Peabody Essex Museum

Salem Film Fest spotlights local filmmakers, adds new Peabody Black Box Theater venue

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Hail,Satan!

Salem Film Fest will feature HAIL, SATAN? on Sunday, March 31 at 7:15 pm at The Cabot Theatre in Beverly.

 

By Shelley A. Sackett

 

On Friday, March 29, from 5:30 – 7:30 p.m., Salem Film Fest, one of New England’s leading all-documentary film festivals, will launch its 12th year with a kick-off party at Salem Arts Association at 211 Bridge St. Visiting filmmakers will be on hand to mingle with filmgoers prior to the first two features of the 70 short- and full-length film fest

 

“SFF always focuses on our filmmakers—we do everything we can to make their visits easy, fun and rewarding,” SFF Co-Founder and Director Joe Cultrera wrote in the program liner notes. Filmmakers are scheduled to be present at more than half the screenings, affording audiences the opportunity to learn about the documentary process and engage in intimate, thought-provoking conversations.

 

SFF2019 runs from March 29 to April 4, with films from around the globe screening at CinemaSalem, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the National Park Service Visitor Center in Salem; The Cabot and Endicott College’s Manninen Center for the Arts in Beverly, and the new Black Box Theater in downtown Peabody.

 

Salem Trolley will provide free weekend rides between cities so filmgoers can easily journey through 2019’s stellar lineup. A complete schedule of films, filmmaker receptions and music events, plus information on how to buy passes and individual tickets is at salemfilmfest.com.

 

One half dozen films this year are by filmmakers or about subjects with local connections.

 

Salem is well known for its historical connection to witchcraft. With Lynn native and director Penny Lane’s Hail, Satan?, its contemporary roots in sorcery may eclipse even the Salem Witch Trials for notoriety. The film’s subject is The Satanic Temple, a non-theistic religious organization with active chapters worldwide that is headquartered in Salem on Bridge St. Its co-founder, Lucien Greaves, is the film subject. Lane’s SFF North Shore Spotlight film questions the meaning of religious expression in a secular nation when The Satanic Temple campaigns to place a Satanic monument on the Arkansas State Capitol lawn. Greaves will answer questions after the screening on Sunday, March 31 at 7:15 p.m. at The Cabot.

Councilwoman

COUNCILWOMAN is SFF opening night film on Friday, March 29 at CinemaSalem at 7 pm.

 

Opening night’s Councilwoman is the first feature documentary directed by Watertown, MA-based Margo Guernsey. The film is at CinemSalem at 7 p.m. on Friday, March 29, and tells the story of a Dominican immigrant and hotel housekeeper in Providence, Rhode Island, who wins a coveted City Council seat. Guernsey has worked as a freelance director and producer in the Boston area since 2012 and will be on hand for a post-screening Q&A.

Marcos Doesn't Live Here Anymore

MARCOS DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE will screen on Wednesday, April 3 at 8 pm at CinemaSalem.

 

Filmmaker and Tufts University alumnus David Sutherland (Kind Hearted Woman, The Farmer’s Wife) has won over 100 international awards and citations for his films. On Wednesday, April 3 at 8 p.m., the New England premiere of Marcos Doesn’t Live Here Anymore will screen at CinemaSalem. Sutherland tells the heartbreaking story of Elizabeth Perez, a decorated Marine veteran, who fights to reunite her family amidst the trauma caused by America’s immigration policy after her undocumented husband is deported to Mexico. Sutherland will be on hand for a Q&A.

CAMOUFLAGE: VIETNAMESE BRUSH STROKES WITH HISTORY will screen on Saturday, March 30 at PEM at 10:20 am.

 

On Saturday, March 30, filmmaker Bestor Cram will be at PEM for a Q&A following the 10:20 a.m. screening of Camouflage (Contemporary Vietnamese artists overcome obstacles that demand personal courage and artistic determination to document a little known side of the aftermath of America’s war in Vietnam). Cram, a Viet Nam Veteran, has over 25 years experience as director, producer and cinematographer and founded Northern Light Production, located in Allston, MA.

