One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting

USA/Germany, 2021, Tacita Dean

British artist Tacita Dean has long been an ardent advocate for analog film. The latest in her series of 16mm artists’ portraits profiles two American painters who share a birthday, but 50 years apart: Venezuelan-born Luchita Hurtado and Ethiopian-born FRONT 2022 participant Julie Mehretu. Dean’s camera captures the two women as they discuss their lives and work (and other topics ranging from childhood and motherhood to immigration and climate change) during a face-to-face conversation recorded early in 2020, the year Mehretu would turn 50 and Hurtado would have turned 100. (She died a few months before reaching that milestone). Hurtado’s artist son, Matt Mullican, also appears in this work that was made to be shown as a continuous loop in a gallery setting, but will be shown theatrically one time here. Cleveland premiere. 16mm. 51 min. Admission free; part of FRONT International 2022: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, 7/16-10/2, www.frontart.org