Newport Art Museum’s Art
Artist Talk with Lissa Rivera
During this month’s Art After Dark, the Museum will present an artist talk with photographer Lissa Rivera and her muse, BJ Lillis, in her exhibition Beautiful Boy, which is currently on view at the Museum through May 20. Born out of conversations about femininity, fantasy and gender, Lissa Rivera’s ongoing series of photographic portraits depict her male partner dressed as a woman. Settings and garb borrowed heavily from visual culture, cinema and art history seek to upend the cliched notion of femininity as a weakness. In the work, gender is an opportunity for exploration, rather than a limitation imposed. The artist talk will be followed by the screening of Czech director Vera Chytilová’s 1966 film Daisies, which Rivera cites as being influential to the evolution of her “Beautiful Boy” series.
Created in the mid-1960s during a brief window of loosened restrictions that enabled visual experimentation in Communist Czechoslovakia, Daisies is widely regarded as the most influential film from what is now named the Czech New Wave. Vera Chytilová’s absurdist farce is perhaps the New Wave’s most anarchic film, and is widely considered one of the great works of feminist cinema. Described as Dadaist, madcap and radical, this wildly experimental narrative film follows the misadventures of two brash young women (Marie I and Marie II) as they embark on a series of outlandish antiestablishment pranks and refuse to play by the rules of the patriarchal culture around them.
5:00 pm: Galleries open for Art After Dark
5:30 pm: Artist Talk with Lissa Rivera and BJ Lillis
6:30 pm: Daisies screening, $5 donation
Art After Dark is free for Members, $10 suggested donation for non-members. Light refreshments and a cash bar will be available. Details are available at www.newportartmuseum.org.