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

Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp: The Art of the Possible (2020)

Directed by Matthew Taylor
Running Time: 1 hour 26 minutes

Thursday, June 27

2 – 3:30 pm

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

Marcel Duchamp: The Art of the Possible explores the life, philosophy and impact of one of the most influential early 20th century modernists, Marcel Duchamp. The film breaks down Duchamp’s ideas and applies them to both historical events and the modernist explosion that blanketed the early 20th century. The Art of the Possible isn’t simply a biopic; rather, the film shows how Duchamp’s ideas changed the public consciousness, and our understanding of aesthetics, art, and culture. The film highlights the singular impact of Duchamp’s philosophy on art, and, more importantly, examines how Duchamp’s revolutionary ideas from the early 20th century have shaped the 21st century and modern day.

Ultimately, Marcel Duchamp: The Art of The Possible is a guide to exploring the possibilities in every art endeavor and showcasing how Duchamp’s ideas gave generations of artists the intellectual backing to pursue new ideas.

Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint (2019)

Directed by Halina Dryschka
Running Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

Thursday, July 18

2 – 3:30 pm

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

Hilma af Klint was an abstract artist before the term existed, a visionary, trailblazing figure who, inspired by spiritualism, modern science, and the riches of the natural world around her, began in 1906 to reel out a series of huge, colorful, sensual, strange works without precedent in painting. The subject of a recent smash retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, af Klint was for years an all-but-forgotten figure in art historical discourse, before her long-delayed rediscovery. Director Halina Dryschka’s dazzling, course-correcting documentary describes not only the life and craft of af Klint, but also the process of her mischaracterization and erasure by both a patriarchal narrative of artistic progress and capitalistic determination of artistic value.

Sarasota High School Alumni Auditorium

Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat (2017)

Directed by Sara Driver
Running Time: 1 hour 18 minutes

Thursday, August 29

2 – 3:30 pm

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

Boom for Real explore the pre-fame years of the celebrated American artist Jean Michel Basquiat, and how New York City, its people, and its tectonically shifting arts culture of the late 1970’s and 80”s shaped his vision.

Poster for Movie Price of Everything

The Price of Everything (2019)

Directed by Nathaniel Kahn
Running Time: 1 hour 38 minutes

Thursday, September 26

2 – 3:30 pm

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

Exploring the labyrinth of the contemporary art world, The Price of Everything examines the role of art and artistic passion in today’s money-driven, consumer-based society. Featuring collectors, dealers, auctioneers and a rich range of artists, from current market darlings Jeff Koons, Gerhard Richter and Njideka Akunyili Crosby, to one-time art star Larry Poons, the film exposes deep contradictions as it holds a mirror up to contemporary values and times, coaxing out the dynamics at play in pricing the priceless.

Are we in the midst of an art crisis? Can the value of art really be measured in dollars and cents? How are these values assigned and who assigns them? Does the art market have a chilling effect on our great museums and the ability of the public to engage in the art of our time? Most importantly, what does this new consumerist approach to art mean for artists themselves?
Lifeline Poster

Lifeline: Clyfford Still (2019)

Directed by Dennis Scholl
Running Time: 77 minutes

Thursday, October 31, 2024

2 – 3:30 pm

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

Jackson Pollock said, “he makes the rest of us look academic,” Mark Rothko acknowledged him as a “myth-maker” and Clement Greenberg called him “a highly influential maverick and an independent genius.” Clyfford Still, one of the strongest, most original contributors to abstract expressionism, walked away from the commercial art world at the height of his career. Extremely disciplined, principled, and prolific, Still left behind a treasure trove of works like no other major artist in history. With a wonderful mosaic of archival material, found footage and audio recorded by the artist himself, Lifeline paints a picture of a modern icon, his uncompromising creative journey and the price of independence. Featuring the painter’s surviving daughters, painters Mark Bradford, Julie Mehretu, Julian Schnabel, SFMOMA director Neal Benezra, Clyfford Still museum director Dean Sobel, award winning architect Brad Cloepfil, Colorado governor John Hickenlooper, art historian David Anfam, art collector Jeffrey Loria, museum director James Demetrion, art critic Jerry Saltz, and writer Tom Healy.

Close to Vermeer movie poster

Close to Vermeer (2023)

Directed by Suzanne Raes
Running Time: 78 minutes

Thursday, November 21, 2024

2 – 3:30 pm

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

Go behind the scenes of the largest Vermeer exhibition ever, mounted in early 2023 at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Capturing the imagination of the art world – with glowing reviews, global publicity, and tickets sold out through the entirety of its run – the Rijksmuseum’s Vermeer retrospective is nothing short of an historic event. Suzanne Raes’s film follows curators, conservators, collectors, and experts in their joint mission to shine a new light on the elusive Dutch Master. This fascinating documentary reveals everything from the quiet diplomacy required to get the Vermeers to the Netherlands and the new technical knowledge gained by scanning the paintings layer by layer, to the shocking news that one work may not be by Vermeer after all. In the process, we discover how Vermeer was able to depict reality so differently from his contemporaries. But above all, Close to Vermeer shows the infectious love Vermeer’s art inspires. As one curator lovingly puts it: “A good exhibition should change your view of the world. Vermeer can really do that.”

Faces Places movie poster

Faces Places (2017)

Directed by Agnès Varda
Running Time: 90 minutes

Tuesday, January 28, 2025

2 – 3:30 pm

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

Legendary filmmaker Agnès Varda and photographer JR travel the French countryside, encountering people and places that become the subjects of their public art installations.

Yarn movie poster

Yarn (2016)

Directed by Una Lorenzen
Running Time: 76 minutes

Tuesday, February 25, 2025

2 – 3:30 pm

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

Meet the artists who are redefining the tradition of knit and crochet, bringing yarn out of the house and into the world. Reinventing our relationship with this colorful tradition, Yarn weaves together wool graffiti artists, circus performers, and structural designers into a visually-striking look at the women who are making a creative stance while building one of modern art’s hottest trends.

Sneakerheadz movie poster

Sneakerheadz (2015)

Directed by David T. Friendly
Running Time: 73 minutes

Thursday, March 27, 2025

2 – 3:30 pm

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

A look at sneaker collectors explores the extreme lengths the truly obsessed will go to in order to obtain the rarest and most-expensive “kicks.”

Black Art: In the Absence of Light (2021)

Directed by Sam Pollard
Running Time: 86 minutes

Thursday, April 24, 2025

2 – 3:30 pm

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

At the heart of this feature documentary is the groundbreaking “Two Centuries of Black American Art” exhibition curated by the late African American artist and scholar David Driskell in 1976. Held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, this pioneering exhibit featured more than 200 works of art by 63 artists and cemented the essential contributions of Black artists in America in the 19th and 20th centuries. The exhibit would eventually travel to the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the Brooklyn Museum. The film shines a light on the exhibition’s extraordinary impact on generations of African American artists who have staked a claim on their rightful place within the 21st-century art world.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022)

Directed by Laura Poitras
Running Time: 122 minutes

Thursday, May 29, 2025

2 –4 pm

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

The life of internationally renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin is told through her slideshows, intimate interviews, ground-breaking photography, and rare footage of her personal fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the overdose crisis.

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