Art on Film

Put the art world in focus with Art on Film at SAM. Join us for award-winning documentaries, short films, and biopics that highlight some of our favorite artists, reveal untold histories, and explore what it takes to make it as an artist today. Each screening will include opportunities for discussion and connection among audience members.

 

Meet in the Sarasota High School Alumni Auditorium.

Sarasota High School Alumni Auditorium

Reserve your Spot

Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts (2018)

Directed by Jeffrey Wolf
Running Time: 76 minutes

Tuesday, June 24, 2025

2 –4 pm

$5 for Members 
$10 Not-Yet Members (includes Museum admission)

This illuminating documentary explores the life of a unique American artist, a man with a remarkable and unlikely biography. Bill Traylor was born into slavery in 1853 on a cotton plantation in rural Alabama. After the Civil War, Traylor continued to farm the land as a sharecropper until the late 1920s. Aging and alone, he moved to Montgomery and worked odd jobs in the thriving segregated black neighborhood. A decade later, in his late 80s, Traylor became homeless and started to draw and paint, both memories from plantation days and scenes of a radically changing urban culture.

 

Having witnessed profound social and political change during a life spanning slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, and the Great Migration, Traylor devised his own visual language to translate an oral culture into something original, powerful, and culturally rooted. He made well over a thousand drawings and paintings between 1939-1942. This colorful, strikingly modernist work eventually led him to be recognized as one of America’s greatest self-taught artists and the subject of a Smithsonian retrospective.

 

Using historical and cultural context, Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts brings the spirit and mystery of Traylor’s incomparable art to life. Making dramatic and surprising use of tap dance and evocative period music, the film balances archival photographs and footage, insightful perspectives from his descendants, and Traylor’s striking drawings and paintings to reveal one of America’s most prominent artists to a wide audience.

Museum Town (2019)

Directed by Jennifer Trainer
Running Time: 76 minutes

Thursday, July 24, 2025

2 –4 pm

$5 for Members 
$10 Not-Yet Members (includes Museum admission)

Directed by Jennifer Trainer, a former journalist and one of MASS MoCA’s original builders, and narrated by Academy Award® winner Meryl Streep, the documentary tells the story of an unconventional museum, the small town of North Adams, MA it calls home, and the great risk, hope, and power of art to transform a desolate post-industrial city.

 

Today, MASS MoCA is the largest museum for contemporary art in the world—but just three decades ago, its vast brick buildings were the abandoned relics of a shuttered factory. This documentary tells how such a wildly improbable transformation came to be. Museum Town also looks at the artistic process itself—not only how museums work but how artists create, tracking celebrated artist Nick Cave as he builds the monumental installation “Until,” a reflection on gun violence, race, and the American Dream.

 

In addition to Nick Cave, the documentary features appearances by artists James Turrell, Laurie Anderson and David Byrne, with original music and soundtrack by John Stirratt of Wilco, featuring songs by Talking Heads, Sharon Jones, Big Thief, Wilco, Moses Sumney among others.

 

Eva Hesse (2016)

Directed by Marcie Begleiter
Running Time: 108 minutes

Thursday, August 28, 2025

2 –4 pm

$5 for Members 
$10 Not-Yet Members (includes Museum admission)

Eva Hesse (1936-1970) is one of America’s foremost postwar artists.

Her pioneering sculptures, using latex, fiberglass, and plastics, helped establish the post-minimalist movement. Dying of a brain tumor at age 34, she had a mere decade-long career that, despite its brevity, is dense with complex, intriguing works that defy easy categorization. EVA HESSE, the first feature-length appreciation of her life and work, makes superb use of the artist’s voluminous journals, her correspondence with close friend and mentor Sol LeWitt, and contemporary as well as archival interviews with fellow artists (among them, Richard Serra, Robert Mangold, Dan Graham) who recall her passionate, ambitious, tenacious personality. Art critic Arthur Danto has written that her work is: “full of life, of eros, even of comedy… Each piece vibrates with originalit and mischief.” The documentary captures these qualities, but also the psychic struggles of an artist who, in the downtown New York art scene of the 1960s, was one of the few women to make work that was taken seriously in a field dominated by male pop artists and minimalists.

