Media Contact
Alex Capriotti, 213-232-6236, acapriotti@thebroad.org
The Broad Un-Private Collection: Kara Walker and Ava Duvernay
LOS ANGELES, Oct. 1, 2014—The ninth talk in the highly successful The Broad Un-Private Collection series pairs one of the most important artists of our time, Kara Walker, with 2012 Sundance Best Director Ava DuVernay. Taking place on Oct. 11 at 2 p.m. at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills, the sold-out talk will be streamed live online at thebroad.org, making the conversation accessible to a wide audience.
Both speakers are artists reaching new heights of recognition and accomplishment in their careers. Kara Walker’s unprecedented public art installation A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby welcomed over 130,000 visitors in two months this past spring at the Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn, N.Y. Ava DuVernay will release her much-anticipated feature film Selma this December. The dialogue will be an opportunity to gain insight into each artist’s creative process and their approach to subject matter. Walker and DuVernay use historical narratives as well as fictionalized histories to tell important and often challenging stories from the perspective of African-American women.
The Broad collections have acquired the work of Kara Walker since early in the artist’s career. The collections contain eight works by Walker, including 26 drawings from the series Negress Notes (1996), cut-paper silhouette works African’t (1996) and Danse de la Nubienne Nouveaux (1998), and charcoal drawing Pastorale (2010). The Broad’s collection of artwork by Kara Walker is the largest on the West Cost and is among the deepest holdings of the artist’s work in the world. A selection of Walker’s intense, large-scale works will be on view when
The Broad museum opens in downtown L.A. in 2015.
WHEN: Saturday, October 11, 2014 2 p.m. PT
WHERE: Writers Guild Theater
135 South Doheny Drive
Beverly Hills, CA 90211
WHO: Kara Walker is best known for her candid investigation of race, gender, sexuality and violence through silhouetted figures that have appeared in numerous exhibitions worldwide. The New York-based artist was born in
Stockton, Calif., in 1969 and raised in Atlanta, Ga. from the age of 13. She is the recipient of many awards, notably the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award in 1997 and the United States
Artists Eileen Harris Norton Fellowship in 2008. In addition to the Broad collections, Walker’s work can be found in numerous museums and public collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Tate Gallery, London; the Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo (MAXXI), Rome; and Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt.
Walker’s major survey exhibition, Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, was organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis where it premiered in 2007 before traveling to ARC/ Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth. Recent solo exhibitions have been presented at the Art Institute of Chicago; Camden Arts Centre, London; and the Metropolitan Arts Center (MAC), Belfast. In spring 2014, Walker’s first large scale public project, a monumental installation entitled A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, was on view at the abandoned Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn, N.Y. Commissioned and presented by Creative Time, the project – a massive sugar covered sphinx-like sculpture – responded to and reflected on the troubled history of sugar.
Ava DuVernay
Ava DuVernay is a writer, producer, director and distributor of independent film. Winner of the Best Director Award at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, DuVernay was honored with the 2013 John Cassavetes Independent Spirit Award and the Tribeca Film Institute 2013 Affinity Award for her second feature film Middle of Nowhere. Currently, she is in post-production on the upcoming feature film Selma, which chronicles the historic 1965 voting rights campaign led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and will be released by Paramount in December.
DuVernay is directing the film, with Oprah Winfrey and Brad Pitt’s Academy Award-winning company Plan B serving as producers. DuVernay made her directorial debut with the critically-acclaimed 2008 hip-hop documentary This is the Life. Winner of audience awards in Toronto, Los Angeles and Seattle, the film debuted on Showtime in 2009. In 2010, she wrote, produced and directed her first narrative feature, the family drama I Will Follow starring Salli Richardson-Whitfield which released theatrically in 2011. DuVernay has directed the network documentaries Venus Vs. for ESPN and My Mic Sounds Nice for BET, and an episode of ABC top-rated drama series Scandal, as well as
acclaimed fashion and beauty films for Prada and Fashion Fair.
Based in Los Angeles and a graduate of UCLA, DuVernay is the founder of AFFRM, the African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, as well as the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. She is also board member for both Film Independent and the Sundance Institute.
WATCH: View a live video stream of the talk starting at 2 p.m. PT on Saturday, October 11, at www.thebroad.org.
INTERACT: Walker and DuVernay will answer questions submitted through Twitter during the program. Use #WalkerDuVernay while watching the livestream to engage in the online conversation and submit questions.
ATTEND: The conversation sold out within hours of tickets going on sale. A standby line will be available onsite the day of the event starting at 12 p.m. Standby line does not guarantee entrance. Available tickets will be sold to the standby line on a first come, first served basis.
About The Broad
The Broad is a new contemporary art museum being built by philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. The museum, which is designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, will open in 2015. The museum will be home to the nearly 2,000 works of art in The Broad Art Foundation and the Broads’ personal collections, which are among the most prominent holdings of postwar and contemporary art worldwide. With its innovative “veil-and-vault” concept, the 120,000-square-foot, $140-million building will feature two floors of gallery space to showcase
The Broad’s comprehensive collections and will be the headquarters of The Broad Art Foundation’s worldwide lending library. For more information on The Broad, The Broad Un-Private Collection series and to sign up for updates, please visit www.thebroad.org.
About The Broad Un-Private Collection Series
The Broad Un-Private Collection is an ongoing series of public programs The Broad started in September 2013 to introduce audiences to the museum’s 2,000-work contemporary art collection by showcasing stories behind the collections, the collectors and the artists in the months leading up to the 2015 opening of The Broad museum.
Since launching the program, The Broad has brought together a variety of artists whose works are in the Broad collections in conversation with cultural leaders including Mark Bradford with Katy Siegel, Shirin Neshat with Christy MacLear, Jeff Koons with John Waters, Takashi Murakami with Pico Iyer, Eric Fischl with Steve Martin and John Currin with James Cuno. Talks are held at venues throughout Los Angeles, making the programming available to audiences across the city. All talks are livestreamed and full videos of past talks are available online. The Broad Un-Private Collection series is one part of the Broad collections’ 30-year mission to make contemporary art accessible to the public.
# # #