Film And Talk: Five Experimental Shorts By Women Artist Filmmakers

On Friday, March 11, in recognition of Women’s History Month, the Parrish Art Museum presents a special screening of experimental films made by members of Women Artist Filmmakers, a network established in 1974 to discover, celebrate and support women artists who make films.

In 1975, its members organized a film series as part of the exhibition “Women Artists Here and Now” at Ashawagh Hall in Springs. To commemorate the event, the Parrish will screen a selection of those films followed by Q&A with Rosalind Schneider, founder of Women Artist Filmmakers, and visual artist Sara VanDerBeek, a Springs resident and co-founder of Soft Network.

The exhibition “Women Artists Here and Now” at Ashawagh Hall, co-organized by visual artists Joyce Kozloff and Joan Semmel, featured many female artists who were and are active in the East End, including Semmel, Lynda Benglis, Hedda Sterne and Miriam Schapiro, among others. Women Artist Filmmakers curated a program of shorts by their early members, which included Dorothy Beskind, Susan Brockman, Doris Chase, Silvianna Goldsmith, Maria Lassnig, Carolee Schneemann, Olga Spiegel and Alida Walsh. The films to be shown at the Parrish include: “Self Portrait” (Maria Lassnig, Austria/USA, 1971, 5 min.); “Plumb Line” (Carolee Schneemann, USA, 1968-71, 14 min.); “Depot” (Susan Brockman, USA, 1975, 10 min.); “Circles II” (Doris Chase, USA, 1972, 14 min.); “Parallax” (Rosalind Schneider, USA, 1973, 21 min.).

This selection of films was organized by Schneider and Martha Edelheit, one of the group’s original members, for a commemorative screening conducted at The Arts Center at Duck Creek in Springs in 2021. The event was the conclusion of Soft Network’s multi-venue programming entitled “Interior Scroll or What I Did on My Vacation” that explored feminist, inter-generational, and multi-disciplinary artistic interactions that have been integral to the ongoing development of the arts communities of the East End.

Soft Network is a cooperative platform established by Chelsea Spengemann and Sara VanDerBeek for connective arts programming. The organization’s mission is to provide opportunities for living artists and the representatives of non-living artists to support each other through sharing resources, labor and profits by generating new projects in collaboration with existing platforms.

At 6 p.m. on Friday, March 18, in celebration of Women’s History Month, the Parrish and Hamptons Doc Fest will present a screening of “Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint,” a documentary directed by Halina Dryschka, on the life and craft of af Klint (Sweden, 1862­–1944) — the visionary female artist who worked in abstraction in the early 1900s, before the term existed. The screening will be followed by a conversation with artists Dannielle Tegeder and Sharmistha Ray who co-founded Hilma’s Ghost — a feminist artist collective that addresses art-historical gaps by cultivating a global network of women, nonbinary, and trans practitioners whose work references spirituality.

Advance ticket purchase with pre-event registration is recommended for both events at parrishart.org. Limited tickets will be available at the door. All attendees are required to wear medical-grade masks at all times and show proof of vaccination; those 18 and older must provide a valid ID. Parrish Art Museum is at 279 Montauk Highway, Water Mill.