Modern Mondays: An Evening with Suzan Pitt

Suzan Pitt’s wildly imaginative and comically sinister animation has dazzled MoMA audiences for nearly 45 years. The award-winning artist and filmmaker returns to introduce the New York premiere of five newly restored films as well as her most recent work. This career-encompassing Modern Mondays is presented in partnership with the Academy Film Archive as a featured event in MoMA’s To Save and Project festival. Highlights include Pitt’s earliest 16mm films, Bowl, Theatre, Garden, Marble (1970) and Crocus (1971); her magisterially oneiric Asparagus (1979); excerpts from her unfinished ESO-S (c. 1980), a hybrid of live action and animation; and Joy Street (1995), an exuberant expression of desire, defiance, and suffering. Also included are her two most recent films, Visitation(2011), an alchemical experiment in photogenic drawing inspired “by hearing wolves crying and simultaneously reading H. P. Lovecraft,” and Pinball (2013), a deliriously colorful and kinetic piece of abstract visual music set to composer George Antheil’s radical 1953 reworking of his Ballet méchanique.