Also on Sunday, March 31 are:

GRIT

GRIT will screen on Sunday, March 31 at CinemaSalem at 2:30 pm.

 

Grit (directed by Western MA resident Cynthia Wade and Sasha Friedlander), the story of one of the world’s largest man-made environmental disasters — a tsunami of boiling mud that sinks 16 Indonesian villages — that transforms a teenage survivor into a political activist; and

Balian (The Healer) (directed by Boston- based Dan McGuire), which follows the 20-year rise and fall of Mangku Pogog, a “Balian” or traditional Indonesian healer who is equal parts trickster, scoundrel and saint. His “discovery” by Western tourists leads to serious consequences and McGuire returns 20 years later to learn about his fate. Both films show at CinemaSalem with filmmakers present for post-screening Q&A sessions.

 

Balian

BALIAN (THE HEALER) will screen on Sunday, March 31 at CinemaSalem at 5 pm.

 

 

Finally, SFF veterans will be relieved to know nine new Salem Sketches will be unveiled this year. The mini docs showcase portraits of the local scene with one Sketch screened before each feature film. And, new this year, there are five Shorts Blocks—and they are all free.

 

 

A complete lineup of films, listings of all events, and information on how to buy tickets is available at salemfilmfest.com.

Mr. Fish makes a big splash at Salem Film Fest

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By Shelley A. Sackett

IMG_5852

Producer Ted Collins, Mr. Fish and SFF moderator Debra Longo at the PEM post-screening Q&A.

 

Dwayne Booth wears many hats.

 

He lives in the Philadelphia area, where he is a loving family man and a popular lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

 

For the last 25 years, he has also been known as Mr. Fish, the controversial and enormously talented freelance editorial cartoonist whose work has been published in some of the nation’s most reputable and prestigious magazines, journals, newspapers and web magazines, currently at Harpers.org and Truthdig.com.

 

Although Fish (as he prefers to be called) has written three books of cartoons and essays and won several prestigious awards, his was hardly a household name. All that has changed with the release of the documentary feature, “Mr. Fish: Cartooning from the Deep End,” which screened last Friday evening at the Peabody Essex Museum as part of the Salem Film Fest.

 

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From the left: Mr. Fish (Dwayne Booth), flanked by his two daughters, producer Ted Collins and “Mrs. Fish”, Diana Booth.

 

Not your average editorial cartoonist, Fish’s radical and sometimes outrageous work brims with controversy and biting satire, drawing from politics, propaganda, religion and social taboos. His rebellious anti-establishment philosophy is a throw back to the 1960s, yet his angst is contemporary. He has been called a poet with a cartoonist’s pen.

 

Nothing is off limits to Mr. Fish — he dares us to look away and invites us to cringe all the while challenging us to examine our assumptions and question the status quo. “I want cartooning to be dangerous and to be more than ink on paper,” Fish says to the camera.

 

Director Pablo Bryant shot over 90 hours of footage over the course of five years, and his film lets its audience through the keyhole into Fish’s private family life. Against a backdrop of Fish’s art and animation, the film explores his relationships with his wife Diana and their children; the beginning of his career; his views about money, war, and environmental catastrophe; the decline of the print industry that used to publish his work, and the diminished commercial appeal of his art.

 

“Where is the threat to the dominant culture today? There’s still so much work to do. Who’s going to do it?” Fish says in the film.

 

Watching Fish effortlessly draw his cartoons is one of the film’s greatest pleasures. Bryant’s unobtrusive camera allows the audience to eavesdrop as Fish explains how he comes up with his ideas and what drives him.

 

“The fact that I use art to communicate what it feels like to be human and why it’s significant to me- I feel like I have no other choice,” he says. “A lot of people go thru life masking what it means to be a human being. I would rather use art to demonstrate the injustice of the overall society.”

 

Faced with compromising his creativity to earn a living or staying true to his artistic and moral compass, Fish is at a real financial tipping point by the film’s end, and the audience is left wondering whether Fish will have to sell out after all.

 

Luckily, Fish, his family and the film’s producer and Massachusetts native, Ted Collins, were on hand for a lively and intimate 30-minute Q&A once the near sell-out crowd stopped clapping and settled down.

