An Evening with Paige Taul
Paige Taul, I am, 2017. Courtesy of the artist.
In her lyrical short films, Chicago-based artist and filmmaker Paige Taul draws on her own personal history to explore, in her words, “Black cultural expression and notions of belonging.” She presents a selection of nine shorts that meditate on family and folk. Assembled from family photographs, interviews, and related footage, they offer a prismatic portrait of her family while forging more abstract connections to kin across time and space.
2017–23, USA, Digital
50 minutes followed by a talk and conversation with the artist
In English
PROGRAM
I am
2017, USA, 3 minutes
An interview with Taul’s mother about her relationships with her family, religion, and Blackness.
7-7-94 For my babe
2018, USA, 3 minutes
A short film based on a polaroid Taul’s father sent to her mother before he was sent to federal prison.
In the face of god
2018, USA, 4 minutes
The story of Taul’s parents.
10:28,30
2019, USA, 4 minutes
Meditating on the twin desires to live together and apart, Taul and her twin sister explore their relationship to each other and to their mother.
The Promise
2019, USA, 6 minutes
Taul’s mother tells a story about a near-death experience.
Too Small to be a Bear
2020, USA, 5 minutes
Two generations of women reflect on a profound event in the life of the filmmaker’s grandfather and baseball player Jesse Taul.
71
2022, USA, 19 minutes
Taul uses William Greave’s influential documentary Still A Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class (1968) as a jumping off point for a consideration of Black middle-class life today. Drawing upon the experiences and observations of her aunt and mother, she navigates the temporal gaps in conformity and respectability politics between 1968 and 2022.
On Sunday
2023, USA, 5 minutes
A collaboration with the musician Olula Negre, On Sunday uses archival material from the Chicago Film Archives to meditate on the quotidian joy of family, nature, and kin.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Paige Taul is an artist, filmmaker, and assistant professor in the Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She often uses the experiences of her own family to explore Black identity. Her work has screened widely, including at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Barbican Centre in London, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and the HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark in addition to film festivals like Media City Film Festival in Windsor, Ontario and Onion City Film Festival in Chicago, among many others.
ACCESSIBILITY
Conversations at the Edge events have live captions (CART). The Gene Siskel Film Center is fully ADA accessible and its theaters are equipped with hearing loops. For other accessibility requests, please visit saic.edu/access or write cate@saic.edu
TICKETS
$13 General public
$8 Students & seniors
$6.50 Film Center members
$5 SAIC staff & faculty & AIC staff
FREE for SAIC students with a valid ID
All CATE programs are free for SAIC students. Unless otherwise noted, SAIC student tickets are released five days prior to showtime. Tickets must be picked up in person from the Gene Siskel Film Center box office. A student ID is required.
RESOURCE GUIDES
Conversations at the Edge’s resource guides contain articles, interviews, and other material related to upcoming artists and events. Available here.