All Videos

Befitting a profile documentary about an artist whose work thoughtfully engages in intellectual activism, Shut Up and Paint is a film unusually occupied by questions of process and power. This makes for a narratively unresolved, but fascinatingly layered piece that eschews tidiness in favor of a poetic struggle, both at the level of its subject and their representation, but also at the level of the filmmaking itself. The film documents an ethical crisis in the career of one of the art world’s shining stars, Titus Kaphar, as he struggles with the commodification of his work and the surrounding pressure to blunt his activism in the name of marketability. A Black American from humble beginnings, Kaphar rose to prominence via bold, provocative work that “reconfigures and regenerates art history to include the African-American subject“.   A Grand Prize winner at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, the film played across the United States as part of public television’s POV program. It is currently in the running for Oscar and on the basis of its inclusion in DocNYC’s “Contender” series and its nomination for this year’s Cinema Eye Honors, it has to be considered one of the favorites to make the cut. Good luck to Kaphar, Mallis, and team, I expect that this is a film we’ll be returning to throughout this awards season.  Analogous Colors” was featured on the cover of Time Magazine’s June 15th, 2020 edition. Capitalism absorbs dissent though, and Kaphar finds himself pondering his naivete early in the film as the sale price of his paintings moves into the six and seven figures. A gallerist asks if Kaphar could “focus every interview given to (his) painting, to the work, and not the message” as that might help make his work more palatable to curators. Kaphar, exasperated, finds the requests shortsighted to the point of offense—what is his art without the meaning that fuels it? Simultaneously, he ruminates on his recognition in elite Art World circles.  Nominally it is a victory for representation that he is able to break through, however, being absorbed into this larger elite (and very white) world means that his art has been largely priced out of the homes of people of color.    Kaphar at work in his studio If the film does not wrap its narrative in a tidy bow, it is because the questions with which it grapples do not lend themselves to pat solutions. The explicit conundrums of Kaphar’s artistic commodification and the film’s implicit recognition of the documentary medium’s director/subject power imbalance are valuable themes precisely because of the questions they raise rather than the answers they are able to provide. This sort of indeterminacy is rather brave for a documentary I feel, as too often the medium is one that prescribes exactly what its audience is supposed to feel and conclude after viewing. — - Short of the week 

JAYNE UNFILTERED BRINGS YOU REAL VOICES! Over 72% of young black New Yorkers are unvaccinated because they have been lied to and have good reason to be skeptical of big pharma's jabbing their bodies with an experimental vaccine. The United States has a long sorid history of conducting human experimentents on Black Americans that are atrocities. In the name of science, Black Americans have been used as guinea pigs.  The Covid19 vaccinations that are not as effective as natural immunity ( The global data of vaccinated exposes the big pharma false trial data )are currently being mandated or lose your job, life and health are not only unconstitutional but crimes against humanity. The Covid-19 vaccinations are experimental genetic experiments and have already caused tens of thousands of deaths according to the CDC's own data, more than all in vaccines history. Globally, hundreds of thousands have experienced life-altering side effects that our media and big tech are shamelessly censoring because they are being paid by big pharma and entered into non disclosure agreements before the vaccine campaigns started. The majority of young black New Yorkers will now face segregation, loss of income, lose their health services, and all dignity, forcing them back into a darker history of segregation. 'Black lives matter’ is only when it serves political gain and not real lives. All Americans must unite and resist and hold government officials accountable who unlawfully break our Constitutional rights. All citizens should never be subjected to forced medical experiments and it should remain a personal and private choice with informed consent. The world has gone mad and Governments around the world are violating the Nuremberg Code, a code humanity must respect to avoid repeating history.  #informedconsent #blacklivesmatter #jayneunfiltered #humanexperiments #vaccinemandates #newyork