Welcome To This House (2015), is a feature documentary film on the homes and loves of poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), about life in the shadows, and the anxiety of art making without full self-disclosure.  Hammer filmed in Bishop’s ‘best loved homes’ in the US, Canada, and Brazil believing that buildings and landscapes bear cultural memories.  Interviews with poets, friends, and scholars provide “missing documents” of numerous female lovers. Bishop’s intimate poetry is beautifully performed by Kathleen Chalfant and with the creative music composition by Joan La Barbara brings Bishop into our lives with new facts and unexpected details.

Please join us for a screening and Q&A with Barbara Hammer at The Loft Cinema.

Barbara Hammer is a visual artist primarily working in film and video. Her work reveals and celebrates marginalized peoples whose stories have not been told. Her cinema is multi-leveled and engages an audience viscerally and intellectually with the goal of activating them to make social change. She has been honored with five retrospectives in the last three years: the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Tate Modern in London, Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Toronto International Film Festival and Kunsthalle Oslo in Norway. Her book Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life was published in 2010 by The Feminist Press at the City University of New York. 

She teaches at the Euorpean Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Her work is represented by the gallery KOW in Berlin, Germany. COmpany (formerly Capricious88) will exhibit her drawings and paintings in a one-woman show in New York City opening in September of 2015.

Barbara Hammer lives and works in New York City and Kerhonkson, New York.

This screening is presented with support from the UA Institute for LGBT Studies, Department of Gender & Women's Studies, Lesbian Looks Film Series, Exploded View Cinema, and Joe & Janet Hollander.