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Many of Hollywood’s biggest names are currently passing through London where they are set to debut some of this year’s buzziest awards titles as part of the London Film Festival. The most sought-after cinema ticket among the city’s cool kids, however, is an intimate screening hosted this evening by an art gallery.
The Serpentine, a contemporary art space usually found in the grand Kensington Gardens, an eyeshot away from the royal palace, has shuffled up the road to the Ciné Lumière to mount the first expansive UK survey of work made by the American artist-filmmaker Ja’Tovia Gary.
A Dallas native, Gary is best known internationally for her intellectually rich and inventive films and multimedia pieces that blend animation, documentary-style interviews, archival materials, and video clips from social media. Her work has been shown in galleries, museums, and cinema spaces. The Giverny Document (2019), a single-channel film that could be described as her breakout work, screened at Locarno, Ann Arbor, and AFI Fest. But an expended three-channel version of the work was also the subject of solo exhibitions at MoMA and the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York and Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
Gary’s latest film Quiet as It’s Kept (2023) debuted at BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia, Nashville Film Festival and AFI Fest before moving over to gallery spaces. Both those films will screen this evening in London alongside An Ecstatic Experience (2015).
“I consider myself an artist and a filmmaker,” Gary told us during a virtual interview a few weeks ahead of her London debut. She was calling from her new base in New Orleans, Louisiana and the conversation was wide-ranging and lengthy. We discuss Gary’s start as a filmmaker, her past career as an actor, and whether she is interested in working in Hollywood. Gary is repped by WME for film and television. Check out a condensed version of the conversation below.
DEADLINE: Ja’Tovia, how are you?
JA’TOVIA GARY: I’m doing well. I’m grateful. I keep saying that because I think it’s essential to stay grateful, humble, and positive even amid the storm as the church folks would say. Even when things seem upside down, it’s important to expect the best possible outcome. I’m in the middle of lots of transitions. I’ve just moved to New Orleans and I turned 40. I do this every few years. I take stock of everything. But I’m doing well. I can’t complain. I’m reading some interesting books.
DEADLINE: What are you reading?
GARY: I just finished revisiting Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. There’s this really cute bookstore near me called Baldwin & Co., named for James Baldwin. I’m waiting for them to receive Parable of the Talents, which is part two.
DEADLINE: I was first introduced to your work with ‘The Giverny Document’ in 2021, just after George Floyd was murdered and it was the height of COVID lockdowns. That was when it seemed your work really began to attract great attention. What did it feel like to in some ways become a famous artist during such an unstable time?
GARY: That’s an interesting question because, at that time, I had stepped back. I had left New York. I had been in New York for 16 years working tirelessly on my practice, trying to hone a voice and visual style. Then this work hit at a really interesting time. It felt like it hit when it was needed because of the myriad of social issues or disruptions that were going on. I was leaving New York City. I’d gone to Boston for Harvard’s Radcliffe fellowship. After that, something told me not to go back to New York. So to answer your question, I’d remove myself from the equation because I’m not famous. This isn’t fame. Beyonce, that’s fame. And I want nothing to do with that. Still, I do have a big personality. I’m very much a Leo and I’m ready for the applause. The flip side to being a public figure is that you must be ready for the critique. You have to be ready for people to examine you very closely and give their opinions on what you’re saying and doing. I wrestle with that often.
DEADLINE: I read you used to be an actor. Is that true? What did you act in?
GARY: I was doing theater. I had a few ridiculous commercials. I have a Walmart commercial. It was like a back-to-school supplies commercial. But I mostly did theater and worked on stuff like The Colored Museum by George C Wolfe and A Streetcar Named Desire, which is one of my favorite plays. It was high school stuff, but we were very serious about it because it was a performing arts high school and they were treating us like we were artists, so I’ve been taking the creative process and storytelling very seriously for a long time.
DEADLINE: You studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York? What was New York like back then? Was it a fruitful experience? Because I often speak with Black filmmakers and artists who tell me they feel quite isolated.
