Art Will Get Us Out Of This

PAINT ME A ROAD is an Award Winner!

Photo credit: Yaya Rey

We are over the moon that the Urbanworld Film Festival and New York Women in Film & Television recognized us with two honors: Best Female Feature Film Director and honorable mention for Best Feature Documentary. These recognitions mean so much to all of us who worked on the film and those who appear in it, that is to say, people who love Faith and people who love justice. Mary and I had a brief moment on the mic in a state of disbelief and joy. In our surprise and overwhelm, I fear my few words were rambling when precision is required to cut through all the noise. Here's a little bit more of what I would like to say about getting the best director award for a very personal and intimate film about oppression, resistance, vision, and, yes, always, beauty.

If there were ever any doubts about the reality of women being devalued, underestimated, and denied full participation in our society, the recent election underscored myriad devastating reasons why we have still never elected a woman to the highest office. Not-so-fun-fact: The candidate who spends the most money always wins the presidency. Except twice, when a woman was in the race.

Faith Ringgold’s masterwork "For the Women’s House" imagines women in roles that were closed to us in 1970—doctor, minister, construction worker, professional basketball player, bus driver. Today, women do all these jobs, except one: president. That singular absence remains 55 years later.

I believe as documentarians, we're faced with addressing our themes as either apocalyptic and unresolvable or terribly boring and oversimplified. Art, to me, is the way to puncture that binary. We are told not to collaborate with our "subjects" and to either sensationalize or look away and fill the space with pretty things. When making "PAINT," Mary and I collaborated in a way that made it possible for us to not sensationalize while also not avoiding, erasing or ignoring. For us, art is healing and transformative and the art of storytelling can hold both trauma and joy at once, resulting in some kind of reality, a way to embrace the very real chaos of our day.

Thank you for recognizing this work, and for honoring the vision of those who fight for justice and beauty every day.

Audience loves PAINT ME A ROAD at Urbanworld

The sold out screening of PAINT ME A ROAD OUT OF HERE at Urbanworld was a huge hit!

The screening was followed by a Q&A with director Catherine Gund, film participant and executive producer Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, and film participant Leah Faria, moderated by Linda Villarosa with surprise guest Correction Officer Barbara Drummond.

Participants: Enid “Fay” Owens, Rasir, and Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, editor Arielle Amsalem, producer, Tanya Selvaratnam, and director/producer Catherine Gund

Participant Russell Craig, Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, Catherine Gund

Photo Credit: Donna Grace Kroh

Mary E.E. Baxter receives Anonymous Was a Woman Award

Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, who is featured in and an Executive Producer of Paint Me a Road Out of Here, received the 2024 Anonymous was a Woman Award. Congratulations Mary!

PAINT ME A ROAD opens at Film Forum February 7

Mark your calendars. PAINT ME A ROAD OUT OF HERE opens at Film Forum on February 7 and will run though at least February 20. We look forward to seeing many of you there!

Carla Guttierez and Catherine had a blast together at The Festival del Cinema Iberoamericano in Florence Italy where they screened Chavela along with Carla's fantastic directorial debut documentary, all archival footage and gorgeous animation, about Frida Kahlo called Frida.

They also gave a masterclass about their decades-long experiences making documentary films, working with archival footage, and collaboration between directors and editors.

The audiences and staff were energetic, curious, and smart, the parties were a blast, and the steak remains a core memory for Carla.

Introducing our MEANWHILE art community to our new American Academy in Rome art community was soul-filling goodness. Here one of Catherine's fellow Residents, the professor and writer Darby English, responds to the film during the Q&A:

"By way of thanks to you: I can’t think of a more useful rejoinder to the politicization of 'I can't breathe.' It’s hard to talk about what is being said when people who are fully alive claim that they can't breathe. On one level it operates like a shocking absurdism—it breaks through, can maybe make you think again when otherwise you can't think. But at some point I think it's important to get specific about what’s happening to life, to language, to politics when someone mobilizes this profound contradiction. This film is full of thoughtful response to that question, partly because it doesn't tell us what it means, or how to think about it. A lot of ways to come to the question without the need of an answer looming over everything. I love that it starts out acknowledging that it is despairing not to know. Algarin says, 'But I despair because I do not know.' That's a choice - I would underline that - that's a choice to despair when one does not know. It's a despairing thing not to know. But it can be a very relieving, enlightening thing not to know. That's another contradiction the film creates space to breathe in."

Sharing MEANWHILE with fellows, residents, staff, and friends at the American Academy in Rome, Catherine appeared in conversation with Johanne Affricot

PAINT at UC Santa Cruz

Professor Gina Dent's UCSC Institute of Arts and Sciences was a particularly meaningful partner for a screening of "Paint Me a Road Out of Here" in November. The Institute has partnered with Santa Cruz Barrios Unidos and the San José Museum of Art to host a remarkable exhibition called "Seeing Through Stone" which is on view in all three locations simultaneously until January 5, 2025. Our cinematic parable for a world without incarceration aligns with their project of visualizing abolition. We have to keep dreaming the change into reality.

PAINT at Wexner Cent for Arts

Mary and Catherine also made their way to screen PAINT at The Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio where they were joined in the post-screening talkback by Kamisha Thomas and Aimee Wissman, two formerly incarcerated community leaders who started The Returning Artist Guild in 2018. The panel had everyone - including themselves - crying and laughing and imagining the brightest future.

Friend of Aubin Molly Gochman's Podcast Monuments to Motherhood

Sacred Painting, 1990. Ouattara Watts

Ouattara Watts '90s paintings at KARMA gallery Nov 1 - Dec 21

Russell Craig, Philadelphia District Attorney's Office Artist-in-Residence, unveils new artwork banners celebrating the lives of Philadelphians lost to violent crime. Mural Arts Philadelphia will feature the artwork at sites including LOVE Park, Philadelphia Family Court, the Municipal Services Building, the DAO, City Hall, and the Juanita Kidd Stout Center for Criminal Justice.

Aubin Gifts for the Holidays or Any Occasion

Available in Unisex/Men's Fit and Women's Fit

Created by Catherine Gund, Words of Art is a creative, collaborative card game for art lovers featuring 150 works from renowned collector and philanthropist Agnes Gund’s never-before-published private art collection.

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