Melanie Crean and Jess Saldaña will team up for the latest “A Possibility that Exists Alongside” at the New Museum (photos by Jordan Parnass, Jess Saldaña)
Who: Melanie Crean, Jess Saldaña
What: Free gallery tour and poetry reading
Where: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 235 Bowery at Prince St., 212-219-1222
When: Thursday, August 22, free with advance RSVP, 6:00
Why: On August 22, artist, educator and filmmaker Melanie Crean will lead a special tour of the New Museum exhibition “Mirror/Echo/Tilt,” a multichannel video installation by Crean, Shaun Leonardo, and Sable Elyse Smith that examines arrest and incarceration, made in conjunction with participants with firsthand experience. The tour will be followed by a poetry reading by Chicanx muralist, poet, performer, and analogue film photographer Jess Saldaña, the founder and curator of the Brooklyn performance space Affections. The event, free with advance RSVP, is part of the New Museum program “A Possibility that Exists Alongside,” which last month featured a gallery tour by Leonardo and a poetry reading by Nicole Sealey and continues September 12 with a tour and reading by Smith; the exhibit runs through October 6.
Roberto Minervini follows up his Texas Trilogy – The Passage, Low Tide, and Stop the Pounding Heart – with the powerful sociopolitical call to action, What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? The film is shot in sharp, distinctive black-and-white by cinematographer Diego Romero Suarez-Llanos so that it looks like a fictional work from the civil rights era, but it is an all-too-real documentary that shows what’s happening in the US today, even though far too many Americans would deny the inherent realities the movie depicts. Italian-born director Minervini, who is based in the American south, tells four poignant stories steeped in oppression: Judy Hill is struggling to get by, running a bar that has become an important meeting place for the Tremé community while also caring for her elderly mother, Dorothy; Ashlei King hopes that her young sons, fourteen-year-old Ronaldo King and nine-year-old Titus Turner, come back safe after going out to play in a junkyard; Mardi Gras Indian Chief Kevin Goodman melds black and Native American traditions in changing times; and Krystal Muhammad and the New Black Panther Party for Self Defense protest the killings of two African American men at the hands of police.
“In a lot of ways, I feel like I’m just looking for guidance in how to be a blind artist,” filmmaker Rodney Evans says in Vision Portraits, his remarkable new documentary opening August 9 at Metrograph. Evans follows three artists as they deal with severe visual impairment but refuse to give up on their dreams as he seeks experimental treatment for his retinitis pigmentosa. Manhattan photographer John Dugdale lost most of his eyesight from CMV retinitis when he was thirty-two but is using his supposed disability to his advantage, taking stunning photos bathed in blue, inspired by the aurora borealis he sees when he closes his eyes. “Proving to myself that I could still function in a way that was not expected of a blind person was really gonna be the thing,” he says. “It’s fun to live in this bliss.” Bronx dancer Kayla Hamilton was born with no vision in one eye and developed iritis and glaucoma in the other, but she is shown working on a new piece called Nearly Sighted that incorporates the audience into her story. “How can I use my art form as a way of sharing what it is that I’m experiencing?” she asks.
Fifty years ago, a film came along that perfectly captured sociopolitical changes taking place across America; the golden anniversary of that revolutionary tale is being celebrated on September 20 at Radio City Music Hall with a special one-night-only screening introduced by one of the stars and featuring songs played live by some of the original artists. Tickets go on sale at noon on August 2 for Easy Rider Live, a gala presentation of a newly remastered print of Dennis Hopper’s seminal film, which was named Best First Work at Cannes, with opening remarks by costar Peter Fonda and live performances by Roger McGuinn, John Kay of Steppenwolf, and special guests, produced by T Bone Burnett.