 

Asked if he was receptive to being the subject of a documentary, Fish said he really didn’t care one way or the other, but credited his wife Diana (who, with their twin daughters, later joined Fish and Collins for the Q&A) with deciding to invite director Bryant to stay with them while he was filming. “For a filmmaker, it was sort of like Jane living with chimps,” Fish said, referring to Jane Goodall.

 

Asked what happens to the original art he creates if it has no current market, Fish told a story about his early career, when he was fiercely opposed to the commodification of art. He would take his cartoons to Staples, make copies and destroy the originals. When he met the famous Los Angeles gallery owner Robert Berman ten years ago, Berman asked him for the originals. “Luckily, I had a few I was too lazy to throw away,” he said as the audience laughed.

 

Fish said that since Trump was elected President, there has been a renewed interest in his art. He published a new book in 2017, “And Then the World Blew Up,” and has two more scheduled. He even has a line of skateboards.

 

“I’ve been told, ‘Now is your time. Now you have a purpose.’ My job is very hard, though. What I don’t want to do is to turn Trump into a clown or a monster. That turns it into burlesque and ignores the underlying problem,” he said.

 

When an audience member asked Fish how parent-teacher conferences went, given his known proclivity for the graphically vulgar and obscene, he invited his family to join him on stage. His daughters told a story about their 6th grade teacher who fished their lunch bags out of the trash during a field trip because he knew Fish drew cartoon portraits of the girls.

 

Diana told about the time she entrusted her husband to attend parent-teacher open house, which included attending the girls’ classes to meet their teachers. When she received a call from Fish, she asked him why he wasn’t at the open house. “He told me he was cutting their classes,” she said.

 

Salem Film Fest Program Director Jeff Schmidt knew “Mr. Fish” would be a good fit for the Salem festival. “As a programmer, I’m constantly on the look out for films starting to make their way onto the film festival circuit.  I ran across “Mr. Fish: Cartooning From The Deep End” early on and reached out to producer Ted Collins and director Pablo Bryant to encourage them to submit to the festival. Our programming team loves films with unique characters who take chances, and Mr Fish certainly fits that bill,” he said.

 

 

Georgia O’Keeffe as artist, model, and designer at Peabody Essex Museum

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Shelley A. Sackett

DECEMBER 28, 2017 – SALEM – Few people outside academia realize that Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), the iconic artist famous for paintings of enlarged flowers and New Mexico landscapes, was an accomplished seamstress who lavished as much creative juice on her self-presentation as on her work. With the opening of its multi-disciplinary exhibition, “Georgia O’Keeffe: Art, Image, Style,” the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem opens the door to her closet.

O’Keeffe’s paintings are presented alongside her never before exhibited handmade garments and dozens of images of the artist taken by photographers, including her Jewish husband, Alfred Stieglitz. The show, first curated at the Brooklyn Museum by art historian Wanda M. Corn, is the first to explore how the renowned artist deliberately and adeptly shaped her public image and myth, creating her own celebrity fame.

The 125 works expand our understanding of O’Keeffe while underscoring her fierce determination to be in charge of how the world understood her identity and artistic values. The powerful public persona she created through her clothes and the way she posed for the camera unequivocally proclaimed her independence and modern, progressive lifestyle.

“O’Keeffe drew no line between the art she made and the life she lived,” Corn said. “She strove to make her life a complete work of art, each piece contributing to an aesthetic whole.”

Corn discovered O’Keeffe’s cache during a 1980 cross-country stopover in New Mexico on her way to Stanford University, where she taught art history. She visited O’Keeffe’s homes in the Southwest state at Ghost Ranch and Abiquiú, finding closets full of the artist’s clothing preserved in beautiful condition. Because most were without labels, she had to guess which ones the artist created and which she bought. Corn said if she could sit down with O’Keeffe, “My first question would be, ‘Was I right in my attributions?’”

Most of the clothes and desert artifacts now belong to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, founded the year of her death in 1986.

