Join us for a conversation between filmmaker Catherine Gund and artists Russell Craig, Jesse Krimes, and Xaviera Simmons, moderated by Kate Fowle, Director of MoMA PS1. The conversation follows a special private screening of Aggie, a documentary about Agnes Gund, former Chair of the Board of PS1 and founder of the Art for Justice Fund. Art for Justice’s many transformational commitments include key support for Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, which features work by panelists Russell Craig and Jesse Krimes. Touching on the intersection of art, racial justice, and mass incarceration, the panel brings together minds at the forefront of these conversations to consider the expansive political possibilities of artmaking today.

More about the film:

Aggie is a feature-length documentary that explores the nexus of art, race, and justice through the story of art collector and philanthropist Agnes “Aggie” Gund’s life. Emmy-nominated director Catherine Gund focuses on her mother’s journey to give viewers an understanding of the power of art to transform consciousness and inspire social change. Aggie is internationally recognized for her robust and prescient support of artists–particularly women and people of color–and her unwavering commitment to social justice issues. After falling in love with art as a high-school student, Aggie discovers a new way of looking at the world. The film opens with Aggie selling Roy Lichtenstein’s “Masterpiece” For $165 million to start the Art for Justice Fund. The proceeds from one of the highest grossing artworks ever sold fuel a monumental effort to reform the American criminal justice system and end mass incarceration. The film captures Aggie as a true maverick who demonstrates the unique role and potential of collectors and benefactors to use art to fight justice. This is untapped terrain, and we see Aggie leading the way.

More about the panelists:

Founder and Director of Aubin Pictures, Catherine Gund is an Emmy- nominated producer, director, writer, and activist. Her media work focuses on strategic and sustainable social transformation, arts and culture, HIV/AIDS and reproductive health, and the environment. Her films — which include Aggie, Chavela, Dispatches From Cleveland, America, Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity, What’s On Your Plate?, A Touch of Greatness, Motherland Afghanistan, Making Grace, On Hostile Ground, and Hallelujah! Ron Athey: A Story of Deliverance — have screened around the world in festivals, theaters, museums, and schools; on PBS, the Discovery Channel, Sundance Channel, Netflix, and Amazon Prime. Gund’s most recent projects include: Aggie (Sundance, Doc Fortnight); Dispatches from Cleveland (CIFF, MSPIFF), a five chapter documentary that looks at the police murder of 12-year-old Tamir Rice and shows how people joined together to vote out the prosecutor who didn’t have their backs; and Chavela (Berlinale, Hot Docs, Ambulante) a documentary about the life of the iconic Latin-American gender- bending diva, Chavela Vargas. Gund currently serves on the boards of Art For Justice, Art Matters, Baldwin for the Arts, and The George Gund Foundation. She co-founded the Third Wave Foundation which supports young women and transgender youth, and DIVA TV, an affinity group of ACT UP/NY. She was the founding director of BENT TV, the video workshop for LGBT youth. She was on the founding boards of Bard Early Colleges, Iris House, Working Films, Reality Dance Company, and The Sister Fund and has also served for MediaRights.org, The Robeson Fund of the Funding Exchange, The Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School, and the Astraea Foundation. An alumnus of Brown University and the Whitney Independent Study Program, she lives in NYC with her four children.

Russell Craig is a painter and Philadelphia native whose work combines portraiture with deeply social and political themes. A self-taught artist who survived nearly a decade of incarceration after growing up in the foster care system, Craig creates art as a means to explore the experience of overcriminalized communities and reassert agency after a lifetime of institutional control. Craig is currently featured in Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration at MoMA PS1. His work has also been shown at the Philadelphia African American Museum, and included in group shows including Truth to Power; State Goods: Art in the Era of Mass Incarceration; and the OG Experience, and has garnered coverage in outlets including the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Post, Artsy, The Guardian, and The New York Times. Craig is an alumni of Mural Arts Philadelphia’s Restorative Justice Guild program, a 2017 Right of Return Fellow, and a 2018 Ford Foundation: Art For Justice Fellow.

Kate Fowle is the Director of MoMA PS1. From 2013-2019 she was the inaugural chief curator at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow and director-at-large of Independent Curators International (ICI) in New York, where she was the executive director from 2009-13. Prior to this she was the inaugural international curator at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (2007-08). In 2002 she co-founded the Master’s Program in Curatorial Practice for California College of the Arts in San Francisco, for which she was the Chair until 2007. Before moving to the United States, Fowle was co-director of Smith + Fowle in London from 1996-2002. From 1994-96 she was curator at the Towner Art Gallery and Museum in Eastbourne, East Sussex. Fowle’s recent projects include solo exhibitions with David Adjaye, Rasheed Araeen, John Baldessari, Sammy Baloji, Louise Bourgeois, Marcel Broodthaers, Urs Fischer, Rashid Johnson, Irina Korina, Robert Longo, Anri Sala, Taryn Simon, Juergen Teller, and Rirkrit Tirivanija, as well as extended essays on Ilya Kabakov, Sterling Ruby, and Qiu Zhijie, and numerous extended articles on curating and exhibition histories. Fowle has written three books: Exhibit Russia: The New International Decade 1986-1996 (2016); Rashid Johnson: Within Our Gates (2016); and Proof: Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Longo (2017).

Jesse Krimes is a Philadelphia based artist and curator whose work explores how contemporary media shapes or reinforces societal mechanisms of power and control, with a particular focus on criminal and racial justice. Shortly after graduating from Millersville University in 2008, he was indicted by the U.S. government on drug charges. While serving his six-year prison sentence he produced and smuggled out numerous bodies of work, established prison art programs, and worked collaboratively with his peers. After his release in 2014, he co-founded Right of Return USA, the first national fellowship dedicated to supporting formerly incarcerated artists. Krimes is currently featured in Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration at MoMA PS1. His work has also been exhibited at venues including Palais de Tokyo, The International Red Cross Museum, Zimmerli Museum, Aperture Gallery, and will be shown at The Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2021. He has received public commissions from Amnesty International and Eastern State Penitentiary, and is currently curating Reimagining Reentry, a citywide public art project with Mural Arts Philadelphia and the corresponding exhibition Rendering Justice, at the African American Museum of Philadelphia. He was awarded fellowships from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the Independence Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, the Art For Justice Fund, Captiva Residency, and Creative Capital. His work is a part of The Agnes Gund Art Collection and he is represented by Malin Gallery in New York. In addition to his artistic practice, he successfully led a class-action lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase for their predatory practice of charging people released from federal prison exorbitant fees.

Xaviera Simmons' sweeping body of work includes photography, performance, choreography, video, sound, sculpture, and installation. Simmons received her BFA from Bard College (2004) after spending two years on a walking pilgrimage retracing the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade with Buddhist Monks. She completed the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in Studio Art (2005) while simultaneously completing a two-year actor-training conservatory with The Maggie Flanigan Studio, NY. Simmons’ works are in major museum and private collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Deutsche Bank, New York; UBS, New York; The Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Agnes Gund Art Collection, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Studio Museum in Harlem; ICA Miami; Perez Art Museum Miami; The Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro; The Nasher Museum of Art, Durham; The High Museum, Atlanta; among many others. She was a visiting lecturer and the Solomon Fellow at Harvard University (2020) and has been awarded The Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters from Bard College this summer. This fall and winter 2021 Simmons will have works on view at Socrates Sculpture Park, NY, Times Square NY, Columbia University and The Moody Gallery at Rice University among many other exhibitions

"Aggie"Conversation and Q&A