Paul and Ellen Casey Wagner, the duo behind “Georgia O’Keeffe: The Brightness of Light,” a new feature documentary film about the life and art of the American icon, will be in Lincoln on Friday, April 11 to attend two special events at Sheldon Museum of Art and The Mary Riepma Ross Media Arts Center as part of the Geske Cinema Showcase.
A single ticket of $35 general admission, $25 for Friends of The Ross and Sheldon Art Association members, and $5 for UNL students will admit you to two special events that evening. First, the Wagners will attend a reception from 5-7 p.m. at Sheldon. The event will include an opportunity to view three Georgia O’Keeffe artworks from the museum’s collection. The reception will then be followed by a 7:30 p.m. screening of the film at The Ross, where the Wagners will present a Q&A after the screening. Reservations are required. Visit https://theross.org for details and tickets.
The Geske Cinema Showcase, sponsored by The Friends of the Ross, is a program that allows The Ross to host filmmakers and their film at the Ross, while also spending time with students in the Lincoln Public Schools’ Arts and Humanities Program, the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts’ IGNITE colloquium, and the Arts Alive in Nebraska class in the Hixson-Lied College.
“The Friends of the Ross has been a major sponsor of the Santa Fe International Film Festival for 15 years,” said Laurie Richards, interim programming manager at The Ross. “Board members, including myself, have had many opportunities to meet filmmakers and see their work during this festival. When I saw this film at the Santa Fe Festival in October, I knew right away it was meant for us to show and for Sheldon to be involved. When I was a UNL student, I worked at Sheldon and handled their O’Keeffe painting and her works on paper responding to various exhibitions and installations. Sheldon mounted an exhibition in 1980 that dealt with O’Keeffe’s thematic concerns, most fully recognized in the 20s and 30s through oils, watercolors and drawings. It just seemed obvious the movie and Sheldon were all right here together, so it needed to be done.”
The film was written and directed by Wagner and produced by Wagner and Casey Wagner. The film features music by Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch, narration by Hugh Dancy and Claire Danes as the Voice of O’Keeffe.
Wagner has produced and directed more than 40 documentary and dramatic films over a 40-year career, including “The Stone Carvers,” which won the Academy Award for Best Short Documentary. He teaches screenwriting and film directing at the University of Virginia.
The Wagners reside in Charlottesville, Virginia. They are the principal officers in American Focus, Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to the creation of independent films about subjects in American culture.
Charlottesville is what initially connected them to O’Keeffe.
“We live in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the Fralin art museum at the University of Virginia did a small exhibit based on her time in Charlottesville back in the early 20th century, and we were just blown away,” Casey Wagner said. “We had no idea how influential that time had been to her.”
O’Keeffe was there during the summers from 1912-1916.
“Her mother was running a boarding house for UVA students,” Casey Wagner said. “Of course, at the time, women weren’t admitted to UVA, but during the summer, they could take summer school classes. She took an art class, and it completely changed her life. She had stopped painting for nearly four years, and it just completely revitalized her interest. It was just key for the rest of her life.”
The Wagners thought initially that they could make a short film about that time period in her life, which few people know about.
“Then when we started doing research, we realized there hadn’t been a major film done on O’Keeffe since the 1970s,” she said. “We just decided this deserves a bigger, longer film.”
O’Keeffe is widely revered as the “Mother of American Modernism” and one of the greatest female artists of the 20th century. She exploded on the New York art scene in the 1920s with her paintings of flowers, bones and the beauty of nature. Nude photographs of her taken by her lover, Alfred Stieglitz, shocked the public and contributed to the perception that her paintings were sexually charged.
In the 1970s, O’Keeffe famously isolated in the New Mexico desert and emerged as an iconic role model for second-wave feminists.
Wagner also noted that 20 years after O’Keeffe died in 1986, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University released 20,000 pages of letters between O’Keeffe and Stieglitz.
“Also since 1977, there had been a huge number of exhibits, books, articles and just a lot of research because what had happened was she was well known and famous throughout her life,” he said. “But the scholarship about her didn’t really kick in until the 1970s when second-wave feminists across the country rediscovered O’Keeffe, so she went from being an artist to really becoming an American pop icon. Over the 50 years since the other film in 1977, they created all this research and study and exhibitions, and that became the basis for our film that includes lots of material, especially based on the letters that really give you a view of O’Keeffe that wasn’t available to the filmmaker in 1977, even though that film is fabulous because it has O’Keeffe. They’re quite different films, but they’re both kind of necessary to understanding O’Keeffe.”
One of the highlights of their film, for Casey Wagner, is their filming in New Mexico.
“The land in the New Mexico landscape is absolutely stunning,” she said. “And you can see why she just fell in love with it and couldn’t live anywhere else really after that. It was a thrill for me to go off and for the filming we did, and I think the way that it is woven in the film with her artwork is very dramatic and very compelling to people. We’re very proud of that.”
Wagner added, “We bill the film as being about the life and art of Georgia O’Keeffe, but really when you get into the film, you can’t even separate those two because what she created in her art is so embedded in her life experiences. For example, she was born in and grew up on the prairie of Wisconsin, and she grew up on a farm, her parents were farmers. That idea, that sense of space, came natural to her growing up there, and that carries all the way over into New Mexico, where she paints these lands and these ravishing landscapes of the land. So much of her artwork is just about her life, and of course, her life is about her artwork. Her life and her art are completely intertwined, and it’s part of what makes the story interesting and what makes it appealing to people because just the artwork gives you such a deep insight into who she was as a person.”
O’Keeffe had a passion for both art and life.
“It’s not even a film just about painting. It’s about art and about all the arts—music, painting, dance, poetry, writing,” he said. “She was so passionate about creativity and life that what she did on the canvas just sort of radiates out into all aspects of her life, and the conversations that she had with Stieglitz and others and what was said about her art is really much bigger than just painting or a painting technique. It’s really about how to create a life, and that in which art is such an expressive part of who we are as human beings.”
Casey Wagner said there is one myth they hope to dispel with the film.
“O’Keeffe definitely, in some ways, cultivated an image of herself as sort of a recluse in the desert and very austere and doesn’t really want to see people,” she said. “And that definitely was part of her, but she also was an incredibly social person. She traveled widely, and so she had a huge circle of friends and so much broader and more diverse kind of life than most people ever had imagined.”
The Wagners earned the support of every major O’Keeffe scholar and biographer and the cooperation of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, which controls the licensing of O’Keeffe’s art and archival materials.
“This unprecedented level of support from the O’Keeffe ‘world’ has allowed us to create a film that is detailed and authoritative,” Wagner said in a director’s statement.
The Wagners are enjoying sharing their film with audiences, like the event at The Ross, and the film is getting positive reviews.
“It’s really, really remarkable how many people come up to us afterward and say, I just can’t even tell you what this film meant to me,” Casey Wagner said. “It somehow really makes people think deeply about their own lives and living them. It’s just really struck a chord with people. It’s not only broadening their understanding of O’Keeffe’s life, but it’s just kind of an existential kind of moment for them and discussing their own lives.”
Richards is looking forward to the Wagners’ visit to Lincoln.
“The Wagners understand the value of the arts and the culture surrounding fusing their film with O’Keeffe’s art,” she said. “The arts are rewarding and exciting, and combining the various elements, this wonderful documentary of O’Keeffe’s life and the fact that the Sheldon has three extraordinary examples of her work, was just serendipity. We are all excited to have them here and to bring their film to the University and to the community.”
For more information on the film or to view a trailer, visit https://GeorgiaOKeeffeFilm.com.
The film will run at The Ross from April 11-24.