The provocative photographs by Stieglitz (1864-1946) dominate the exhibition’s walls at the Peabody Essex. It’s hard to imagine the different path O’Keeffe’s life might have taken had she not caught his eye in 1916, when he was 52, married, and a world-famous photographer based in New York and she was 28 and still unknown.

Instantly infatuated with O’Keeffe and her art, the son of German-Jewish immigrants wooed and won her. She moved to New York and soon, he began taking nude photographs of her, one of which hangs beside an O’Keeffe painting at the Peabody Essex exhibit. The two married in 1924. For years, Stieglitz photographed O’Keeffe obsessively, teaching her how to pose and helping make her the most photographed artist of the 20th century.

In 1927, O’Keeffe visited New Mexico and fell in love with the desert landscape. Her art and clothing would change in response to it. She lived there part of the year from 1929 on, moving there permanently after Stieglitz’s death in 1946. The younger generation of photographers who visited her in New Mexico cemented her status as a pioneer of modernism and a contemporary style icon.

Sprinkled throughout the rooms of paintings, paired clothing, and photographs at the Peabody Essex exhibit are small screen films, including fascinating home movies of O’Keeffe and Stieglitz in New York and a one-minute 1977 video portrait, the only such interview the artist granted.

One standout in the exhibition’s predominantly black and ivory palette is an orange Andy Warhol diamond-dusted print that introduces the idea of “Saint Georgia,” showing a meditative, mystical, Mother Theresa-like O’Keeffe. Another is a video of the House of Dior’s 2018 O’Keeffe-inspired cruise collection that features her signature gaucho hat.

“O’Keeffe’s aesthetic legacy of organic silhouettes, minimal ornamentation, and restrained color palettes continues to capture the popular imagination and inspire leading designers and tastemakers of today,” said Austen Barron Bailly, organizing PEM curator.

“Georgia O’Keeffe: Art, Image, Style” runs through April 1 at the Peabody Essex Museum, East India Square, 161 Essex St., Salem. For more information, call 978-745-9500 visit pem.org.

PEM hires neuroscientist to enrich visitor experience

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Tedi Asher

Dr. Tedi Asher

Groundbreaking initiative first in the museum world

By Shelley A. Sackett, correspondent

 

By his own admission, Dan Monroe is “afflicted with intense curiosity.” The Peabody Essex Museum executive director and CEO relaxes by intensely investigating fields unrelated to art and appreciation, such as quantum physics.

 

A few years ago, neuroscience caught his attention. After reading roughly 150 books and publications, it became clear to him that neuroscience has a direct role to play at PEM.

 

“What we essentially do is to create experiences of art and culture. We call them exhibitions and programs, but we are really creating experiences,” he said.

 

Since research shows that all experiences are created in our brains, he reasoned, if PEM wanted to remain at the forefront of designing meaningful, relevant and impactful art experiences, it would be a good idea to better understand how brains work.

 

Essentially, he thought that by getting inside visitors’ heads and figuring out how they felt, how they saw, what caught their attention and what they remembered, PEM could enrich their visits.

 

Plus, it would make the museum a more fun experience.

 

His team began experimenting with this new approach, adding innovative multi-sensorial elements to select exhibits. Professional dancers greeted visitors in the “Rodin: Transforming Sculpture” galleries, their movements and poses reflecting those of the sculptural works. “Asia in Amsterdam” showcased fragrant spices, a soundtrack conveying 17-th century Dutch life, storytelling and striking graphics.

 

The feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

 

“The dancers created a new kind of attention and a new avenue for people to appreciate and see sculpture,” he said, noting that the traditional way museums transmit information — through written labels — is not working. “If people read them at all, they spend an average of 2.5 seconds, even at the oversized introductory panels,” he said. He wanted a more transformative experience for the PEM guest and, based on visitor surveys, so did the public.

 

After the success of the Rodin and Asia shows, Monroe and his team decided to expand their reach. They applied for and received a $130,000 grant from the Barr Foundation, a Boston-based philanthropic organization, to launch the neuroscience initiative and delve deeper into using neuroscience research to enhance the way PEM designs exhibits.

