Virginia Film Festival : Virginia Film Festival and Bayly Art Museum Co-Sponsor Beat Generation Reunion: Unforgettable Film, Photography and Performance Series

For Immediate Release

Contact: Charlotte Crystal (804) 924-6858
Virginia Film Festival and Bayly Art Museum Co-Sponsor Beat Generation Reunion: Unforgettable Film, Photography and Performance Series
Sept. 17, 1998
Mention the "Beat Generation" and Jack Kerouac's stream-of-consciousness novel, On the Road, and Allen Ginsberg's epic poem, Howl, spring immediately to mind. But there was much more to the flowering of creativity nurtured by the controversial Beat movement in New York City and San Francisco in the 1950s and 60s. Art, music, poetry, prose, photography, filmmaking: the Beat Generation had an impact on virtually every major art form.
The Bayly Art Museum is celebrating this creative period in the American arts by cohosting an exciting series of performances and events with the Virginia Film Festival. The centerpiece of these programs will be "Glory Days: The Beat Generation Photographs of Fred W. McDarrah," a Bayly Art Museum exhibit that will run from Oct. 2 through Dec. 23. Additionally, a special Beat Generation Reunion on Oct. 31 will bring together three of the most important Beat Generation artists, composer David Amram and poets Ed Sanders and Diane di Prima, in a live performance melding poetry, jazz, and film. These artists will be joined by Beat-influenced filmmakers Ken Jacobs and Carolee Schneemann, whose work will be featured during the Film Festival, in a panel discussion on "The Art of Spontaneity," also on Oct. 31.

Beat Events
Glory Days: The Beat Generation Photographs of Fred W. McDarrah
Exhibition: October 2 - December 23
Bayly Art Museum, University of Virginia
Picture editor of the Village Voice for 35 years, Fred W. McDarrah produced a photographic chronicle of the Beats. Many of McDarrah's evocative photographs -- reflecting the "glory days" of poetry readings, jazz, cafe life, parties, performances and the ordinary life of extraordinary Americans -- will be on display.

Panel Discussion and Gallery Talks
The Beat Period: What Was Happening, What It Meant, and How It Significantly Related to American Artistic Tradition, Far Eastern Art and Thought, and European Phenomenology and Existentialism
Thursday, October 22, 5:30 p.m., Campbell Hall 153, adjacent to the Museum
Lecture by Neil Chassman, a member of the New York poetry scene in the mid-1960s and curator of the ground-breaking exhibition Poets of the Cities: New York and San Francisco, 1950-65.
The Art of Hans Hofmann
Friday, October 30, noon, Bayly Art Museum
Ken Jacobs, a former student of Hofmann and a featured artist in this year's Virginia Film Festival, will discuss Hofmann's art and influence
The Art of Spontaneity Panel
Saturday, October 31, 1:00 p.m., Campbell Hall 158
Exploring the links across jazz improvisation, Beat poetry, underground film, Zen Buddhism, and Abstract Expressionism, with David Amram, Ken Jacobs, Fred and Gloria McDarrah, Diane di Prima, and Ed Sanders, moderated by Daniel Belgrad, associate professor at the University of South Florida and author of The Culture of Spontaneity.
First Sundays Gallery Talk
Sunday, November 1, 2:00 p.m., Bayly Art Museum
Fred W. and Gloria McDarrah will conduct a gallery tour of the exhibition.

Film Screenings and Performance Events
A Beat Generation Reunion
Saturday, October 31, 7:00 p.m., Culbreth Theatre
$15/$10 students
Live poetry and jazz with David Amram, Diane di Prima, and Ed Sanders, plus a special screening of Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie's Pull My Daisy!
The Beat Cinema of Ken Jacobs
1) Jack Smith Filmed by Ken Jacobs: Saturday, October 31, 11:00am, Campbell Hall 158
2) Nervous System Performance: Two Wrenching Departures: Sunday, November 1, 1:00 p.m., Vinegar Hill Theatre, $6/$5 advance ($7 during Festival)
On Saturday, see Ken Jacobs' classic underground films featuring the legendary performance artist Jack Smith, including Blonde Cobra and Little Stabs at Happiness, and, on Sunday, his live performance on the two-projector "Nervous System" a farewell to his late friends Jack Smith and Bob Fleischner.
Beat Cinema and Beyond (All screenings at Vinegar Hill Theatre)
The Chelsea Girls (Andy Warhol): Thursday, Oct. 29, 7:00pm
The Connection (Shirley Clarke) with producer Lewis Allen: Friday, Oct. 30, 4:00pm
Fuses and Other Films with Carolee Schneemann and B. Ruby Rich: Friday, Oct. 30, 7:00pm
Shadows (John Cassavetes) and The End (Christopher MacLaine): Saturday, Oct. 30, 7:00pm
Me and My Brother (Robert Frank) with speaker Gordon Ball: Sunday, Nov. 1, 10:00am

Receptions
First Fridays at the Bayly Art Museum: Friday, October 6, 4:30 - 6:30 p.m.
Virginia Film Festival Opening Night Gala: Thursday, October 29, 5:00 - 7:00 p.m., Bayly Art Museum, $40 Featuring music by the Charlottesville Swing Orchestra

