Videoteca

James Rosenquist Up Close 2019
James Rosenquist was one of the leading figures in the pivotal Pop Art movement. The film follows the trajectory of the artist's career from his 1960's juxtaposed images of American life, to larger concerns on politics and the environment, and finally to kaleidoscopic depictions of galaxies and universes far beyond our perception.

On The Wings of Brancusi 2018
Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), the most important sculptor of the first half of the 20th century, has been a fascinating and enduring influence on a generation of contemporary American artists. Insights into Brancusi’s legacy are presented by Carl Andre, Lynda Benglis, Ellsworth Kelly, Martin Puryear, Richard Serra, and Joel Shapiro, with additional commentary on Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Roy Lichtenstein, Isamu Noguchi,and Claes Oldenburg. In 1995, Anne d’Harnoncourt, Director Emeritus of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, asked Checkerboard to document the PMA’s acclaimed retrospective on Brancusi for the Museum’s archive. The resulting footage became the genesis of the documentary.

Inventing Cornell Tech: The Vision 2015
Ground has been broken on Roosevelt Island for New York City's newest academic campus - the sustainable, high tech home of Cornell Tech, a radical reconception of graduate level engineering study for the information age. Over the next three years, a stunning complex of architecture and landscape will emerge - a unique hub of high tech research and entrepreneurial activity. Before every great piece of architecture, there is a unique journey, and since 2013, Checkerboard has been documenting the journey of Cornell Tech as it rises on Roosevelt Island. This film tells the story of how political visionaries, educational innovators, architectural designers and philanthropic benefactors have come together to create something that will have an incredible impact on New York City for decades to come.

Jeff Koons: The Whitney Retrospective 2014
The Whitney Museum of American Art presented the landmark exhibition Jeff Koons: A Retrospective from June 27 to October 19, 2014. It was the largest, most comprehensive survey of Koons’s art ever assembled, spanning four decades of his career and displaying 145 works from every series, including 13 new pieces exhibited publicly for the first time. The film follows Koons and Whitney Chief Curator, Scott Rothkopf, who conceived and organized the show, through every gallery of the exhibition. In addition, insightful interviews with Adam Weinberg, the Whitney’s Director, Robert Storr, Dean Emeritus of the Yale School of Art, and Michelle Kuo, Editor of Artforum, help to deepen the investigation into Koon’s art and process.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro: Reimagining Lincoln Center and the High Line 2013
Diller Scofidio + Renfro has long been at the forefront of design with provocative exhibitions that blurred the boundaries between art and architecture. This film captures their extraordinary evolution and unique process in reimagining the public identities of Lincoln Center and the once derelict High Line railroad tracks.

James Salter: A Sport and a Pastime 2011
This 54-minute documentary traces the writer James Salter's lifelong love affair with France, unforgettably expressed in his 1967 masterpiece, A Sport and a Pastime. Salter's own reflections on his writing and life offer rich insights for reader and writer alike.

Ray Kappe: California Modern Master - Forty Years of Modular Evolution 2009
Explorations in 21st Century American Architecture Series: Ray Kappe has long been a cult figure in the architectural scene in and around Los Angeles. In 1972, he founded the influential, avant garde Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-ARC), where many of the younger-generation architects have studied or taught.

Jean Nouvel: Guthrie Theater 2008
French architect Jean Nouvel has long been known in Europe for his bold, shimmering glass museums, concert halls, and high-rise towers. Now the much-acclaimed new Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which opened in 2006, is displaying Nouvel's remarkable talents to an American public. With a cantilevered lobby that extends 175 feet over the Mississippi River, the dark midnight-blue, aluminum-paneled structure has captivated the culturally conscious city and helped spur the rejuvenation of a once-industrial waterfront. In the tour, Nouvel takes us through three distinctive theaters he designed for the Guthrie, and out onto the cantilevered deck to view the legendary river that inspired the boldly elevated design.

Steven Holl: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Bloch Building 2008
In this enlightening visit, Holl takes us through the galleries where contemporary art is displayed beneath curving vaults admitting daylight, a tour which effectively demonstrates the convergence of space, time, and architecture.

Rudy Burckhardt: Man in the Woods 2003
A detailed look at a remarkable artist who died in 1999 at age 85. Aspects of Burckhardt's work in photography, film, and painting are examined in interviews with Rudy Burckhardt, painter Yvonne Jacquette, and curators Robert Storr (former Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture, Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Brian Wallis (Chief Curator, International Center of Photography, New York). In his studio in New York, Burckhardt discusses his photography and its significance within its historical framework. In the woods near his summer home in Maine, the viewer sees Burckhardt's easel and painting in front of the scene he is depicting. Whether in city or country, Burckhardt appreciated and transformed the chaos he discovered.

In Search of Clarity: The Architecture of Gwathmey Siegel 1995
Charles Gwathmey has held steadfast to the spirit of modernism in his architecture from the day he successfully built his parents' home in 1967 based on the theories of Le Corbusier and American individualism. Avoiding the nostalgia of fashionable postmodernism throughout the eighties, Gwathmey partnered with Robert Siegel, and their firm continues to create innovative houses, corporate, institutional and university buildings across America. This documentary ranges from the deMenil villa on the dunes of Easthampton to their Guggenheim Museum addition. We hear from such leading architects as Philip Johnson and Peter Eisenman, and from filmmaker Steven Spielberg, who describes how a journey through a Gwathmey Siegel house creates the same sense of drama as a well-made movie.

Horst 1988
We enter the life of Horst, and see the world of fashion photography evolve from the 1930s to the 1980s through his work and stories.

Julie Mehretu: Palimpsest Release date not available
The film traces Ethiopian abstract artist Julie Mehretu’s preparations for her 20 year career retrospective, leading up to the installation and realization of the survey at LACMA in 2019. The artist offers extensive commentary on her work, her process, and the chronology of her career, from her graduate work at RISD (1996–97) to her current expansive multi-layered canvases.

Thom Mayne: U.S. Federal Office Building, San Francisco Release date not available
The Pritzker-prize winning architect Thom Mayne has been identified with muscular, bold, steel-and-glass design since the founding of his firm, Morphosis, in 1971. Through a tour of the Federal Office Building in San Francisco, Mayne proves that innovative and sustainable architecture can be introduced successfully into a building type typically considered predictable and boring.

KieranTimberlake: Loblolly House & Cellophane House Release date not available
KieranTimberlake, an architectural firm based in Philadelphia, is a recognized leader of the "green" architecture movement in the U.S.As this film illustrates, its founders Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake have been developing innovative means to combine sustainable design principles with off-site construction for the mass customization of houses.

Studio Gang Architects: Aqua Tower Release date not available
The film not only examines the thinking behind Aqua which makes the building's presence against the skyline so striking, but takes visitors to the award-winning "Brick Weave House" (2009) in a Chicago residential neighborhood, where brick walls form a large open-air "screened porch" at the house's front.

Peter Eisenman: University of Phoenix Stadium for the Arizona Cardinals Release date not available
Seminal theoretician and influential architect, Peter Eisenman is also an irrepressible sports fanatic. In this revealing look into his design for an iconic new home for the Arizona Cardinals football team, Eisenman takes us on a tour of the stadium that represents the culmination of nearly a decade of his work on this visionary sports facility.

John Richardson: The Art of Picasso 1927 - 1973 Release date not available
We are in the midst of production on a one-hour film on seminal art historian John Richardson, and his work on the fourth and final volume of his biography on Picasso. Richardson shares his insights and observations on Picasso, whom he first met in the 1950s, with Shelley Wanger, his editor at Alfred A. Knopf (a division of Random House, Inc.).