SCREENING INFORMATION
Annapolis Film Festival
Annapolis, Maryland USA March 21-24, 2013
www.annapolisfilmfestival.net
Utopia Film Festival at the Old Greenbelt Theatre
Saturday, October 20 at 3PM
www.utopiafilmfestival.org
Inter-Society Color Council Annual Meeting in Manchester, New Hampshire
Screening: Tuesday, October 16 at 1:30PM
www.iscc.org
The Leonardo Museum, Salt Lake City, Utah
Screening: Thursday, October 4 at 7PM
www.theleonardo.org
ARC OF LIGHT: A Portrait of Anna Campbell Bliss to be featured in the Women in the Arts Movie Marathon at Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center
Sat., May 19, 10:00-Noon, 2:00-4:00 p.m. and 6:00-8:00 p.m. at 67 Broadway, the Lark Books parking deck, FREE, 56 Broadway, Asheville, North Carolina
Presented in collaboration with the City of Asheville Cultural Arts Division and Lark Books.
Don't miss our Women in the Arts Movie Marathon featuring some of the best films about women artists of our time. Kick things off Friday night at the BMC Museum + Arts Center and then all day Saturday (free!) under the weather-safe roof of the Lark Books parking deck. Bring your own comfy chair or use ours. Easel Rider, The Mobile Art Lab, will make it happen.
Support for this project has been generously provided by the following: the North Carolina Arts Council, a division of the Department of Cultural Resources; The Elizabeth Harris Gallery; The Beattie Foundation; The Mary Duke Biddle Foundation; Lark Books; and the City of Asheville Cultural Arts Division. Special thanks to Elizabeth Harris, Miles Manning, David Loncle, Robert A. Ellison Jr., Bill Page, Denise Drury and Marya Roland.
For further information: www.blackmountaincollege.org
or call (828) 350-8484
RECENT PRESS
Artist Anna Campbell Bliss brought Modernism to Utah — in spite of itself.
The Salt Lake Tribune, Sunday, March 4, 2012. Author: Glenn Warchol.
'Cutting-edge' artist the subject of Laurel filmmaker's work.
The Washington Post, March 07, 2012. Author: Holly Nunn. Also published in The Gazette.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
ARC OF LIGHT: A Portrait of Anna Campbell Bliss traces the broad spectrum of this important artist's life and work, ranging from the aesthetic influences of her early childhood and her ground-breaking career as a Harvard-trained architect to her emergence as a cutting-edge artist whose work fuses an astonishing range of elements, including architecture, mathematics, computer technology, painting, printmaking and calligraphy. The documentary film examines the roots of Bliss's art in the Bauhaus school, which flourished in Germany in the 1920s, and how the Bauhaus artists influenced the development of Bliss's extensive contribution to American modern art.
Windows, 1989-1990 Alkyd on Enameled Steel, 8' x 30'
computer based mural, Anna Campbell Bliss
ARC OF LIGHT explores Bliss's direct connections to the Bauhaus, especially through Gyorgy Kepes, with whom she studied visual design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Josef Albers, another Bauhaus artist, who taught at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina after leaving Germany in 1933.
In the film, Bliss describes how Kepes inspired her interest in combining art, science and technology in her work. At MIT, where he taught, Kepes created artworks that reflected his fascination with scientific instruments, integrating images generated by devices such as x-ray machines and electron microscopes that anticipated Bliss's pioneering use of computer technology, geometry and numeric systems and foreshadowed the Digital Age.
Extended Vision, 2001-03
Laser etched and screenprinted--
100 anodized aluminum panels 18" x18"
Anna Campbell Bliss
The film underscores Bliss's talent for tapping the core ideas that began in the 1920s inspiring her to create important and unique works of her own, such as Windows, which can be seen at the Utah State Capitol, and Extended Vision, now a permanent installation at the Cowles Mathematics building at the University of Utah. The film also touches on the most challenging period in her life when she discovers that she is losing her sight but miraculously overcomes the condition.
Model for on-site commission
at the University of Utah
School of Nursing
Anna Campbell Bliss, 2010
includes interviews with Anna Campbell Bliss and her husband, Robert Bliss, former dean of the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Utah, prominent filmmaker Judith Hallet, and Stanley Hallet, a professor of architecture and the former dean of the School of Architecture at the Catholic University of America, as well as interviews with Ric Collier, former director of the Salt Lake Arts Council and many of the artist's colleagues and friends.
© Black Opal Productions LLC 2010
