Three Quarters: The Cinema of Kevin Jerome Everson

Three Quarters: The Cinema of Kevin jerome Everson

Media City Film Festival and Trinosophes Projects Present Free Film Screening of Celebrated Filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson.

Introduction by Paige Wood, MCFF Regional Engagement

Screening curated by MCFF Artistic Director OOna Mosna

Kevin Jerome Everson, arguably one of the most prolific, and important experimental filmmakers currently working, is an artist who thinks through the particular problems of cinema by making it. His tireless output exemplifies American painter and film critic Manny Farber’s description of “termite art” as having “no sign that the artist has any other object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art, and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement.” Everson’s films, light and deeply affective, are never not alive: each new film surprises. His themes, though clearly identifiable, are never forced; they emerge organically through the course of his work. Everson’s oeuvre is one of the most significant records of contemporary African American life.

Since the late 1990s, Kevin Jerome Everson has created a singular body of work that conflates archival, documentary, and scripted footage, blurring the distinctions between what is real, and what is simulated. Everson works to obstruct the narratives he presents, which in turn shifts his films from representations of the everyday to a meditation on the abstract and emotive registers that exist within it.

In 2020, Everson was the recipient of the Berlin Prize at the American Academy in Berlin and the 24th Heinz Award in 2019. His films have been exhibited and screened widely, including the 15th Baltic Triennial, Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, 2024; the Newark Museum, NJ, 2023; Museum of Modern Art, NY, 2022; Block Museum, Evanston, IL, 2022; McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco, 2021; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, 2019; The Museum of Contemporary Arts, Los Angeles, CA, 2019; BAMcinemafest, Brooklyn, NY, 2018; National Museum of African American History and Cultural, Washington D.C., 2018; Tate Modern, London, 2017; Wexner Center of the Arts, Columbus, OH, 2017; Berkeley Museum of Art Pacific Film Archives, Berkeley, CA, 2017; among others. Additionally, Everson participated in the 2022 Berlin International Film Festival, Berlin, Germany, the 2018 Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, the 2017, 2012, and 2008 editions of the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, as well the 2013 Sharjah Biennial. His work has been exhibited internationally at film festivals including Sundance, New York, Toronto, Venice, Vienna, Ontario, London, Rotterdam, Berlin, Ann Arbor, and Oberhausen.

Everson’s work is held in the permanent collections of Akron Art Museum, Akron, California Institute of Art, Valencia, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Centre Pompidou, Paris, The Progressive Art Collection, Mayfield Village, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Sundance Institute Collection, UCLA, Los Angeles, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Wexner Center of the Arts, Columbus.

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