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Curated Art Film Series Launches at The Kate

The Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts and the Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center are collaborating on a curated film series featuring a selection of art films owned by the college and produced by the Checkerboard Film Foundation in New York City. The movies in the series, called Bridging the Arts, document artists whose unique and important contributions informed American culture.

Regional curators and other subject matter experts will give brief lectures before each film.

The series will launch at the Kate at 300 Main Street, Old Saybrook, on Tuesdays April 26, May 24, and June 21. All films begin at 4 p.m.

The spring 2016 series will feature:

Ellsworth Kelly: Fragments—Tuesday, April 26

“In my paintings I’m not inventing; my ideas come from constantly investigating how things look.”- ElIsworth Kelly

Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) is an American abstract painter, sculptor, and printmaker. Kelly’s work reflects the connection between abstraction and nature from which he extrapolated forms and colors. Since the beginning of his career, Kelly’s emphasis on pure form and color and his impulse to suppress gesture in favor of spatial unity, played a pivotal role in the development of abstract art in America. This hour-long documentary follows Kelly as he revisits the Paris of his early twenties and explores early influences which became leitmotifs that he would return to, reiterate, refine, and re-work for decades to come.

Roy Lichtenstein: Reflections—Tuesday, May 24

This film features one of the great pop artists of our time, discussing his work, his artistic process, and the sources of his inspiration. Also appearing are several leading authorities on contemporary art including former curators and art historians: Diane Waldman, deputy director and senior curator (1965–1996), Guggenheim Museum; Kirk Varnedoe, chief curator and painting and sculpture (1988–2001), Museum of Modern Art; and Robert Rosenblum, professor of Fine Arts at New York University and associate curator at the Guggenheim Museum. Lichtenstein’s long time dealer, Leo Castelli, was interviewed in his gallery by Isabella Rossellini. The artist was filmed in his studios in New York City and Southampton, Long Island, as well as on location in Los Angeles and Rome. Featured are Lichtenstein’s Large Scale Murals, Reflections Series, and his Interior Series.

Kiki Smith: Squatting the Palace: An installation by Kiki Smith in Venice—Tuesday, June 21

This film takes a circular approach to an artist who works in overlapping spirals of creative energy.

Smith works in her home, not in a space specifically designed as a studio, but on the second floor of her East Village townhouse. There, amidst her books, a pet bird, and tiny kitchenette, Smith goes from drawing to collaging to modeling clay to painting plaster casts and back, again and again, moving from one discipline to another in a way that may seem aimless to a casual observer, but is actually the modus operandi of a highly sophisticated visual artist. Over the course of the film, it becomes apparent that many of the pieces Smith is creating—including sculptures, photographs, prints, and furniture fashioned from liquor boxes—are intended for an eight-room installation at the Fondazione Querini Stamplia in Venice to open contemporaneously with the 2005 Venice Biennale. The movie follows Smith to Venice for the installation of her exhibition, which proves to be an integral part of the conceptual whole. The film culminates in a detailed look at the completed exhibition, Homespun Tales: Stories of Domestic Occupation, widely regarded as one of the most successful Venice Biennale exhibitions.

This information provided by the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts and the Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center.