SCHEDULE OF UPCOMING SCREENINGS
MOCA Artist Film Series is presented by The Edward F. Limato Foundation.
All screenings take place in the Ahmanson Auditorium at MOCA Grand
Saturday, May 24, 2025, 3pm
Harmony Holiday
Abide With Me, 2024, 38 min
Free with RSVP
Abide With Me (2024) is a short film that meditates on Black artistic identity before fame through a close look at the life of Thelonious Monk. At the age of seventeen, already serious about composing and playing piano, Monk left his home in Manhattan’s San Juan Hill to tour with an evangelist. From 1934–37 he played piano accompaniment to her faith healings. No one heard from him for three years. Found video recordings layered beneath Fred Moten’s voice-over of a text written by Holiday piece together these three years in the groundbreaking musician’s life prior to becoming a signed artist. The film opens outward from collaged archival material depicting the specificities of Monk’s life in less visible spaces. Holiday intersperses other clips of renowned artists like John Coltrane, Amiri Baraka, Lauryn Hill, Sun Ra, Tina Turner, Nina Simone, and Azealia Banks, not only on stage, but elsewhere in moments before and between performances when personality might slip a persona’s grip—or, as Holiday’s film narrates, “where the white gaze does not know how to look.” Her conception of the “backstage” in this work materializes with a close look of a soon-legendary Monk in a nascent space of discovery, reinstating, as Holiday explains, “the hero’s journey of the Black performer as one that is defined by unseen glories, not spectacularized ones.”
Harmony Holiday will be present for a post-screening conversation with moderator Robin D.G. Kelley.
Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, and experimental filmmaker whose work surveys music, ancestry, death and rebirth, and celebrity. She is the author of 5 collections of poetry including Maafa (2022), and also curates an archive of griot poetics and a related performance and conversation series at LA’s 2220 Arts + Archives. At the core of her practice is a pursuit of visual and literary vocabularies that might best express the melancholic hope endemic to Black American social life. As Holiday navigates the depths of Black remembrance and loss, she sets her sights on the relationship between “the new”, “the archival,” and the spaces between them that defy linear time. She treats these energies as collectively improvising ensembles in which prose and poetry sit by turns comfortable and chaotic, next to images cribbed from Black artistic and private life. Most recently she has received awards from the Silver and Rabkin Foundations, and is completing a memoir Love is War for Miles, a biography of Abbey Lincoln, and a collection of poems.
Saturday, June 7, 2025, 3pm
Genesis P-Orridge
S/he is Still Her/e: The Official Genesis P-Orridge Documentary, 2024, 98 min
Free with RSVP
Genesis P-Orridge lived their art to the extreme. A pioneering musician, avant-garde artist, spiritual explorer, and gender revolutionary, Genesis has been featured in films and videos, but never the full story, never this intimate, until now. In this authorized but raw and personal documentary, award-winning director David Charles Rodrigues (Gay Chorus Deep South) documents the final year of P-Orridge’s existence as they grapple with mortality and, in the process, reveal the many sacrifices and ultimate payoffs of a life that transcended boundaries. Featuring William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Timothy Leary, Alice Genese (Psychic TV), David J (Bauhaus/Love and Rockets), Nepalese monks, African witch doctors, and a special cameo by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, plus never-before-seen archival treasures, including performances from Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV.
Genesse P-Orridge joins director David Charles Rodrigues and artist Ron Athey for a post-screening conversation.
Genesse P-Orridge is the CEO and Creative Director of The Estate of Genesis P-Orridge. In her role overseeing her father’s legacy, she considers herself a guardian. Since taking on this responsibility, she has co-edited Nonbinary: A Memoir, Genesis P-Orridge’s posthumously published autobiography, with Abrams Books. She served as an executive producer for S/he Is Still Her/e: The Official Genesis P-Orridge Documentary, in which she also appeared. Genesse was interviewed by The New York Times about her work on the exhibition We Are But One at Pioneer Works at Red Hook Labs, which focused on her father’s complex and expansive Pandrogyne Project. Her sculpture installation Altared State, dedicated to her father and honoring Genesis’s influence as a parent, was part of this exhibit and featured in The New York Times. She has also collaborated with clothing brands such as Pleasures and Online Ceramics, releasing limited collections inspired by Genesis’s life, art, and music.
