IN CINEMA

AIN’T I A WOMAN
Dir. Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter | Experimental Documentary | English | US | 2020 | 15 minutes

PAINT ME A ROAD OUT OF HERE
Dir. Catherine Gund | Documentary | English | US | 2024 | 90 min

Tuesday, April 8th at 7PM
Tickets: $15 General Admission/ $7 Reduced Price 

Q+A with Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, Artist, Film Participant, and Executive Producer for PAINT ME A ROAD OUT OF HERE, and Demetrius James, Program Director at the Bard Microcollege for Just Community Leadership in Harlem. 

A great painting tells a compelling story. When its provenance deepens that story, it becomes an extraordinary and impactful performance piece. Documentarian and activist Catherine Gund tracks the labyrinthine ordeal borne by Faith Ringgold’s 1971 painting “For the Women’s House” — originally created for the women incarcerated on Rikers Island, then relegated to mishandling, defacing, and deep storage. Artist and rapper Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, herself formerly incarcerated and commissioned to create a new work for the Rikers women, bands together with Ringgold, politicians, philanthropists, and corrections officers against Kafkaesque bureaucracy to liberate the original painting from Rikers and, more profoundly, Black women from mass incarceration.    

Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist, writer, pedagogue, and cultural worker based in Philadelphia PA. As a visionary thought leader creating socially conscious music, film, performance, and visual art, her practice embodies resilience, care, and community-centeredness while working at the intersections of reproductive justice, black feminist thought and transformative change.

In recent years, Baxter worked as an executive producer as well as starred alongside the indomitable Faith Ringgold in Paint Me a Road Out of Here (PMAR), which premiered at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC on June 14, 2024. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally at venues including MoMA PS1, New York; the African American Museum of Philadelphia; Frieze LA; Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia;Ben & Jerry’s Factory in Waterbury, Vermont; Martos Gallery, New York; the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, Ohio; Brown University, Rhode Island; the Schomburg, New York; Yale Art Gallery, Connecticut; the National Museum of World Cultures Leiden, Netherlands; Two Rivers Gallery, British Columbia; as well as a solo exhibition in 2023 at the Brooklyn Museum, New York.