February 22, 6:30 - 8:30 PM

EFA Studios
323 West 39th St, 3rd Floor, New York, NY
Free Admission

Please join us for a special screening of Billy Gerard Frank's film Second Eulogy: Mind the Gap which premiered at the Venice Biennale 2019 Grenada National Pavilion. The film is 40 min long and the artist will participate in a moderated talk after the screening.

Billy Gerard Frank’s film Second Eulogy: Mind the Gap is an autobiographical deconstruction and repositioning of his father’s life revealed in an old suitcase of letters and mementos and his own memories of confusion and desire. Fiction and non-fiction interweave to conjure an abstract story of intertwined lives: of Frank’s father, and Frank’s personal experiences of growing up as a gay teen in Grenada. Front and center are death and mortality, truth vs reality, what the adult said, what was said on the television and radio in 1983, what is remembered, and what one chooses to forget. Memories of confusion and the desires the first time a man laid his hands on my body, my sense of abandonment—the gap of time.

Due to limited space, RSVP is at capacity.

Agenda

6:30 - 6:45 PM - Welcome
6:45 - 6:50 PM - Artist Introduction
6:50 - 7:30 PM - Screening
7:30 - 8:00 PM - Discussion with Billy Gerard Frank and Alex Fialho
8:00 - 8:30 PM - Reception 

Billy Gerard Frank born in Grenada, West Indies is Multi-Media Artist and Filmmaker. Frank's research-based practices interrogate personal issues dealing with race, exile, memory, global politics, and post-colonial and queer decoloniality, challenging normative discourses around them while imagining and creating counter-histories. His works have been exhibited and screened in group and solo shows in museums and institutions like Brooklyn Museum (2020); Butler Institute Of American Art, and international film festivals like the Berlinale, and Sundance, and are also in several private collections and institutions like the National Academy Museum of Fine Arts and Design, Farnsworth Art Museum, among others. He represented Grenada in the 59th La Biennale di Venezia (2022) and was also one of the artists in the collective who represented the island at the 58th La Biennale di Venezia (2019). He is a recipient of many grants, including the Ford Foundation Grant for his La Biennale Di Venezia project (2022) and recipient of the Creative Capital Award in 2024, “Wild Futures: Art, Culture, Impact.”

Frank is also one the founders of the Nova Frontier Film Festival & Lab which showcases and incubates the works of filmmakers and artists from and about the Global African Diaspora, The Middle East, and Latin America, and is also a Lecturer in Directing and Design in the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale and has lectured at universities like NYU, the School of Visual Arts, and York University.

Alex Fialho is a PhD candidate in Yale University’s Combined PhD program in the History of Art and African American Studies. As an art historian and curator, Fialho’s scholarship focuses on modern and contemporary art, Black feminist and queer theory, and AIDS cultural studies. Fialho identifies as a white, queer, HIV-negative, cisgender person (he/they). Their work in community intends to be in service and support of queer, femme, Black and anti-racist creative practices. Prior to graduate school, Fialho worked as Programs Director of the New York-based arts non-profit Visual AIDS from 2014–2019. Since 2016, with collaborator Melissa Levin, Fialho has stewarded the legacy of artist Michael Richards, curating the traveling museum retrospective "Michael Richards: Are You Down?” most recently on display at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Fialho is a 2023–2024 Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies Fellow in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

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