Beat Generation and Related Biographies
University of Virginia Museum and Film Programs, Fall 1998
Contacts:
Bayly Art Museum: Jill Hartz, Director, 804/924-3592
Virginia Film Festival: Richard Herskowitz, Director, 804/982-5326
University News Service: Charlotte Crystal, 804/924-6858
David Amram has composed more than 100 orchestral and chamber music works and written scores for Broadway theater and film, including Splendor in the Grass and The Manchurian Candidate. A close friend of Jack Kerouac, Amram composed the score for the 1959 Beat Generation documentary film Pull My Daisy. A pioneer player of Jazz French horn, he is also a virtuoso on piano, flutes and whistles, percussion, and dozens of folkloric instruments from 25 countries. He improvises lyrics and has collaborated with Leonard Bernstein, Langston Hughes, Dizzy Gillespie, Dustin Hoffman, Willie Nelson, Thelonius Monk, Odetta, Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller, Charles Mingus, and Lionel Hampton, among others.
Daniel Belgrad (moderator, The Art of Spontaneity Panel, Saturday, Oct. 31) is an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and American Studies at the University of South Florida. His book, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 1998), is the first comprehensive history of the postwar avant-garde. His study integrates such diverse moments in American culture as Abstract Expressionism, bebop jazz, gestalt therapy, Black Mountain College, Jungian psychology, beat poetry, experimental dance, Zen Buddhism, Alfred North Whitehead's cosmology, and the anti-nuclear movement.
Diane di Prima is the author of more than 30 books of poetry and prose, which have been translated into thirteen languages. A participant in Timothy Leary's psychedelic community at Millbrook, NY, she now lives in San Francisco where she works as a writer, teacher, and healer, and studies alchemy and Tibetan Buddhism. Her most recent books are Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems (City Lights, San Francisco), and Seminary Poems (Floating Island, Point Reyes). An expanded edition of her epic poem, Loba, was published this year and Viking Press will release the first volume of her autobiography, Recollections of My Life as a Woman in fall 1999.
Ken Jacobs is a filmmaker, teacher, and inventor of a new form of 3-D movie projection called the "Nervous System." Jacobs studied with action painter Hans Hofmann and brought his lessons in spontaneous art making to the cinema, becoming one of the leaders of the '60s "underground film" movement. He made several classic underground films, including Blonde Cobra, featuring performance artist Jack Smith, and then moved on to become a pioneer of the '70s "structural film" movement with his masterpiece, Tom, Tom the Piper's Son. Since the '70s, Jacobs has supplemented his filmmaking and his legendary and influential teaching of film art at SUNY Binghamton with live "shadow play" and "Nervous System" performances of such works as The Impossible and C*H*E*R*R*I*E*S. Jacobs was honored with the Maya Deren Award from the American Film Institute in 1994 and has had screenings and retrospectives at the American Museum of the Moving Image, the Museum of Modern Art, and many other international venues.
Fred and Gloria McDarrah were participants and meticulous observers and documenters of the Beat scene in Greenwich Village in the '50s and '60s. Picture editor of the Village Voice for 35 years, Fred W. McDarrah has produced a lively and unpretentious photographic chronicle of the Beats. McDarrah is a former Guggenheim fellow and winner of the prestigious Page One Award of the New York Newspaper Guild. His photography books include The Beat Scene, Beat Generation: Glory Days in Greenwich Village, Kerouac & Friends, The Artist's World and Museums in New York. McDarrah's photographs were recently featured in the Whitney Museum of American Art's "Beat Generation" exhibition and at the National Portrait Gallery.
Edward Sanders is a poet, prose writer, and musician. His most recent book, 1968: A History in Verse, was published by Black Sparrow Press in 1997. He is perhaps best known for The Family, his story of the Charles Manson group, and his two-volume work Tales of Beatnik Glory, 1990. His poetry awards include a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Performing Arts, Inc., New York City and a Writers Community residency sponsored by the YMCA National Writers' Voice through the Lila Wallace Readers Digest fund (1997), Guggenheim Fellowship (1983), National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1987). Sanders is the founder and leader of The Fugs, a folk-rock poetry satire group, now in its 33rd year. He is also the founder and editor of the Woodstock Journal.
Carolee Schneemann was recently the subject of a major retrospective at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City. Featured in the exhibition were works from 1963 to 1996, including video and sculptural installations, early paintings and constructions, and films, drawings, and photographs. Accompanying these works was documentation of such performances and multimedia installations as Meat Joy (1964), Interior Scroll (1975), and Infinity Kisses (1980-91). The history of her work is characterized by research into archaic visual traditions, pleasure wrested from suppressive taboos, and the body of the artist in dynamic relationship with the social body. Schneemann's work, including the classic experimental film Fuses (1964-65), has challenged the practice and definition of art especially with regard to discourses concerning the body, sexuality, and gender. Her work has been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She was the recipient of a 1993 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 1996 Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. Schneemann has published widely; her books include Cezanne, She Was a Great Painter (1976) and More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings (1979).

This year marks the 11th annual Virginia Film Festival, co-sponsored by the University of Virginia, which brings internationally recognized film industry figures to Charlottesville. The theme of this year's festival, which runs from Oct. 29 to Nov. 1, is "Cool."
Program cosponsors include the University of Virginia Arts Enhancement Program, ART$ Program, ArtSpace of University Union, McIntire Department of Music, Corcoran Department of English, Peters Rushton Funds, Women's Studies Program.
For more information about the Bayly Art Museum exhibit, call Jill Hartz, museum director at (804) 924-3592. For more information about the Virginia Film Festival, call Richard Herskowitz, director, at (804) 982-5277. For tickets to "A Beat Generation Reunion," and "Nervous System Performance," call the Virginia Film Festival at (804) 982-5277 or 1-800-UVA-FEST.
Television reporters should contact the TV News Office at (804) 924-7550.

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