New Media Gallery, Summer 2008

Click on the exhibition title below to see dates and scheduled events. The "Read more" link under some listing provides additional information.

Highlights from the Black Maria Film and Video Festival
Carrara

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New Media Gallery Programs

Highlights from the Black Maria Film
and Video Festival
April 15 - June 1

Each year the Virginia Film Festival brings a much- anticipated Film Society program featuring works from the Black Maria Film and Video Festival. In conjunction with this year's visit by Festival director John Columbus, the Museum presents these award- winning new experimental, documentary, and animated films and videos. Visit www.vafilm.com for details on the Virginia Film Festival show or download programming press release (pdf).

U.Va. Art Musuem Media Gallery Installation

"The Ville"
17 min. by Amy Bench, Austin, Texas
Juror's Citation
"The Ville" is a quiet contemplation of race, identity, fear and acceptance in today's urban landscape. In its heyday, the Ville neighborhood of St. Louis was notable in many ways and was where the young Chuck Berry heard the Antioch Baptist Church choir. In the Ville, Tina Turner, Arthur Ashe and Barbara Jordan went to school at the first black high school west of the Mississippi. Today, 16-year-old Jermaine and 8-year-old Kathryn reflect on what it means to live there now, how survival is more real than history.

"Conjure Bearden"
16.5 min. compiled by Thomas Whiteside, Durham, N.C.
"Conjure Bearden" is a short meditation on African-American life in the Jim Crow South in the 1930s and '40s. Filmmaker Thomas Whiteside has reassembled and reconfigured silent footage originally shot by nomadic African-American filmmaker H. Lee Waters. This piece is a sort of homage to the iconography of artist Romare Bearden, who was a native of Charlotte, N.C., and who, aside from his career in New York, Paris and St. Martin, kept close ties to his roots. Bearden doesn't appear in this footage, but his aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents do. Whiteside has collected an extraordinary cross-section of Waters' films now accompanied by a bluesy score by Anthony Kelley. Waters' work stands out not only because of its power, but because so much of it survives.

		William Wylie, American, b. 1957 Untitled #01-113, 2006 From Carrara Series Pigment print, 343⁄4 x 411⁄2 inches Promised Gift Image © the Artist

William Wylie: Carrara
June 3-July 6

William Wylie, photographer and associate professor in the McIntire Department of Art, has worked over seven years making photographs and shooting video in the spectacular marble quarries of Carrara, Italy. The 2008 video pieces are meditations on the workers and the work involved in everyday activities within the quarries. Using High-Definition video to record the passing of time and the processes involved in moving, cutting, and hauling the massive marble blocks, these videos capture the essence of the labor and life of the cavatori (stonecutters) as well as the machines that they use to dismantle the mountains. Wylie is debuting these films at the Museum.

The exhibition opens in conjunction with the second annual Charlottesville Festival of the Photograph.