The Carnegie Museum of Art Film Series is an annual program that builds on the rich, dynamic film history and expansive time-based media collection at the museum.
Each year, Carnegie Museum of Art invites a filmmaker or artist to curate the Film Series, offering visitors the chance to enjoy film and time-based media, a medium that Carnegie Museum of Art has showcased and collected for decades.
“Alternate realities, reincarnation, and remembrance; complex family relationships and inherited trauma; the wreckage of capitalism and carceral culture; and formal experimentation are ideas that have much resonance to me and unfold in various forms throughout the series.” —Astria Suparak
The 2024 Carnegie Museum of Art Film Series programmed by artist and curator Astria Suparak features a special program each month that expands out of a singular idea, topic, or question that is catalyzed by artworks in the museum’s collection. For each program, Suparak has curated a combination of forms, ranging from feature-length narratives and documentaries to music videos, formalist experiments, animation, and internet memes. The selections date from 1920s avant-garde cinema to a new collage video created for the series.
Astria Suparak is based in Oakland, California. Her cross-disciplinary projects address complex and urgent issues (like institutionalized racism, feminisms, and colonialism) made accessible through a popular culture lens, such as science fiction movies, rock music, and sports. Straddling creative and scholarly work, the projects often take the form of publicly available tools and databases, chronicling subcultures and omitted perspectives.
Artists and filmmakers include:
Tony Buba, an internationally acclaimed filmmaker from Braddock, Pennsylvania, inaugurates the 2023 Film Series, running May through December 2023. This year’s selection will introduce 17 films and 24 directors to a new generation of filmgoers in the Carnegie Museum of Art Theater, with special screenings in the museum’s outdoor Sculpture Court.
Buba, best known for documentaries about Pennsylvania, curated the inaugural Film Series lineup, which explores topics relevant to the region, such as labor, inequity, and identity. The expansive roster of films includes rarely seen and critically acclaimed documentaries and feature films, including work made by Buba and other filmmakers and directors, such as Peggy Ahwesh and Manny Kirchheimer.
