Latest news with #PérezArtMuseum
Axios
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Axios
Third Horizon Film Festival pushes boundaries with Caribbean stories
For Jonathan Ali, the Third Horizon Film Festival is a platform — one that elevates "cutting-edge Caribbean cinema" and showcases the region, its politics and its diaspora. Why it matters: Since its inaugural year in 2016, Ali, the event's director of programming, said the festival has built a reputation for featuring works that push boundaries and wouldn't otherwise be shown in Miami. Driving the news: The festival's eighth edition begins Thursday night and runs through the weekend, with multiple daily screenings at the Koubek Center. The event's opening film, screening Thursday night at the Pérez Art Museum Miami and followed by an opening party, is "Koutkekout (At All Kosts)," a documentary from Haiti by director Joseph Hill. State of cinema: This year's festival is built around a retrospective of restored films, Ali explained, comprising four films that center themes of labor and workers' rights. "You Don't Get Freedom, You Take Freedom: Caribbean Activist Cinema 1978–1985," includes four films: three documentaries, featuring stories from Haiti, Jamaica and Suriname, and a fiction feature. What they're saying:"What they all have in common, in particular the three documentaries, is that they focus on the struggle of workers' rights, labor organizing and people's struggles against often-oppressive capitalistic systems of labor and work," Ali said. The fourth film, "West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty (1979)," is part musical, part theatre, and examines nearly 400 years of colonialism in the Caribbean. That film will close out the festival with a Sunday night screening. In curating this year's lineup, the festival aimed to use cinema as a "socially and politically disruptive tool," though the event itself is not tied to any particular political moment, Ali said. "For us, as Caribbean and diaspora artists and curators, we have always believed in and championed the political possibility of art," whether that's sparking conversation or the imagination, he said. The region's "history of colonialism, exploitation and a longstanding process of resistance and resilience" is "reflected in the films we show and the art we platform," he added. What we're watching: This year's lineup also includes new and recent films, mostly documentaries, from different countries, free-to-attend panels with filmmakers and events around the city. Plus, this year's festival includes "something we've never really done before," said Ali: A multimedia live performance with "A Freedom Struggle: Looking for Lucrecia Pérez." The live performance, by Dominican artist and filmmaker Génesis Valenzuela, examines the "challenge of investigating the colonial wound" and how it presents currently in the body. (Valenzuela will participate in a Q&A after the performance.) The intrigue: The festival's organizers deliberately keep it short and intimate. Despite it lasting just a few days, there is no counterprogramming, meaning no films overlap in screen time. "We want people to be experiencing things together in solidarity and community," Ali said.
The Guardian
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Tate Modern given Joan Mitchell work in biggest donation since 1969
Tate Modern has announced its most significant single donation in more than 50 years, a monumental triptych by the American abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell that she named after her German shepherd dog, Iva. The huge six-metre work, painted by Mitchell in 1973, was given to Britain's national art collection by the billionaire Miami real estate magnate Jorge M Pérez and his wife, Darlene. The artwork was hung in their bedroom, they told reporters on Thursday, until they were persuaded by a two-year 'conversation' with the Tate director, Maria Balshaw, to donate the work to the central London institution. 'She's a good saleswoman,' joked Pérez. Balshaw said the Mitchell triptych was the single most significant gift to the institution since Mark Rothko donated nine large murals in 1969. Its value has not been revealed, although a smaller work by Mitchell sold for $29m in 2023. Pérez described it as 'priceless'. The new work will hang next to the museum's Rothko room, where five of his murals are displayed, and Pérez said the two artists' paintings 'form an incredible partnership. They just talk to each other.' Like the art of many female artists of the period, Mitchell's work had been underestimated in her lifetime, Balshaw said, and the museum had 'missed the boat' by not acquiring more of her works – it previously owned only some prints and a smaller, late painting – when they were more affordable. 'By the time we realised the importance of the work, they were too expensive for a UK public institution to buy,' she said. 'So this [gift] has changed the British national collection permanently,' she said. 'It's such a significant rebalancing – it's not just filling a gap, it is taking us into a new representation of work of that period.' An acquisition of this scale would not be possible without 'an act of truly extraordinary generosity' by philanthropist donors, Balshaw acknowledged. About 30% of Tate's funding comes from government grants, but it is still struggling with a post-pandemic financial squeeze and recently announced job cuts in an effort to tackle its funding deficit. She had been in discussions with the philanthropist couple – who have also given donations worth more than $100m to Miami's Pérez Art Museum, now named in their honour – since they visited an installation by the Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2023, she said. 'I can tell you that the conversation about gifting this important work focused on the millions of people that will see this work here in London,' said Balshaw. 'You have given the British public and all our visitors from around the world a truly extraordinary thing, and I am deeply grateful.' Having extended their bedroom to accommodate the work, parting with it had been 'a very difficult decision in many ways', said Pérez. He added: 'We've always collected with the intent that art should be exposed to the most people that they can possibly be exposed to. 'Because I think art changes people's lives. It's changed our life for the better. It helps us understand the world better in different ways. It makes us part of the creative process that the artists go through, once you deeply get into them. So having the public feel the same thing that we feel is very important.' When asked for his interpretation of the work's connection to the painter's German shepherd, Pérez said: 'Actually, I think it's got much more connection to landscape than to a dog. These are just her expressions of a mood, a landscape.' The real estate magnate was born in Argentina to Cuban-exile parents, before moving to Miami and making his fortune developing apartment blocks. Although previously a friend of Donald Trump before he ran for the US presidency, he is a longtime Democratic party supporter and fundraiser, and has been an outspoken critic of Trump's policies, saying in December that his proposals for mass deportations risked leading to a 'police state'. A previous request by the president to help him build his Mexico border wall was similarly rebuffed, with Pérez calling it 'idiotic'. As well as the painting, the couple have also made a 'multimillion-pound' donation to endow a curatorial post at Tate dedicated to African art, and have promised to make further donations of works in their collection by African and Latin American artists. Pérez hopes the couple's gifts will inspire other wealthy individuals to make donations. 'The public sector is swamped with ever growing needs, and it all can't be solved by the government,' he said. 'People who have been very fortunate, like Darlene and I have been, have an obligation to give back to that community that is giving you so much. So we really hope that gifts like this get other people to think about giving.'