Saturday, June 21, 2025, 3pm
Sharon Hayes
Ricerche: four, 2024, 120 min
Free with RSVP
Ricerche: four, 2024 is composed of interviews with three groups of LGBTQIA elders, filmed in Philadelphia, PA, Dowelltown, TN, and in Los Angeles, CA. Through joyful, illuminating, and deeply moving conversations, participants reflect on their relationships to community, family, activism, sex, sexuality, and the shifting political landscape. While not all participants identify as elders, each speaks from deep, lived experience that shapes their understanding of the social, political, and economic promises and possibilities — as well as the obstacles — facing them and their communities. These conversations make an inspired proposition for the importance of intergenerational collaboration, dialogue and care. Ricerche: four is one part of a 4-part video series that steps off Pier Paolo Pasolini’s brilliant 1964 film, Comizi d’Amore, to stage a contemporary inquiry into the “sexual problem” in the US.
Sharon Hayes will be present for a post-screening conversation with participants from the film.
Sharon Hayes is an artist who works with video, performance, sound, and public sculpture to reveal the intersections of history, politics, and speech. Her work challenges reductive historical narratives and reactivates overlooked pathways for developing alternative understandings of today’s political landscape. Hayes’ practice engages in dialogue and collective resonance with a diverse range of actions, voices, and practices that resist normative behaviors, unjust social contracts, and rigid timelines—opening up new possibilities for how we live and relate to one another in the world.
Her work sustains a distinct and vital commitment to performance and to collaboration and is devoted to the radical possibilities of non-normative occupation of public space and in holding public space as a site for unpredictable and unregulated encounters. Hayes has had numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York (2014), the Tanya Leighton Gallery in Berlin (2013), the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2012), and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid (2012). Her work has also been exhibited at the Venice Biennale (2013), the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. She is the recipient of many awards and grants, including a Pew Fellowship (2016), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2014), the Alpert Award in Visual Arts (2013), an Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2013), and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship (2007). She currently teaches in the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania.
Saturday, July 26th, 2025, 3pm
Billy Woodberry
And when I die, I won’t stay dead, 2016, 89 min
Free with RSVP
Legendary Beat figure Bob Kaufman considered poetry a key to human survival, an idea made all the more legitimate by the longevity it’s granted: the things he saw, heard, tasted, felt, and, most of all, thought were preserved in his work. Embodying the spirit of those efforts, the new film from Billy Woodberry, director of the landmark Bless Their Little Hearts, is perhaps the closest we can come to knowing the man and his time.
The picture is alternately dense and fleet in its assemblage of archival footage and photos, interviews with contemporaries, and readings from the likes of Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis. And when I die’scumulative effect is to understand a familiar, over-exposed era with new eyes, thanks in no small part to the honest assessment provided by some of New York’s Beat generation some half-century removed. Its soundtrack (with selections by the likes of Billie Holiday and Ornette Coleman) hums, the participants are lively in their recollection of the man and his words, and the pace of its montage is energetic — a whirlwind procession that will leave viewers with a vivid understanding of Kaufman and his work.
Harryette Mullen, poet and professor in the Department of English at UCLA, joins MOCA Senior Curator, Bennett Simpson, for a poetry reading and post-screening conversation.
Billy Woodberry is one of the leading figures of the LA Rebellion—the new wave of Black American independent cinema that emerged from UCLA’s film school in the ‘70s and ’80s. Woodberry created one of the movement’s defining works with his neorealist masterpiece Bless Their Little Hearts, an aching portrait of an ordinary family buckling under marital and economic pressures. Since then, Woodberry has forged his own distinctive brand of archival documentary filmmaking in searching, politically trenchant works like And when I die, I won’t stay dead and his latest, Mário, a portrait of the Pan-African thinker and activist Mário Pinto de Andrade, founder of the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA).
