In collaboration with Performa09, the Vera List Center and Parsons The New School for Design present the American premiere of Museum Futures: Distributed, Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska’s new film on the power of cultural institutions. Set in 2058, the film offers a provocative vision of a hyper-globalized art world featuring the future director of the future Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden, which commissioned the piece on occasion of its 50th anniversary in 2008.

Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska have been collaborating since 1995. They have worked with museums, banks, galleries, archives, auction houses, schools, and department stores. They have investigated the smuggling of goods across the Polish-Ukrainian border, documented the lost property recovered in the London transport system in a single day, and impersonated a famous art dealer. Their different projects have consistently engaged with the relationship between art and institutions coupled with other domains such as politics, society and economics.

After the 30 minute-screening, the respondents Jamer Hunt and Christiane Paul offer an analysis of the film from their respective fields, in a joint conversation with Marysia Lewandowska.

Presented by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics in collaboration with Performa09 and Parsons’ Streaming Culture / Art & Politics series, and on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2009-2010 program theme “Speculating on Change.”

Where do we stand on issues of race and representation? Can today’s racial imagination be reconciled with that of hardly a century ago, when D.W. Griffith’s notorious film, The Birth of a Nation, became the first blockbuster in American film? The Vera List Center presents a screening and colloquium around Griffith’s notorious white supremacist manifesto, reconsidered in the context of the Obama call for change.

The speakers hail from different backgrounds including history, film, music, journalism, and photography. Presenting analyses of some of the most recent scholarship on slavery and racism, particularly as manifested during the conception, production and distribution of The Birth of a Nation, they examine the film’s legacy and reverberations today.

PROGRAM

Screening I – 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
D.W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation, 1915, silent, 180 minutes
Original sound score and live accompaniment by Michael Stein (Graduate of The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music), introduced by faculty member Sonny Kompanek

Colloquium – 2:00 to 4:00 p.m.
Introduction
Bill Gaskins
Photographer, essayist and Professor of Photography and Art History, Parsons The New School for Design

Presentations
Douglas A. Blackmon
Atlanta Bureau Chief, The Wall Street Journal, Social historian of the Civil War, and Pulitzer-prize winning author of Slavery by Another Name

David W. Blight
Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, Yale University; author of Race and Reunion and numerous other studies and books

Michelle Materre
Assistant Professor, Media Studies and Film, The New School for General Studies

Miriam J. Petty
Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies, Rutgers University-Newark

Michele Wallace
Professor of English, City University of New York

Roundtable – 4:00 to 5:00 p.m.
All participants, moderated by Margo Jefferson
Associate Professor of Writing, Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts

Screening II – 5:30 to 7:00 p.m.
DJ Spooky, Rebirth of a Nation, 2008, color, sound, 90 minutes
Followed by Q & A with filmmaker Paul D. Miller (a k a DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid)

Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2009/2010 program theme “Speculating on Change,” with support of The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music and The Andy Warhol Foundation of the Visual Arts.