Key West Art & Historical Society Debuts New Film Series
(photo credit: Photographic reproduction created jointly by Andrew Olenick, owner of Fotowerks LTD, and Patrick St. Clair, Owner of St. Clair Photo-Imaging.)
Thursday, October 22 at 6pm marks the debut of Key West Art & Historical Society’s new film program, to take place once a month in the Helmerich Research & Learning Center on the third floor of the Custom House Museum, 281 Front Street.
The educational program, titled, “History as Art, Art as History,” will “support and enhance The Society’s mission, exhibitions and programs,” said local film expert and KWAHS Board member Michael Shields, who is director and host of the series.
The inaugural film, titled “Enough to Live On: The Arts of the WPA”, was selected to compliment the current Arthur Rothstein Depression era photographic exhibit at the Custom House and celebrates the 80th anniversary of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Federal Art Project – Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal initiative to put artists, writers, musicians, actors and other craftspeople to work during the Great Depression. The film features more than 70 works by artists including Rockwell Kent, Dorothea Lange, Stuart Davis, and Reginald Marsh, as well as rare footage of the artists, their creations and a perspective of the times in which they worked.
“Enough to Live On” was released in May of this year and is currently screening at museums, libraries and venues across the U.S.
Following the 94 minute showing, the filmmakers, writer/director/narrator Michael Maglaras and executive producer Terri Templeton, producers of multiple “essays in film” via their independent company 217 Films, will participate in a Q&A session with viewers from a remote location.
Maglaras, in his Director’s statement, writes that the story he undertook to tell is “the story of what happens when a government understands that a worker picking up an artist’s brush or sitting down at a piano is actually working.…The arts in America live today, in no small measure, because, at the beginning of the Depression and facing the potential disintegration of our democracy, we had the audacity to put the arts squarely at the service of that democracy…”
Admission for Key West Art & Historical Society members is $5; $10 for non-members, and may be reserved at www.kwahs.org/learn/
For more information, contact Adele Williams, Education Specialist, at 305-295-6616, ext. 115.
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