 

Ballets Russes (2005)

Directed by Dan Geller, Dayna Goldfine
Running Time: 118 minutes

Thursday, September 25, 2025

2 –4 pm

$5 for Members 
$10 Not-Yet Members (includes Museum admission)

Unearthing a treasure trove of archival footage, filmmakers Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine have fashioned a dazzlingly entrancing ode to the revolutionary twentieth-century dance troupe known as the Ballets Russes. What began as a group of Russian refugees who never danced in Russia became not one but two rival dance troupes who fought the infamous “ballet battles” that consumed London society before World War II.

 

BALLETS RUSSES maps the company’s Diaghilev-era beginnings in turn-of-the-century Paris–when artists such as Nijinsky, Balanchine, Picasso, Miró, Matisse, and Stravinsky united in an unparalleled collaboration–to its halcyon days of the 1930s and ’40s, when the Ballets Russes toured America, astonishing audiences schooled in vaudeville with artistry never before seen, to its demise in the 1950s and ’60s when rising costs, rocketing egos, outside competition, and internal mismanagement ultimately brought this revered company to its knees.

 

Directed with consummate invention and infused with juicy anecdotal interviews from many of the company’s glamorous stars, BALLETS RUSSES treats modern audiences to a rare glimpse of the singularly remarkable merger of Russian, American, European, and Latin American dancers, choreographers, composers, and designers that transformed the face of ballet for generations to come. — Sundance Film Festival, 2005

Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable (2018)

Directed by Sasha Waters Freyer
Running Time: 91 minutes

Thursday, October 30, 2025

2 –4 pm

$5 for Members 
$10 Not-Yet Members (includes Museum admission)

Described as a “poet”, an “athlete”, or a “philosopher” of photography, Garry Winogrand harnessed the serendipity of the streets to capture the American 1960s and ’70s. His Leica M4 snapped spontaneous images of everyday people, from the Mad Med era of New York to the early years of the Women’s Movement to post-Golden Age Hollywood, all while observing themes of cultural upheaval, political disillusionment, intimacy and alienation. Once derided by the critics, Winogrand’s “snapshot aesthetic” is now the universal language of contemporary image making. Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable is the first cinematic treatment of Winogrand’s work, including selections from the thousands of rolls of film still undeveloped upon his unexpected death in 1984. Interviews with Tod Papageorge, Matthew Weiner and more attest to Winogrand’s indisputable influence, both as artist and chronicler of culture, while archived conversations with Jay Maisel highlight the gruff, streetwise perspective of “a city hick from the Bronx.” In the tradition of Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Winogrand’s candid, psychological style transports us to a bygone world, one where image lacked the editing and control possible today.

Men At Lunch (2012)

Directed by Seán Ó Cualáin
Running Time: 75 minutes

Thursday, November 20, 2025

2 –4 pm

$5 for Members 
$10 Not-Yet Members (includes Museum admission)

Men at Lunch is the untold story of New York’s greatest legend and one of the most iconic images of the 20th century – Lunch atop a Skyscraper – taken on the 69th floor of the Rockefeller Building in the autumn of 1932.

 

New York City, 1932. The world is in the throes of the Great Depression, the previous decade’s boom of Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants has led to unprecedented urban expansion, and in the midst of an unseasonably warm autumn, steelworkers risk life and limb building skyscrapers high above the streets of Manhattan.

 

In Men at Lunch, director Seán Ó Cualáin tells the story of Lunch atop a Skyscraper, the iconic photograph taken during the construction of the GE Building that depicts eleven workmen taking their lunch break while casually perched along a steel girder – boots dangling 850 feet above the sidewalk of 41st Street, Central Park and the misty Manhattan skyline stretching out behind them. The definitive counterpoint of the epic and the mundane a symbol of the indomitable working man.

 

Part homage, part investigation, Men at Lunch is the revealing tale of an American icon, an unprecedented race to the sky and the immigrant workers that built New York as we know it today.

 

For 80 years, the identity of the eleven men and the photographer that immortalized them remained a mystery: their stories, lost in time, subsumed by the fame of the image itself.

 

But then, at the start of the 21st century, the photograph finally began to give up some of its secrets.

