Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB) will present the solo West Coast museum debut of independent American filmmaker and artist James Benning.
James Benning: Quilts, Cigarettes & Dirt (Portraits of America), will run May 16-July 14. There will be an opening reception 6-9 p.m. Thursday, May 16, and an Artist Talk, 5:30-6:30 p.m. Thursday, May 23, at MCASB in Paseo Nuevo.
For more than 40 years exploring the film medium, Benning has engaged with history, memory, and documentary traditions, often encompassing a rigorous treatment of the American landscape.
The exhibit, curated by Abaseh Mirvali, MCASB executive director and chief curator, features the artist’s observant eye in a series of intimate and distinctly American portraits, including a new body of work shown for the first time.
The show builds on the history of providing the first West Coast museum platform for emerging and established
contemporary artists, presenting visitors with the most innovative and experimental contemporary art of today.
Before becoming a mathematician, filmmaker, artist and professor, Benning grew up in Milwaukee’s Industrial Valley. The highly segregated, working-class region punctuated by urban decay has influenced his artistic approach as well as the historical, social, geographical, and economic contexts he foregrounds in his work.
Benning defines himself as much as his subjects in his long-time affinity with a diverse array of American landscapes and portraits, the extended gaze with which he explores his subjects, and his propensity for examining the nature of the fringe and what it means to those who make their lives in that figurative, and often literal, no man’s land.
Like Walker Evans’ photography of the 1930s, Missouri Pettway’s quilts of the 1940s, and Andy Warhol’s diverse artistic contributions of the 1960s, Benning extrapolates from his life history to discuss his America, using the immediacy of portraiture.
It is through this traditional technique that James Benning: Quilts, Cigarettes & Dirt (Portraits of America) illustrates that in the act of rendering others the artist ultimately and necessarily also renders a portrait of himself.
Works featured in the exhibit, including site-specific works, raise questions about diversity, inequality, poverty, marginalization, ownership, and appropriation while leaving agency in the hands of viewers as to how they will embrace these issues.
Over the course of James Benning: Quilts, Cigarettes & Dirt (Portraits of America) , Benning’s film After Warhol will be on view in MCASB’s Norton Gallery. Benning’s films READERS and Twenty Cigarettes will also be screened at MCASB and additional Santa Barbara venues.
Benning, who was born in 1942, lives and works in Val Verde, Calif. In the late 1960s, he directed his first short films in the
experimental-cinema tradition, retaining its formal rigor and taste for conceptual constraints while pioneering the notion of “figurative narrative.”
His films rest on an experience of time and perception and its relationship to space. They also approach the notion of place from autobiographical, cultural, political, and historical viewpoints. In 2014, his film, 13 Lakes, was added to the National Film Registry.
Benning has been teaching at the California Institute of the Arts since 1987.
— Lauren Sharp for Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara.