Fraenkel Gallery and Metrograph Turn Artist Taste Into a Six-Film Series
A gallery known for photography and contemporary art is now programming cinema. Fraenkel Gallery, based in San Francisco, has partnered with Metrograph for Fraenkel Gallery Presents, a six-film series in which artists represented by the gallery each selected one title to screen from May 8–17, with select encore screenings to follow.
The series opens with Carrie Mae Weems’s choice, No Country for Old Men (2007). Weems will introduce the May 8 screening, and director Joel Coen will join the audience for a Q&A afterward. The selection fits neatly with the artist’s long-running interest in power, violence, and the construction of American mythologies, according to the gallery’s description.
The rest of the lineup extends the same idea of personal, artist-driven programming. Martine Gutierrez selected Princess Mononoke (1997), the Hayao Miyazaki film released by Studio Ghibli. Wardell Milan chose Hereditary (2018), while Hiroshi Sugimoto selected The Face of Another (1996). Lee Friedlander’s pick is North by Northwest (1959), and Nan Goldin selected The Naked Kiss (1964).
Fraenkel Gallery Presents began in 2024 as a film festival at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco. Christian Whitworth, the gallery’s director, said the project has been “a wonderful way to bring people together in person while supporting independent cinema,” and described it as a series curated entirely by visual artists that offers “an unexpected look into the interests and influences of artists who love cinema.”
This New York edition is tied to Fraenkel Gallery’s pop-up exhibition Whipped Cream & Other Delights at Ortuzar in Tribeca, which runs May 9–21. The six participating artists will also appear in that exhibition. Inge de Leeuw, Metrograph’s director of programming, said the theater was “thrilled by the opportunity to collaborate,” noting that the San Francisco version showed “an ambitious curation of films and artistic influences” and that Metrograph audiences would respond to the screenings and related conversations.
Proceeds from the series will benefit Metrograph, giving the project a practical purpose as well as a cultural one. In a season crowded with exhibition openings and institutional programming, Fraenkel Gallery Presents stands out for treating film not as a side note to visual art, but as another form of artistic self-portraiture.
