Paul Wagner and Ellen Casey Wagner, the duo behind “Georgia O’Keeffe: The Brightness of Light,” a new feature documentary film about the life and art of the American icon, will be in Lincoln on April 11 to attend two special events at the Sheldon Museum of Art and the Mary Riepma Ross Media Arts Center as part of the Geske Cinema Showcase.
A single ticket of $35 general admission, $25 for Friends of The Ross and Sheldon Art Association members, and $5 for UNL students will admit you to two special events that evening.
The Wagners will attend a reception from 5-7 p.m. at Sheldon. The event will include an opportunity to view three Georgia O’Keeffe artworks from the museum’s collection. The reception will then be followed by a 7:30 p.m. screening of the film at The Ross, where the Wagners will present a Q&A after the screening. Reservations are required. Visit the Ross website for details and tickets.
The Geske Cinema Showcase, sponsored by Friends of the Ross, is a program that allows the Ross to host filmmakers and their films, while also spending time with students in the Lincoln Public Schools’ Arts and Humanities Program, the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts’ IGNITE colloquium and the Arts Alive in Nebraska class in the Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts.
“The Friends of the Ross has been a major sponsor of the Santa Fe International Film Festival for 15 years,” said Laurie Richards, interim programming manager at the Ross. “Board members, including myself, have had many opportunities to meet filmmakers and see their work during this festival. When I saw this film at the Santa Fe Festival in October, I knew right away it was meant for us to show and for Sheldon to be involved.
"When I was a UNL student, I worked at Sheldon and handled their O’Keeffe painting and her works on paper responding to various exhibitions and installations. Sheldon mounted an exhibition in 1980 that dealt with O’Keeffe’s thematic concerns, most fully recognized in the 20s and 30s through oils, watercolors and drawings. It just seemed obvious the movie and Sheldon were all right here together, so it needed to be done.”
The film was written and directed by Wagner and produced by Wagner and Casey Wagner. The film features music by Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch, narration by Hugh Dancy and Claire Danes as the voice of O’Keeffe.
Wagner has produced and directed more than 40 documentary and dramatic films over a 40-year career, including “The Stone Carvers,” which won the Academy Award for Best Short Documentary. He teaches screenwriting and film directing at the University of Virginia.
The Wagners reside in Charlottesville, Virginia. They are the principal officers in American Focus, Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to the creation of independent films about subjects in American culture.
O’Keeffe is widely revered as the “Mother of American Modernism” and one of the greatest female artists of the 20th century. She exploded on the New York art scene in the 1920s with her paintings of flowers, bones and the beauty of nature. Nude photographs of her taken by her lover, Alfred Stieglitz, shocked the public and contributed to the perception that her paintings were sexually charged.
In the 1970s, O’Keeffe famously isolated in the New Mexico desert and emerged as an iconic role model for second-wave feminists.
Casey Wagner said there is one myth they hope to dispel with the film.
“O’Keeffe definitely, in some ways, cultivated an image of herself as sort of a recluse in the desert and very austere and doesn’t really want to see people,” Casey Wagner said. “And that definitely was part of her, but she also was an incredibly social person. She traveled widely, and so she had a huge circle of friends and so much broader and more diverse kind of life than most people ever had imagined.”
The Wagners earned the support of every major O’Keeffe scholar and biographer and the cooperation of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, which controls the licensing of O’Keeffe’s art and archival materials.
“This unprecedented level of support from the O’Keeffe ‘world’ has allowed us to create a film that is detailed and authoritative,” Wagner said in a director’s statement.
For more information on the film or to view a trailer, visit the film's website.
The film will run at the Ross from April 11-24.
