Frame to Frame is a film series that places movies in dialogue with paintings. This year, guest curator, Carlos Valladares paired film with pieces in the exhibition Glenn Ligon: I Am Somebody that represent some of the most iconic works of contemporary art giant Glenn Ligon.

For the first time in Peoria, the works of Glenn Ligon (b. 1960) are exhibited in Glenn Ligon: I Am Somebody, an intimate exhibition centering around a work on loan from the Art Bridges Foundation. The work “Untitled (I Am Somebody)” from Ligon’s famous Door Paintings of the early 1990s comes from the arguably the most impacting series of his career. These early oil on canvas works solidified Ligon as a unique force within the contemporary art world and fortified the canon of American art with the African American struggle for identity and point of view.

The cinema is the quintessential artistic medium of the 20th century; it is the meeting point of literature, poetry, theater, painting, photography, essay, music, and dance. Yet those who look at, make, or study movies have a tendency to segregate it from the other arts. This curated selection is meant to place a diverse array of films specifically focused on the Black experience in conversation with the highly impactful works of Glenn Ligon, which are based on the words of literary masters like James Baldwin and Zora Neal Hurston.

Frame to Frame is guest curated by Carlos Valladares, a writer, critic, and curator based in New York City. He has written for Gagosian Quarterly, n+1, the San Francisco Chronicle, and others. He received his Bachelor's from Stanford University in Film and American Studies, and is currently a doctoral candidate in Film and Art History at Yale, studying French cinema of the 1960s. He has taught on such topics as Latin American film and literature, the French New Wave, screenwriting, Classical Hollywood.

Carlos Valladares

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