Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

Thursday, October 24

7:30 PM

DFAB 131 (The Humanities Room)

The second film of the fall in our Art That Moves series will be Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, a film by director Alison Klayman.

Ai Weiwei is China's most famous international artist, and its most outspoken domestic critic. Against a backdrop of strict censorship and an unresponsive legal system, Ai expresses himself and organizes people through art and social media. In response, Chinese authorities have shut down his blog, beat him up, bulldozed his newly built studio, and held him in secret detention.

Released in 2012, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry is the inside story of a dissident for the digital age who inspires global audiences and blurs the boundaries of art and politics. First-time director Alison Klayman gained unprecedented access to Ai while working as a journalist in China.

From 2008 to 2010, Klayman documented Ai's artistic process in preparation for major museum exhibitions, his intimate exchanges with family members and his increasingly public clashes with the Chinese government. Klayman's detailed portrait of the artist provides a nuanced exploration of contemporary China and one of its most compelling public figures.

Please join us in Room 131 of the Dickey Fine Arts Building at 7:30 PM on Thursday, October 24, for a film that celebrates the life and work of an artist who has made it his mission to fight social injustices in his native country.

 

Jean-Michel Baquiat: The Radiant Child

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12

7:30 PM

DFAB 131 (THE HUMANITIES ROOM)

The first film of the fall in our Art That Moves series will be Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child.  

Released in 2010, this film was directed by Tamara Davis and documents the meteoric rise to fame and tragically short life of postmodern neo-expressionist artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.  Central to the film is a videotaped interview with Basquiat that Davis conducted in the 1980s only a couple of years before the young artist's death by overdose.  Davis did not reveal any of the content of the interview until the release of this film.

Davis intertwines this footage with 2010 interviews with others who knew Basquiat, such as  Julian Schnabel, Larry Gagosian, Bruno Bischofberger, Tony Shafrazi, Fab 5 Freddy, Jeffrey Deitch, Glenn O'Brien, Maripol, Kai Eric, Nicholas Taylor, Fred Hoffmann, Michael Holman, Diego Cortez, Annina Nosei, Suzanne Mallouk, Rene Ricard, Kenny Scharf, and many others.  The resulting takes pays definitive, and unflinching, homage to the life and artistic process of Jean-Michel Basquiat while also examining his status as an iconoclast leaving an indelible mark on the history of art.

Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist who began his work as an obscure graffiti artist in New York City in the late 1970s and quickly rose to fame as he evolved into an acclaimed Neo-Expressionist painter in the 1980s.  Basquiat combined the visual language of the Abstract Expressionists (such as Jackson Pollack) and the influences of Bebop and street graffiti to create a unique style of painting that was quickly recognized by the international art world as an important contribution to the burgeoning postmodern movement in art.  Temporing Basquiat's amazing success were his battles with personal demons, depression, racism, and misunderstanding.  The artist died of an overdose in 1988, at the tragically young age of 27.

Please join us in Room 131 of the Dickey Fine Arts Building at 7:30 PM on Thursday, September 12, for a powerful film that explores the life of an extraordinary artist, as well as the rewards and perils of rapid stardom in the art world.