How would you imagine an artist colony?
Artist Nao Bustamante digs deep into her archive to stitch together a feature length film that was all but lost since 1999. That year, Nao was a participant at Skowhegan. As a young filmmaker guided by faculty, including iconic filmmaker John Waters, she collaborated with her community to create a meta story of artists at an art colony called “SKOWHEGAN.” This work became the blueprint for a string of films that led Nao towards collaborative filmmaking. She went on to develop interdisciplinary film-formances, “Silver & Gold” presented at Sundance International Film Festival and her 360º mini-series, “The Wooden People”, which premiered at REDCAT. Returning to the material at Skowhegan two decades later, Nao presents a screening guided by this initial question (“how would you imagine an artist colony?”) and the ongoing process of participating in an artist community through memory.
After the screening, Nao has organized an open gathering alongside some fellow participants from that year to mutually expand their muscular memories. Together, we will talk about the experience of being at the School (and Nao’s fictional colony) not as something that happened in the past or in a specific location in Maine, but as an ongoing exercise of imagination in the present.
Click here to RSVP. This event is free and open to all.
Nao Bustamante is a legendary artist, born in the Central Valley of California, who now resides in Los Angeles. Bustamante’s precarious work encompasses performance art, video installation, filmmaking, sculpture, painting and writing. She has exhibited, among other locales, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the NY MoMA, Sundance International Film Festival, Outfest International Film Festival, The Park Avenue Armory and El Museo del Barrio. Bustamante has influenced a generation of artists. The late scholar Jose E. Muñoz wrote, “I want to call attention to the ways in which Bustamante's performance practice engages and re-imagines what has been a history of violence, degradation, and compulsory performance. For a female artist of color to engage this field is not only historically loaded, but it is also extremely vulnerable making.”
Photo Credit: film still from Nao Bustamante's "SKOWHEGAN."