Special Guests: Christopher Knowles, Lauren DiGiulio, and Richard Rutkowski
Join the Parrish Art Museum and The Watermill Center for a special screening of the short documentary, Sunshine Supermanfollowed by a discussion with artist and focus of Richard Rutkowski’s short film, Christopher Knowles.
Sunshine Superman tells the story of artist Christopher Knowles through the voice of his friend and collaborator, director Richard Rutkowski. In 1985 in his first year at Harvard College, Richard met a 27-year-old Christopher Knowles and began their ongoing collaborations on stage and film. Working with Knowles, already at the time a world famous artist and principal collaborator to theater director Robert Wilson, Rutkowski set out to explore the mind and creative impulses of the shy young man whose autism and introvert nature contained a brilliance for patterns and numbers as well as a savant-like memory.
Following the screening, artist Christopher Knowles will speak with dramaturg Lauren DiGiulio about his challenges and success as an artist, and his upcoming projects including a performance at The Louvre in Paris.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS.
Born in 1959, Christopher Knowles lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His incredibly diverse practice, which includes writing, painting, sculpture, and performance, exhibits a fascination with the aural and visual elements of language. Knowles’ first work as a performing artist started with a collaboration with Robert Wilson in 1973, when Wilson invited him to perform in his play The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Knowles wrote and performed in several of Wilson’s seminal early stage works, including A Letter for Queen Victoria (1974), $ Value of Man (1975), and Dia/Log. In 1976 Knowles wrote the libretto for Wilson’s and Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach.
First exhibited as a solo artist in 1974, Knowles has continued to cultivate a prolific practice that explores themes surrounding communication and sign systems. His work has been exhibited in many solo and group showings internationally, and his poetry has been published in a variety of magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, The Village Voice, and Interview Magazine. His two and three-dimensional works are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, and numerous other international institutions and private collections. Most recently, his work was part of the critically successful exhibition Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, as well as a solo exhibition of paintings at Gavin Brown’s enterprise New York, where he is also represented as an artist.
Lauren DiGiulio is a New York-based writer and curator. She has held positions as Associate Director of Programs at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at The Graduate Center, CUNY and as Summer Program Coordinator at The Watermill Center. She is currently a PhD candidate in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. Her specially commissioned article on Christopher Knowles’s work appeared in the Barbican’s Einstein on the Beach program book in 2012, and she is currently working as dramaturg on The Sundance Kid is Beautiful with Christopher Knowles, which will be presented at the Louvre in November of 2013.
A cinematographer since the late 1990’s, Richard Rutkowski has worked for directors as renowned and varied as Neil Burger, Darren Aronofsky, Adrian Lyne, Joel Schumacher, Wes Craven, and Roman Polanski. His resume includes nearly all modern camera formats, from 16mm to 3D, HD, DSLR, and 35mm anamorphic. In addition to feature films, Richard shoots commercials, series television and gallery installation works for artists including Robert Wilson, Dan Colen and Sharon Lockhart.
Public funding provided by Suffolk County
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