MoMA Presents CREATIVE CAPITAL 4/30-6/6

Recognizing the extraordinary contribution that the New York-based nonprofit organization Creative Capital has made to sustaining art of the highest quality in the United States, The Museum of Modern Art will present an exhibition of 37 original, impassioned, and rebellious films and videos that Creative Capital has funded and nurtured over the past 11 years. Presented from April 30 through June 6, 2010, the exhibition will include the premieres of three new works and two live moving-image musical performances among its showcase of 17 shorts and 20 features. Since 1999, Creative Capital has committed more than $20 million in financial and advisory support to more than 400 artists across artistic disciplines. Within film, this includes fictional narratives and documentaries, animated and experimental shorts, live moving-image performances, and many other innovative film projects. The exhibition screens in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters, and is organized by Joshua Siegel, Associate Curator, with Rajendra Roy, The Celeste Bartos Chief Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.

The opening night, HERE [ THE STORY SLEEPS ] (2010) on Friday, April 30, at 7:00 p.m., is a one-night-only live performance of an emerging collaboration between the award-winning filmmaker Braden King (Dutch Harbor; Sonic Youth: Do You Believe in Rapture?), the composer Michael Krassner, and the critically acclaimed Boxhead Ensemble. This hybrid film-concert explores the dream life of cinematic narrative, deconstructing King's forthcoming film HERE, starring Ben Foster and Lubna Azabal, and will include projections designed by Deborah Johnson. The closing night, on Sunday, June 6, at 5:30 p.m., features the New York theatrical premiere of a new work by Eve Sussman and Rufus Corporation: the "New Wave futurist noir" whiteonwhite:randomthriller [alphaversion] (2010). This experimental work by the creators of the gallery installation 89 Seconds at Alcázar (2004) and the theatrical feature The Rape of the Sabine Women (2006) is a film of indeterminate length whose continuously evolving narrative is generated by computer code. The screening will be followed by a conversation with director Sussman, editor Kevin Messman, code writer Jeff Garneau, and actor/writer Jeff Wood.

Among the directors who will present their work during the exhibition are Laura Poitras, whose documentary The Oath (2010) takes us deep inside the world of Al Qaeda, Guantanamo, and U.S. interrogation methods and was featured at this year's New Directors/New Films festival (a collaboration between MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center); Natalia Almada, who won the 2009 Sundance Best Documentary Director award for her film El General (2009), an intimate meditation on the life of Mexican President Plutarco Elias Calles; and Andy Bichlbaum, a member of the Yes Men and co-director of the documentary The Yes Men Fix the World (2009), the 2009 Berlin Film Festival Panorama Audience Award winner, which follows two gonzo anti-globalization activists and their pranks on major corporations and governmental agencies. The animated short film Paulina Hollers (2006) by Brent Green will screen on Thursday, May 6, at 7:00 p.m., and will include live narration by Green and improvised music by a band that includes Donna K., Brendan Canty (of Fugazi), Catherine McRae (of The Quavers), and Drew Henkels (of Drew & the Medicinal Pen).

Three films will have premieres in MoMA's Creative Capital exhibition. These include the East Coast premiere of Erin Cosgrove's Happy Am I (2009), an animated short by an exciting young artist from Los Angeles that combines a wide variety of art historical and pop culture references; the New York premiere of Glenda Wharton's The Zo (2009), a hand-drawn animated short that was shown at Sundance and tells a dark and dreamlike tale of violence, abuse, and escape; and the New York premiere of director Peter Sillen's I Am Secretly an Important Man, a documentary portrait of grunge-rock poet and performance artist Steven (Jesse) Bernstein, a major figure of the Seattle art and music scene who died tragically in 1991.

Other artists in the exhibition include Craig Baldwin, Roddy Bogawa, Bill Brown, Jem Cohen, Sandi DuBowski, James Duesing, Kevin Jerome Everson, Joe Gibbons, Sam Green and Bill Siegel, Lewis Klahr, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, Kalup Linzy, Sharon Lockhart, Bill Morrison, Christopher Munch, Suzan Pitt, Reynold Reynolds and Patrick Jolley, Alex Rivera, Jeff Scher, Phil Solomon, Ela Troyano, David Wilson, and Caveh Zahedi.