Film still from Meshes in the Afternoon

Maya Deren’s Legacy: Women and Experimental Film, is a retrospective exhibition at the MoMA, which examines Deren as a visionary female experimental filmmaker, and the indelible influence she’s had on other women directors.

After college, Deren worked with dancer/choreographer Katherine Dunham, where she developed her interest in dance and spirituality.  Deren captured several hours of footage of Haitian ceremonial dances, but the project was never completed when she unexpectedly died at the age of 44.  The edited footage, titled Divine Horsemen, was released posthumously.  It was during Deren’s time with Dunham that she met her future husband, Alexander Hammid, who introduced her to European avant-garde film.  The couple collaborated on Deren’s first and best well-known film, Meshes in the Afternoon.

This exhibition will screen Meshes in the Afernoon, and other works by Deren.  The exhibition consists of a video installation in the Theater Galleries and short-film programs in the theaters.

Maya Deren’s Legacy: Women and Experimental Film
May 15-October 18, 2010

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
11 West 53rd Street
New York, NY 10019

Click here for the film screening schedule.

Click here to read more about Deren in Aperture magazine #195.

Untitled Film Still #43, 1979, © Cindy Sherman

Exhibition on view:
Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West

Sunday, March 29–Monday, June 8, 2009

MoMA
Special Exhibitions Gallery, third floor
11 West 53 Street
New York, New York
(212) 708-9400

Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West is now on view at the Special Exhibitions Gallery at MoMA. The exhibition’s theme evolves around the importance of photography in shaping our collective imagination of the West.

Since 1850, photography has certainly played a fundamental role in the revolution of the American West, and has helped form and change our perception and image creation of the West’s physical and social landscape, through a variety of photographic traditions and genres.

Into the Sunset brings together over 120 photographs, dating from the ninetieth to the twenty first century, that integrate a range of different artistic strategies and motifs. The photographs, which are organized thematically, illustrate a piece of cultural heritage, and help us understand how general ideas about the West, as Manifest Destiny and the “land of opportunity,” have evolved through the years.

The exhibition features work of approximately seventy renowned photographers including Aperture-published Robert Adams, Katy Grannan, Dorothea Lange, Timothy O’Sullivan, Cindy Sherman, Joel Sternfeld, Edward Weston.

In conjunction with the exhibition, MoMA also holds lunch lectures and discussion panels on Monday, April 6 and Thurday, April 9 both at 12:30 p.m.

In addition, the museum offers a special lecture for deaf and hard-of-hearing visitors, as a part of Interpreting MoMA, on Thursday, May 14, at 5:30 p.m.