 

The initiative enabled PEM to hire Dr. Tedi Asher, a neuroscientist who earned her Ph.D. from Harvard Medical School’s Biological and Biomedical Sciences program 2016, and joined PEM as its full-time Neuroscience Researcher in April. “To our knowledge, this is the first art museum in the world to hire a neuroscientist and put them on staff,” Monroe said.

 

Asher is thrilled with her first job outside the academic arena. “Where else but at art museums can one witness such breadth and depth of emotional experience?” she asked.

 

She was looking for a position that would allow her to creatively communicate neuroscience to non-scientists in a non-traditional teaching environment that would reach beyond academia and benefit the public at large.

 

“I came across PEM’s job ad and it seemed to fit that bill,” she said.

 

Asher’s primary academic focus has been studying emotion, starting as an undergraduate at Swarthmore College, where she studied learning and memory in the common fruit fly. Her doctoral work in neuroscience investigated aggressive behavior in mice.

 

At PEM, she will step out of the laboratory and explore how PEM can enhance and enrich the visitor experience by designing exhibits that will evoke human emotions, thereby leaving lasting impressions.

 

“Teri has a keen interest in using neuroscience to make the world a better place. She’s learning a great deal about art and culture and how museums work at the same time she’s teaching us about neuroscience and how brains work,” Monroe said.

 

Asher’s tasks are threefold. She will investigate how human brains are wired to appreciate art and how that information can be used to design exhibits that resonate on a personal level. She will then work with PEM staff, teaching them basic concepts that are relevant to their work as exhibition and program designers, such as how visual and attention systems work and how they relate to emotion. Finally, she will also pen a small publication to explain the concept behind the neuroscience initiative and its applicability to museums.

 

The skills she honed during schooling — particularly her ability to “mine the literature in an efficient and effective way” — will be key to her position. Specifically, she will be looking at the structure of the visual system and how that influences visual perception, asking questions such as, “What neurostructures allow us to regulate attention? What characterizes how we allocate attention with an experience like a museum visit?”

 

It will be then be up to PEM exhibit designers and staff to translate and incorporate that information into the museum’s installations.

 

The timing of Asher’s hire couldn’t be more perfect. PEM continues to undergo a comprehensive renovation and expansion project, featuring a 40,000 square-foot new wing of galleries, which will open in 2019. At the same time, Monroe explained, PEM is also in the process of refreshing its permanent collections, creating new installations of virtually all of them.

 

“The entire experience at PEM will be new, based on ideas we’re deriving from neuroscience and other fields,” he said. Asher will assist in this overhaul too.

 

Since 2003, PEM has used The Morey Group to measure overall visitor satisfaction through a standardized survey tool used within the museum industry. Among the 80 museums tracked by Morey, PEM is head and shoulders above the rest, ranking number one every year since 2003.

 

“We’ve long been pursuing innovative approaches,” Monroe explained modestly, adding, “but the neuroscience initiative is a distinctive one.”

 

Monroe credits the neuroscience initiative with motivating PEM to shift gears away from written text and towards better and more storytelling. “Stories are the glue that holds us together as social animals. Good stories elicit emotion and emotion is really critical,” he said.

Pleasure and Pain: Not All Shoes Are Meant for Walking

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If, as Mark Twain said, “Clothes makes the man”, then the Peabody Essex Museum’s newest exhibit is full throttle support for a complementary adage: “Shoes make the woman”.

“Shoes: Pleasure and Pain” showcases 300 pairs of shoes by more than 130 designers and artists that range from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the comfortable to the downright punishing. Although men’s shoes are represented with bling and panache, over 70% of the exhibit is devoted to women’s shoes.

With its recent acquisition of 20th– and 21st-century fashion, PEM has the largest shoe collection in the country. Over 100 are included in the exhibit, many of which have never been displayed before.

“We are in the process of building a fashion presence at PEM,” said Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, PEM’s James B. and Mary Lou Hawkes Deputy Director and coordinating curator for the exhibition. “There is a growing appetite for compelling exhibitions about fashion.”

Organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the PEM show marks its U.S. debut and will run through March 12, 2017.

