, and take care of it while killing thousands for experimentation.” During one installation of the piece, she hurt her elbow. She explained, “I felt like I was hurting myself in trying to express how enraged I was, which was not helping. I wanted to find a way to resolve and understand what was happening to me and other people who come to the United States and who cross borders. I felt deep sadness and became obsessed with the Rwandan genocide, which I felt had a lot to do with borders and confining or defining a people through colonization and eugenics.”

In the lobby gallery, In Two Canoe features a pair of fantastical hybrid beings sitting in a canoe that serves as a self-contained bath or fountain, their limbs extending like roots, merging with each other, the canoe, and the landscape. At the far end is For Whom the Bell Tolls, a creature made of red soil, paper pulp, and wooden bells. Below black splotches on the wall, dark gray emergency relief blankets form a silhouette of Kĩrĩnyaga, which is the name of Mount Kenya as well as a 1998 science fiction novel about an African utopia written by white American author Mike Resnick.

On June 3 at noon, the New Museum will host “Teen Summit: Beyond the Essence, More than Critical,” in which Youth Spectrum Arts members and teaching artists troizel and Eden Chinn will answer the question “What happens after we observe what occupies the space of the museum? Art isn’t simply there to be beautiful; it has a message that can inspire action.”

That certainly is true of this marvelous show.

RECANATI-KAPLAN TALKS: GRAHAM NASH

A Graham Nash self-portrait from 1972 is one of two dozens works on view at City Winery (photo courtesy City Winery / Graham Nash)

Who: Graham Nash, Anthony DeCurtis
What: Live and livestreamed conversation
Where: 92nd St. Y Center of Culture & Arts, 1395 Lexington Ave. between 91st & 92nd St., Buttenwieser Hall at the Arnhold Center and online
When: Thursday, June 1, $25 online, $35 in person, 8:30
Why: On “A Better Life,” the second song on Now, his first album of new material in seven years, two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Graham Nash sings, “Let’s make it a better life, leave it for the kids / It’s a lovely place, welcome home to the human race / We can make it a better life — one we can be proud of / So that at the end of the day, I hope we hear them say / that we left them a better life.” In his most recent book, A Life in Focus: The Photography of Graham Nash (November 2021, Insight Editions, $60), the musician, visual artist, and social activist explains, “I’ve been taking photographs longer than I’ve been making music.”

Coming off three shows at City Winery in which he played songs from throughout his long and distinguished career, the eighty-one-year-old Nash will be at the 92nd St. Y on June 1 at 8:30, in conversation with Rolling Stone contributor Anthony DeCurtis. Now contains such other tracks as “Right Now,” “Golden Idols,” and “I Watched It All Come Down”; meanwhile, two dozen of his pictures are on view through July 11 at City Winery in the exhibition “Graham Nash: Enduring Images,” including photos of Columbus Circle, David Crosby, Balboa Park, Johnny Cash, Jerry Garcia, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and an old house in Santa Cruz. At the 92nd St. Y talk, which can be attended in person or online, Nash will also perform some songs from the new record, demonstrating once again how he’s made this life better for all of us.

THE 2023 HARLEM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Ryan Dickie and Abigail Horton’s Blow Up My Life opens the 2023 Harlem Film Festival

THE 2023 HARLEM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
AMC Magic Johnson Harlem 9 Theatres, 2309 Frederick Douglass Blvd.
The Forum, 601 West 125th St.
Maysles Documentary Center, 343 Malcolm X Blvd.
May 18-28
harlemfilmfestival.org

The eighteenth edition of the Harlem International Film Festival kicks off May 18 with the New York premiere of Ryan Dickie and Abigail Horton’s Blow Up My Life, a pharmaceutical thriller starring Jason Selvig, Kara Young, Ben Horner, Davram Stiefler, and Reema Sampat, followed by a filmmaker Q&A and preceded by Eunice Levis’s InVade, a short that mixes undocumented immigration and environmental disaster. InVade is one of four films in the Harlem Spotlight section, along with Hans Augustave’s eight-minute I Held Him, with Brian Teague Williams, Alphonso Walker Jr., and Malik Yoba; Ryan Fenson-Hood’s twenty-one-minute The Obituary of Jasper James, about an unhoused man who moves into a mausoleum; and Patrick Heaphy’s feature-length documentary The Sacred Space Between Earth and Space, about Harlem Stage’s Afrofuturism series produced during the pandemic.

“This year we are celebrating over a century of Harlem Renaissance and Resilience with an amazing slate of films from the area,” HI program director Nasri Zacharia said in a statement. “Music runs throughout our schedule with amazing documentaries, very special honorees, culminating in a big day of music films and a special live performance. This film festival has always emphasized the idea of being a festival with exciting and entertaining events inspired by the films we screen, and this year really underlines that idea.”

Reggie Austin will perform live following NC Heikin’s Life & Life documentary about Austin’s experience in prison; other music docs look at bluesman James Cotton, jazz pianist Arturo O’Farrill, trumpeter Roy Hargrove, and double bassist Ron Carter, who will be honored with the Renaissance Award.

On May 20, Columbia University’s Forum presents free showings of Ashwin Chaudhary’s documentary Blind Eye Artist, about painter Justin Wadlington, whose art will be on display; Jenny Mackenzie’s documentary The Right to Read, about an NAACP activist, a teacher, and two American families dealing with literacy issues; and a special collection of Harlem shorts by local filmmakers.

Other in-person films include Tamika Miller’s Honor Student, David Bell and Mecca Medina’s #Brokeboi paired with William Alexander Runnels’s The Closet B!tch, Clayton P. Allis and Doug E. Doug’s In the Weeds with Doug in person, and Christina Kallas’s Paris Is in Harlem. In addition, STARZ will host the world premiere of the first two episodes of season two of Run the World, with stars Amber Stevens West, Bresha Webb, and Corbin Reid participating in a panel discussion after the Friday Night Spotlight screening. There will also be an extensive virtual section of the festival; keep watching this space for more information.