Brakhage Center Newsletter - May 11, 2023

An exciting year for all. Recent programs included our weekly XPerimental Wednesday series, our Social Justice Curator series, our Artist-in-Residence program, and two collaborative special events, one held on campus, and the other in Denver. These events and activities followed Fall 2022’s Luncheon Series and the Art/Film Series.

The Brakhage Center thanks its many friends and supporters this year, including the Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts, the Roser Visiting Artist Program, John W. Comerford and the College of Arts & Sciences.

In Spring 2023, we brought in three incredible curators to present work related to the theme of social justice as it related to experimental filmmaking practices past and present. Our guests presented their work in our cinematheque space, accompanied by light refreshments.

Guha Shankar, of the Civil Rights History Project and American Folklife Center, presented Death and Life in Southwest Georgia: Glen Pearcy’s Lens on the Black Freedom Struggle. Shankar shared works of civil rights activist and progressive filmmaker Glen Pearcy, whose One More River to Cross, is an incisive documentary exploration of iniquities in the justice system produced during the Southwest Georgia Project of 1968. Jesse Lerner, documentary film and video maker, professor, curator, and writer based in Los Angeles, curated a series of short films from Latin America, in a program titled “Displacements,” which addressed and are framed by varieties of transnational displacements, travels, forced or self-imposed migrations, the experiences of exile, and the global circulations of images, cultures, and commodities. Amalia Córdova, the supervisory museum curator and chair of research and education for the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage at the Smithsonian Institution, shared On Suspicion (Zokunentu), with the musical work of Jaas Newen.

Partnership with Sandra Ristovska/ Mellon/ACLS Scholars and Society Speaker Series 

This curator series was created in partnership with Sandra Ristovska. The Brakhage Center was thrilled to be a part of the Mellon/ACLS Scholars and Society Speaker Series on visual media, justice and human rights, and to collaborate with CU Professor Sandra Ristovska and CMCI (College of Media, Communication and Information).

Every Wednesday from noon to one during the Spring 2023 semester the Brakhage Center screened the work of eminent experimental filmmakers past and present, as well as enjoying refreshments and conversation with faculty, staff at students as well as artists from the larger Boulder community.

Filmmakers screened include: Maya Deren, Hollis Frampton, Ken Jacobs, Stan Brakhage, and Abigail Child, as well as Boulder-based artist Emett Casey, and works in progress by MFA students Dani Wasserman, Sierra Grove and Cody Norton, and BFA candidate Erick Chavez.