In the latest edition of Humanitas, a column focused on the arts and humanities at Yale, an Oscar-winning filmmaker will visit Yale in May, the Schwarzman Center unveils a curated virtual collection of themed student artworks, and the celebrated photographs of Yale School of Art professor emeritus Tod Papageorge are the subject of a contemporary art museum exhibition this summer.
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“Parasite” director coming to Yale for public events
Academy Award-winning filmmaker Bong Joon Ho comes to Yale on May 5 for a conversation with Gregory Crewdson, a professor and the director of graduate studies in photography at the Yale School of Art, on the art of filmmaking.
On May 6, Yale students and the wider community will have an opportunity to be in dialogue with Bong at a “Schwarzman Session” sponsored by Yale’s Schwarzman Center.
Bong Joon Ho
A South Korean writer and director, Bong has developed a global following. His 2019 film “Parasite” was the first South Korean film to win an Academy Award (it won four in all, including Best Picture and Best Director). His film style, as described by one reviewer, is to “deploy genre conventions while subverting them in audacious and ingenious ways.”
“I’m a long-time admirer of Bong Joon Ho’s work,” said Crewdson. “I’m looking forward to a conversation about his creative and artistic process as a filmmaker.”
As a runup to the event with Crewdson, Marc Francis, manager of film programming at Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, organized a film retrospective of Bong’s work, in collaboration with the Council on East Asian Studies, Yale Film Society, Whitney Humanities Center, School of Art, and Film and Media Studies.
The series opened in March with a screening of Bong’s 2006 monster film “The Host,” followed by “Memories of Murder,” a crime thriller released in 2003. A screening of the dark comedy “Parasite,” was introduced by Aaron Gerow, the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures and Film and Media Studies. Most recently, the retrospective showed Bong’s latest film, “Mickey 17,” a sci-fi black comedy that was released earlier this year.
The series will conclude on May 5 with a screening of the 2009 neo-noir thriller “Mother” on 35 mm film — a selection requested by Bong himself. That showing takes place at 1 p.m. in Room L02 of the Humanities Quadrangle at 320 York St. The conversation with Bong begins at 5 p.m. in the same location. The talk is free and open to the public; seats are first-come-first-serve. A simulcast of the conversation will also air in L01.
The Schwarzman Session with Bong will also be at the Humanities Quadrangle, from 12:30 to 2, in Room 276. That event is also free and open to the public, but registration is required.
Art for an uncertain future
The Schwarzman Center’s latest virtual Storyboard exhibition, titled “over time” and now live online, features the creative responses of 10 Yale students to a prompt about understanding and adapting to the future.
Storyboard exhibitions are overseen by Maurice L. Harris, Schwarzman’s director of marketing and communications, and curated by the Schwarzman’s creative marketing fellow. This year’s curator was Airi Gavan, a second-year student at the Yale School of the Environment.
The prompt for this exhibition, the fourth in the series, went out to the Yale community last fall: “How do you listen to your environment, and to yourself, to discern what the future might hold? How do you let go of old paradigms to adapt to the future as it emerges?” Inspiration for the prompt came from Harris’ Yale Residential College seminar, “Artmaking & Leadership: An Integrative Approach,” which allows students to develop artistic skills while examining artists’ role in leading positive social change.
Untitled
That invitation resulted in 22 submissions of poetry, music, video, dance and painting — the most ever, Harris said — 10 of which were included in the exhibition.
These include a short dance video submitted by Xinning Shao, a junior majoring in cognitive science and comparative literature, that conveys the self-knowledge she has obtained through repeated acts of letting go. Katelyn Wang, a sophomore majoring in political science and economics, created an acrylic on canvas piece inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous quote: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Cayce Morrison, a first-year student at the Yale School of the Environment, contributed the poem “Waiting for the Tide,” associating the riding of ocean waves with putting “faith in fluid uncertainty.”
During remarks at the exhibition’s opening on April 22, Harris praised the students for their efforts, noting that “art is the most powerful tool we have to understand and express ourselves, our varied cultural contexts and the worlds we inhabit, which means our work as artists is made ever more important as we face an uncertain future in an increasingly complex world.”
L.A.’s beaches in black and white
The work of Tod Papageorge, the famed American photographer and Yale School of Art professor emeritus, is the subject of a new exhibition opening on June 26 at MoCA CT, a contemporary art museum in Westport, Connecticut. The exhibition is being organized by the School of Art’s Lisa Kereszi, a senior critic and the assistant director of graduate studies in photography, as well as a member of the museum’s arts advisory committee.
Papageorge directed graduate studies in photography at Yale from 1979 to 2013. His professional work as a photographer began in the 1960s on the streets of New York City and went on to include photographic studies of people in Central Park, revelers at Studio 54, summer tourists at the Acropolis, and sunbathers on the beaches of Los Angeles. He has been the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship-Grants. His photographic work has been widely exhibited and is represented in more than 30 major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and San Francisco, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
The Westport exhibition will feature a selection of black and white prints of his L.A. beach photos, works that have never been exhibited on the East Coast, Kereszi said. The photographs were made with a detailed medium-format film camera between 1975 and 1988.
“In these images, there are myriad activities going on all at once, with the photographer there to witness and point to moments of serendipity and visual rhyming, and gather the chaos of joyful public recreation and play into something beautiful and poetic,” Kereszi said.
The show will also include five vintage silver gelatin prints from his Central Park series, which were collected in the book “Passing through Eden” in 2007.
Papageorge was known as a key mentor to his students in the MFA photography program at Yale, and 41 of those students went on to win Guggenheim Fellowships themselves, Kereszi said. An adjacent exhibition at MoCA CT will feature works from many of those accomplished photographers, including Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Katy Grannan, An-My Lê, and Dawoud Bey, offering a testament to the major effect Papageorge has had on the photography world.
Papageorge himself will give a gallery talk on September 18 at 6 p.m. He will also participate in a panel discussion with alumni from the photography program, moderated by Kereszi, on October 4 at 4 p.m.
The exhibition runs through mid-October.
Magnum America
Charlie Samuya Veric ’11 Ph.D., Yolanda Cuomo, Alexandra Juhasz, Peter van Agtmael ’03, Laura Wexler, and Matthew Jacobson
Light filtering through the marble wall panels of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library created a dramatic backdrop for an April 17 panel discussion celebrating the publication of “Magnum America: The United States” (Thames & Hudson). The book, a collection of more than 600 photos taken by the storied Magnum agency photographers from World War II to present day, was co-edited by photographer Peter van Agtmael ’03 and Laura Wexler, the Charles H. Farnam Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and of American Studies in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In addition to Agtmael and Wexler, panelists included the book’s designer, Yolanda Cuomo, and contributing writers Matthew Jacobson, Sterling Professor of History; Charlie Samuya Veric ’11 Ph.D., a poet and professor at Ateneo de Manila University; and Alexandra Juhasz, Distinguished Professor of Film at the City University of New York.
