Theaster Gates

“In the beginning was clay. Clay was without form,” he declares in his 2021 film A Clay Sermon. Making pots is important as a religious and social experience, as well as a creative one; Gates’ identity is bound up with making, researching and teaching about ceramics and its history. “We love the wheel,” he sings as he throws a pot while his group the Black Monks improvise snatches of jazz and gospel. The film was made at the Archie Bray Foundation for Ceramic Arts, a former brick factory in Montana where, earlier this year, Gates was artist-in-residence. The process – from digging the clay to working on the wheel and firing the pot – is filmed as though it were an alchemical ritual; pacing round the derelict premises in his long dark coat, the artist resembles a priest.

An introduction to the work of some of the foremost Black visual artists working today, inspired by the late David Driskell's landmark 1976 exhibition, "Two Centuries of Black American Art."

A cinematic omnibus rooted in New Orleans, challenging the idea of black cinema as a "wave" or "movement in time," proposing instead a continuous thread of achievement.

팝아트 계열의 자유구상화가로서 지하철 등의 지저분한 낙서를 예술 차원으로 승화시켰다는 평가를 받는 전설적인 아티스트, 장 미셸 바스키아. 영화는 그 동안 한 번도 인터뷰에 응하지 않았던 바스키아의 두 여동생들과의 인터뷰를 통해 천재적이면서도 비극적으로 짧게 끝난 바스키아의 삶을 이야기한다. 그의 가장 가까웠던 친구, 연인, 동료 예술가들은 그가 항상 직면해야만 했던 인종차별과 마약, 그리고 돈의 유혹에 대해 밝힌다. 또한 수많은 숨은 의미와 저항정신의 시각적 표현이었던 그의 예술작품 또한 중요하게 다루어진다.

High-definition video art from Theaster Gates