An Ecstatic Experience

Jack Roosevelt Robinson rose from humble origins to cross baseball’s color line and become one of the most beloved men in America. A fierce integrationist, Robinson used his immense fame to speak out against the discrimination he saw on and off the field, angering fans, the press, and even teammates who had once celebrated him for “turning the other cheek.” After baseball, he was a widely-read newspaper columnist, divisive political activist and tireless advocate for civil rights, who later struggled to remain relevant as diabetes crippled his body and a new generation of leaders set a more militant course for the civil rights movement.

Filmed on location in Harlem and in Monet’s historic gardens in Giverny, this multi-textured cinematic poem meditates on the bodily integrity and creative virtuosity of black women.

Quiet As It’s Kept (2023) is an intimate bricolage of vintage Hollywood, direct animation, original super 8 and 16mm film footage, and documentary conventions. Mediating on the gaze and Black women’s particular embodied realities, Gary also re-contextualizes contemporary social media footage. Creating conceptual links for each viral clip to a character, event, or thematic element from Morrison’s story, the film emphasizes questions around the book’s themes of internalized and externalized anti-blackness in contemporary culture.

This filmic collage, shot on location in Claude Monet's garden in Giverny, France, aims to examine the precarious nature of Black women’s bodily integrity, the ethics of care as resistance work, and how class position shapes the contours of violence. Set against the backdrop of the West's continued global imperialist campaigns and its historical artistic canon, this experimental video features a mélange of HD video, archival footage, and analog animation to assert an oppositional gaze in the re-telling of modern history.

A documentation of the creative process of Simone Leigh, a Brooklyn based sculptor and video artist.