Walking on Water (2019) Movie Poster

Walking on Water (2019)

Directed by Andrey Paounov
Running Time: 100 minutes

Tuesday, January 27, 2026

2 –4 pm

$5 for Members 
$10 Not-Yet Members (includes Museum admission)

Ten years after the passing of his wife and creative partner, Jeanne-Claude, Christo sets out to realize The Floating Piers, a project they conceived together many years before. Boasting uncensored access to the artist and his team, Walking on Water is an unprecedented look at Christo’s process, from the inception through to the completion of his latest large-scale art installation, a dahlia-yellow walkway atop Italy’s Lake Iseo that was eventually experienced by over 1.2 million people. The film takes the viewer on an intimate journey into Christo’s world amid mounting madness – from complex dealings between art and state politics to engineering challenges, logistical nightmares, and the sheer force of mother nature. Captured through breathtaking aerial views and fly on the wall camerawork, we watch the artist’s vision unfold, and get to know the man chasing it.

Mau (2021) movie poster

Mau (2021)

Directed by Jono Bergmann and Benji Bergmann
Running Time: 78 minutes

Tuesday, February 24, 2026

2 –4 pm

$5 for Members 
$10 Not-Yet Members (includes Museum admission)

MAU is the first-ever, feature-length documentary about the design visionary Bruce Mau. The film explores his unlikely creative journey and ever-optimistic push to tackle the world’s biggest problems with design. Over the span of his career, this creative dark horse has completed the transformation from world-class graphic designer to designer of the world. He has gone from advising global brands like Coca-Cola and Disney to rethinking a 1000-year plan for Mecca, Islam’s holiest site. And from working with the greatest living architects (Rem Koolhaas & Frank Gehry) on books and museums to rebranding nations such as Guatemala and Denmark. Bruce Mau is a pioneer of transformation design and the belief that design can be used to create positive change in our world.

Beuys (2018) movie poster

Beuys (2018)

Directed by Andres Veiel
Running Time: 107 minutes

Thursday, March 26, 2026

2 –4 pm

$5 for Members 
$10 Not-Yet Members (includes Museum admission)

Thirty years after his death, Joseph Beuys still feels like a visionary and is widely considered one of the most influential artists of his generation. Known for his contributions to the Fluxus movement and his work across diverse media — from happening and performance to sculpture, installation, and graphic art — Beuys’ expanded concept of the role of the artist places him in the middle of socially relevant discourses on media, community, and capitalism. Using previously untapped visual and audio sources, director Andres Veiel has created a one-of-a-kind chronicle: Beuys is not a portrait in the traditional sense, but an intimate and in-depth look at a human being, his art and ideas, and the way they have impacted the world.

MC Escher (2020)

Directed by Robin Lutz
Running Time: 83 minutes

Thursday, April 23, 2026

2 –4 pm

$5 for Members 
$10 Not-Yet Members (includes Museum admission)

M.C. Escher: Journey To Infinity is the story of world famous Dutch graphic artist M.C Escher (1898-1972). Equal parts history, psychology, and psychedelia, Robin Lutz’s entertaining, eye-opening portrait gives us the man through his own words and images: diary musings, excerpts from lectures, correspondence and more are voiced by British actor Stephen Fry, while Escher’s woodcuts, lithographs, and other print works appear in both original and playfully altered form. Two of his sons, George (92) and Jan (80), reminisce about their parents while musician Graham Nash (Crosby, Stills & Nash) talks about Escher’s rediscovery in the 1970s. The film looks at Escher’s legacy: one can see tributes to his work in movies, in fiction, on posters, on tattoos, and elsewhere throughout our culture; indeed, few fine artists of the 20th century can lay claim to such popular appeal.

Hieronymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil (2016) Movie Poster

Hieronymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil (2016)

Directed by Pieter van Huystee
Running Time: 89 minutes

Thursday, May 28, 2026

2 –4 pm

$5 for Members 
$10 Not-Yet Members (includes Museum admission)

In 2016, the Noordbrabants Museum in the Dutch city of Den Bosch held a special exhibition devoted to the work of Hieronymus Bosch, who died 500 years ago. This late-medieval artist lived his entire life in the city, causing uproar with his fantastical and utterly unique paintings in which hell and the devil always played a prominent role. In preparation for the exhibition, a team of Dutch art historians crisscrosses the globe to unravel the secrets of his art. They use special infrared cameras to examine the sketches beneath the paint, in the hope of discovering more about the artist’s intentions. They also attempt to establish which of the paintings can be attributed with certainty to Bosch himself, and which to his pupils or followers. The experts shuttle between Den Bosch, Madrid and Venice, cutting their way through the art world’s tangle of red tape, in a battle against the obstacle of countless egos and conflicting interests. Not every museum is prepared to allow access to their precious art works.

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