'Ma Rainey's Black Bottom,' The Contenders Film Series, Art Deaccession, Two New Exhibits
Based on the play by August Wilson, Netflix’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” stars Viola Davis as Rainey alongside Chadwick Boseman in his final screen role. Director George C. Wolfe joins us to discuss the film.
Raj Roy, chief curator of film at MoMA, joins us to give a wrap up of the year's best films and discuss MoMA's new Virtual Cinema platform as part of the 13th annual edition of The Contenders, running entirely online from December 10, 2020, through February 28, 2021.
Like many cultural institutions, museums have been hit hard this year. In April, the Association of Art Museum Directors announced that it was relaxing their guidelines, allowing museums to sell artwork from their permanent collections to address budget shortfalls. Angelica Villa, editor of Art Market Monitor for ARTNews, talks about how many museums have sold pieces from their collections, why some question the morality of such sales, and why one sale became so controversial, it was cancelled at the last minute.
Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop is an unprecedented exhibition currently at The Whitney that chronicles the formative years of the Kamoinge Workshop, a collective of Black photographers established in New York City in 1963. Assistant curator Carrie Springer and featured photographer, Herb Robinson, one of the founding members of the collective will join to talk about the Kamoinge Workshop’s impact on the Black Arts Movement of the 1970’s.
MoMA's curator of photography Sarah Meister joins us to discuss Gordon Parks's 1957 series The Atmosphere of Crime for Life magazine as well as the fourth floor gallery collection now on view. Titled Gordon Parks and The Atmosphere of Crime, the collection addresses the criminal justice system in ways that are relevant to present-day issues. Exploring selections from the "Atmosphere of Crime" photos, Parks's work is placed in context with 19th-century work—including mugshots—and a generous selection of crime photographs, as well as a clip from Parks’s legendary 1971 film Shaft. The gallery groups together a complex history of capturing criminality, its intersection with race, and its representation in the US.
