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Film and Conversation with Linda Goode Bryant and Laura Poitras

Saturday, May 13, 2023, 2 pm, Dia Beacon

This program is part of Dia Beacon's 20th Anniversary Community Day. Admission to the museum and all activities is free. Visit here to reserve tickets.

Artist Linda Goode Bryant and filmmaker Laura Poitras will present footage of their 2003 trip to Beacon, New York, to explore an empty Nabisco box printing factory that would later become Dia Beacon. After the screening, they will discuss their collaborations over the years in a conversation moderated by Donna De Salvo, senior adjunct curator. 

The event will be held in the Learning Lab on the museum’s lower level.

Linda Goode Bryant is an artist and filmmaker, and the founder and president of Project EATS, a living installation transforming vacant lots and rooftops into neighborhood-based farms, with the goals of catalyzing creativity and cultivating greater food sovereignty across New York City. She also founded Just Above Midtown gallery, a laboratory that, from 1974 to 1986, foregrounded the work of African-American artists. She won a Peabody Award for the film Flag Wars (2003) and, in 2020, received an Anonymous Was a Woman Award and a United States Artists Berresford Prize. She is a former Guggenheim Fellow.

In 2021, Bryant collaborated with architect Liz Diller to create the installation Are We Really That Different for the exhibition Social Works at Gagosian Gallery, New York. In 2022, she was lead faculty for the RAW Académie Session 9 and related exhibition, in collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Philadelphia. She collaborated with curator Thomas J. Lax and curatorial assistant Lilia Rocio Taboada in organizing the exhibition Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces (2022–23) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Laura Poitras is a filmmaker and journalist. Her most recent film, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022), premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Golden Lion for best film, only the second documentary to win the top prize. The film was also nominated for an Academy Award. Her film CITIZENFOUR (2014) won an Academy Award for best documentary and her journalism exposing the U.S. National Security Agency’s global mass surveillance programs was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for public service. The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, commissioned her first solo exhibition, Astro Noise (2016), which consisted of film and other elements that created an immersive environment. The exhibition was curated by Jay Sanders and commissioned under the leadership of Donna De Salvo, then chief curator and deputy director for programs at the Whitney.

In response to Poitras’s post-9/11 reporting, the U.S. government placed her on a terrorist watchlist and interrogated her dozens of times at the U.S. border. In 2015, she successfully sued the government and obtained her classified FBI files. The hundreds of heavily redacted documents reveal that the FBI conducted physical and digital surveillance of her, sent FBI agents to her film screenings, subpoenaed her private communications, and conducted a classified counterintelligence investigation. Despite her watchlist status, Poitras has received recognition for her work, including a MacArthur Fellowship.

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