GARY: Both can be true at once. There are moments where I definitely feel like I’m in a silo. On the flip side, I was blessed to be part of several creative communities. I was Black and in Brooklyn at the time. Back then, Brooklyn was exploding with all types of creativity and cultural production and it was connected to the community and what people were bringing to the space. So if I’m a Black Texan, I’m bringing that and it coincides with folks from Saint Lucia and Jamaica. So it was an incredible opportunity to learn, experiment, and engage. That was Brooklyn then. I don’t know what it’s giving now. I will say that it wasn’t perfect in Brooklyn. It was very difficult at the time. There were all types of state violence, of course. Works like An Ecstatic Experience were a response to the things we were seeing in the streets.
DEADLINE: So you finish SVA and begin working in the film sphere. At what point do you turn your back on the film world and move to the gallery space?
GARY: People say that that’s what’s happened but I don’t see it as such. Maybe it’s because I’ve been quietly working on a film for a decade that people haven’t seen, so they think ‘Oh, she’s just doing these shows now.’ But I also make films. I made a film in 2023 called Quiet as It’s Kept which was screened at festivals. But it also screened in the art space. To me, it’s not about turning my back on the film space. It’s about opening myself up to all spaces and all opportunities for distribution. All opportunities for audience engagement. It’s about how else I can show up and take up space. I don’t feel like I’ve turned my back on the film industry. If anything, it feels like the film industry believes I’m just somewhere else doing something else. But I have been quietly editing a film for 10 years. I’ve been making films. I’m still very much making films. I consider myself an artist and a filmmaker.
DEADLINE: That’s such an interesting answer. Listening to you I’ve realized that my question was probably fueled by my frustration with what I consider the traditional film industry and where I’m now finding the most interesting work, which right now is the art world. Historically, so many of the more interesting film artists like Isaac Julien, John Akomrah, Steve McQueen, and now people like yourself are in the gallery.
GARY: And there are so many new ones coming up. Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, Garrett Bradley, Cauleen Smith, and Chris Harris, who just did the Whitney Biennial.
DEADLINE: Your work is concerned with Blackness. It’s Black art for Black audiences. How do you reconcile showing this work in the gallery space which is traditionally overwhelmingly white?
GARY: I reconcile it because whenever I put on a show it’s overwhelmingly Black, young, and often very queer. It becomes like a party to the point that when I turn and look at the gallery folk they’re visibly shocked. They’re like ‘Oh, she brought the hood’. Whenever I have a show it’s not going be the regular audience. It’s going to be my audience. So what happens is that this white space becomes increasingly black. So yes, the gallery is traditionally a white space. But when you bring in somebody as Black as I am, phenotypically and ontologically, then that space is going to be Black.
DEADLINE: How are you feeling about the show?
GARY: I’m really excited. This is my first time in London.
DEADLINE: Oh, wow.
GARY: I know, most people are shocked. It’s because I de-prioritized Europe for much of my life. When I started traveling, I was going to Africa and the Caribbean. Once I started going to Europe, I had to go to France repeatedly because I had a gallery there and I never got to London. I had the opportunity to go to London last year for Open City Docs but I got sick unfortunately with COVID. So I am incredibly excited for this trip.
DEADLINE: You signed with WME in 2022 for film and TV. Why did you do that? Are you interested in working in Hollywood?
GARY: I can’t talk about WME because my agent left. But Hollywood is of interest. I’m interested in a lot of things. I’m interested in seeing whether I can bring my particular brand of creative storytelling to whatever space I am in and how much autonomy, authority, and agency I will have to get my visions rendered. I have a critical view of the art world as well as the independent film world. To me, they’re all spaces of contention. They are critical terrains where we are wrestling. I see Hollywood much the same. It’s just so deeply entrenched. So there is an interest, but the interest only goes so far as will I be able to get what I see across untainted. Can I be unbought and unbossed in the space? I haven’t had a real chance to test that out yet. We’ll see though in the next few years.
