From Photograph to Screen: Robin Coste Lewis, Julie Mehretu, and Michael Govan

Join us for a very special evening featuring the West Coast premiere of writer and artist Robin Coste Lewis’s moving-image work Intimacy, which combines selections from her grandmother’s photo archive—a collection of images of African Americans that spans over a century—with Lewis’s writing. This film combines newly published text and images from her photobook, To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness, from which the film was made. Artist Julie Mehretu and LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director Michael Govan will join Lewis in conversation about the work.

Robin Coste Lewis will have a pre-event book signing of To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness at 6 pm in the lobby of LACMA's Resnick Pavilion.

The screening and talk takes place in person at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures starting at 7:30 pm. RSVP is required.

Priority for the book signing is given to pre-sale book attendees. Pre-sale books are available at the LACMA Store online. After all LACMA Store online pre-sale attendees have had their books signed, the signing line will open in the order in which attendees arrive. Only copies purchased from the LACMA Store will be signed at the pre-event. Additional copies of To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness will be available for purchase on the day of the event at the pre-event signing until the end of the signing. If you purchase a book in the LACMA Store online but cannot attend the event, your copy will be signed and held for you at the LACMA Store in the Resnick Pavilion for pick-up.

Robin Coste Lewis is a Ford Foundation Scholar-in-Residence at The Museum of Modern Art. She is the author of Voyage of the Sable Venus (2015), which won the National Book Award, the first poetry debut by an African American to do so in the prize's history. The former Poet Laureate of Los Angeles, she is also the author of To The Realization of Perfect Helplessness (2002).

Julie Mehretu is a world renowned painter who lives and works in New York City. In exploring palimpsests of history, from geological time to a modern day phenomenology of the social, Julie Mehretu's paintings, prints, and drawings engage us in a dynamic visual articulation of contemporary experience, a depiction of social behavior and the psychogeography of space. She is the recipient of the MacArthur Award (2005) and the US Department of State Medal of Arts Award (2015). Mehretu’s work has been exhibited extensively in museums and biennials and is represented in collections world wide. A mid-career survey of Mehretu's work recently toured at LACMA (Los Angeles), the High Museum (Atlanta), The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), and The Walker Museum of Art (Minneapolis) from 2019 through 2022. Mehretu is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and The National Academy of Design. Her global representative is Marian Goodman Gallery.

Masks are strongly recommended indoors for everyone. Learn more about all of the museum's health and safety protocols.