Curated by themes, the five-section show (Transformation, Status, Seduction, Creation and Obsession) features shoes worn by high profile celebrities such as David Beckham, Elton John, Queen Elizabeth and Princess Diana. Among the artists and designers represented are Manolo Blahnik (of “Sex and the City” notoriety), Christian Louboutin (with his signature red soles), Christian Dior, Jimmy Choo and Prada. Combat boots and sneakers share center stage with stilettos and seductive boudoir mules.

 

11rogervivierchristiandior

Beaded evening shoes by Roger Vivier for Christian Dior, 1958-1960.

 

It is the pairing of designer and consumer that is at the heart of the exhibit. “Shoes are about the personal creativity of the designer and the person who wears that shoe. It’s a partnership between two people who likely never meet. Creation is about communication,” Hartigan said.

The shoes on display aren’t just meant to protect feet and promote locomotion. They are also projections of the mood, identity and status of the wearer. “Shoes are extensions of ourselves,” she added.

Blahnik’s Mondrian-inspired red and yellow “Tendona” shoes would be conversation-stoppers at any gathering as would Louboutin’s impossibly high-heeled “Anemone” design, with its red satin bursts and feathers. The shoes seem molded to fit a Barbie doll’s nonhuman foot, and in fact, Barbie does have her very own accessory line of three Louboutin designs.

 

Manolo Blahnik , 'Tendona' shoe, 2015. Leather. Courtesy of Manolo Blahnik

“Tedona” by Manolo Blahnik, 2015, made of leather and on loan from the designer..

 

These shoes aren’t meant for the average consumer (even Barbie’s version retails for $35). With starting prices of $700, they are associated with more than female sexuality and power. “High heels have always been worn by rich people of high society,” said Hartigan, noting that the Egyptians first developed platform shoes in 3500 B.C. so the wealthy could be seen as walking high off the ground.

Historians looking for more than the dazzle of sequins and crystals (yes, there is even a Swarovski Cinderella glass slipper) can linger among the lotus shoes made for bound feet, 16th century chopines and men’s shoes with noisy slap-soles that were worn in Europe in the 17th century.

 

chopines

Chopines by an artist in Venice, Italy, about 1600 made of punched leather and pine.

 

Fashionistas will delight in the chance to see Vivienne Westwood’s dramatically exaggerated lace-up blue platform heels that famously caused model Naomi Campbell to stumble on a Paris runway in 1993. A picture of Campbell good-naturedly laughing after her very public tumble is part of the display.

 

campbell

The Vivienne Westwood blue, platform-heeled “Super Elevated Gillie” shoes that caused Naomi Campbell’s infamous 1993 Paris catwalk show tumble.

 

The exhibit also has a distinctive local flavor, acknowledging New England’s importance as a shoe manufacturing center and featuring selections from the late Boston style maven Marilyn Riseman and noted North Shore collectors Jimmy Raye and Lillian Montalto Bohlen.

Turning momentarily serious, the section “Seduction” shines a spotlight on the often-blurred lines between objectification and celebration of women’s sexuality. Inspired by bondage and 18th century prostitution, mules and high heels have always represented both passion and exploitation.

Perhaps the most extreme example of this is “Fetish”, an unwearable pair of stilettos created by Louboutin in collaboration with film director David Lynch, whose signature style (“Blue Velvet”, “Twin Peaks”) is darkly twisted sensuality. The only way one can wear these shoes is by crawling. A picture of a woman doing just that is part of the exhibit.

 

fetish

“Fetish” by Louboutin in collaboration with David Lynch.

 

Walking through the galleries, it’s evident that while the lion’s share of shoes is designed for women, the designers are predominantly men. Although high heels may empower and literally elevate women, they can do so at a cost of permanent back and foot problems.

Asked whether he has sympathy for women who wear his designer high heels, Louboutin was unambiguous in a 2012 interview with “Grazia” magazine. “High heels are pleasure with pain. If you can’t walk in them, don’t wear them,” he scoffed.

Or, as a shoe designer in ancient Roman times (when high heels were popular with both men and women) might have put it, “caveat emptor”.

Shoes: Pleasure and Pain runs through March 12, 2017 at the Peabody Essex Museum, 161 Essex St., Salem. For more information, visit pem.org.