Film and Media

It’s Friday night. A Netflix subscriber is sitting on their couch, scrolling through an endless feed of entertainment options. They pass by the next episode of Stranger Things, skip over the Marvel movies, shrug at Friday Night Lights. Finally, they land on the latest environmental documentary film release. They grab their blanket and popcorn and eagerly press play.

Art is not magic; most artists are not all that different from other people. However, many of them developed a skill or asset that most of us haven’t: a fascination for the undercurrent in our society, in our social encounters, in our practices, in our organizations.
 —  Jaap Warmenhoven, Stanford Social Innovation Review

On June 2, 2015, Kenny Leon presented the following as a keynote address at the Grantmakers in the Arts Racial Equity Forum in Atlanta, Georgia.

California is often characterized as a state in which the north and south differ politically and culturally, but differences between its coast and inland areas may be even more profound. The current year’s drought exacerbates the coast-versus-valleys tension as major cities vie with the state’s agricultural center for water. Intending “to start a new conversation between the two parts of California that are at best disconnected, and often at odds,” in 2010, photographer and writer Lisa Hamilton secured a grant from the Creative Work Fund to collaborate with Roots of Change.

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   Sandy versus NYC (11Mb)

The cameraman eases his viewers into the glacial wild of Iceland as we breathe to collect ourselves from severe storm news coverage. Suddenly we are in freezing water wading barefoot between chunks of floating ice with the photographer James Balog. He must capture this hunk of ice transfused with light, as an ocean wave is giving it a spectacular spraying.

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   Developing Artist-Driven Spaces in Marginalized Communities (3.9 Mb)

“AIDS? Wasn’t that an art movement in the eighties?” quipped the young Chelsea gallerist, straining for just the right mix of irony and hipness. Sensing that her question missed the mark, the young woman then quickly offered, “Well, that’s a joke I often hear from artist friends when they talk about AIDS.” Her remarks betrayed a too-often-repeated distancing strategy from the reality of HIV/AIDS and the underlying complexity that the epidemic poses for artists today. On one hand, such comments hint at the wholesale incorporation of AIDS-themed art practice into the academy/marketplace.

I’m a film teacher. I’m tech savvy. I show my students a lot of video clips. I know how to rock a DVD remote better than anybody. Yet, at a recent teaching job, there was no DVD player in the classroom. I had to show video clips off my Mac. I know my Mac inside and out, backward and forward, yet I rarely watch DVDs on it. I most certainly do not rock the DVD player application. When showing clips there are moments when I need to scan through a scene, slow shots down, or move frame by frame. With the laptop, I do this quite ineptly.