Events Calendar

Location: TBD (Note: This event will not be held at the Stanley Museum of Art).

Join us for a special evening of film screenings and conversation with acclaimed filmmakers/artists Christopher Harris and Cameron Granger. This program is part of the Grant Wood Art Colony's 8th Biennial Symposium, Race and Regionalism: Representation in the Heartland, and is held in conjunction with the Stanley Museum of Art's exhibition, it's a fine thing.

Featured Films

• Christopher Harris

1. Distant Shores (2016, 3min)
   Christopher Harris’s Distant Shores, to take one, models a necessary imaginative leap simply by juxtaposing footage of a Chicago River cruise with testimony of a migrant’s harrowing voyage at sea. A three-minute film edited in camera; it nevertheless offers several ways of thinking about displacement. (Max Goldberg, KQED)
    
2. Dreams Under Confinement (2020, 2min)
   This powerful short film maps the intersection of surveillance technology, urban landscapes, and carceral logic onto Chicago Police Department’s chaotic scanner calls for increasingly militarized police presence during the 2020 public protests in response to the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor.
    
3. God Bless the Child, (in-progress, 15min)
   Performative artist talk: In God Bless the Child, the artist’s first autobiographical work, Harris draws directly from his infancy and experience as a foster child in St. Louis, Mo. Combining photos, records, and other materials from his personal archives with 16mm film footage he shot in Senegal, Harris situates “the carcerality of the social welfare state and child services in relation to Black childhood in the US” within the broader context of the transatlantic slave trade and the French Catholic Church’s colonization of West Africa and the Americas. His hometown of St. Louis, MO and Saint-Louis, Senegal are presented as fraternal colonized twin cities.

• Cameron Granger

1. Before I Let Go (2022, 23min 11sec)
   Five years ago the east side neighborhood of a town called Bad City was leveled by giant monsters called the Titans. A filmmaker hired by the city to document the community's recovery efforts quickly discovers how different that road to recovery can look for a city, and for its people.

Following the screenings, Harris and Granger will engage in a conversation about their work, exploring themes of memory, identity, and the representation of lived experience.