For the second installment of Eye on a Director, MAD highlights the collection of the legendary film distributor and archive Canyon Cinema. In the late 1950s, Canyon Cinema brought together independent film artists whose work reflected a remarkable diversity in style and content. Variously called avant-garde, underground and experimental, these artists shared a vision of filmmaking as a form of personal expression, free from the demands and constraints of commercial conventions. 

To celebrate the life and work of the singular artist and animation historian Robert Russett (1935-2015), guest curator Mark Toscano has assembled this nearly complete retrospective of Russett’s 16mm films.  This program will span his early, radical Pop hybrids of Sharits and Conner, through his fascinating and rigorous abstract perceptual explorations, to the haunting and ominous impressionistic rephotography works in which Russett explored his adopted homeland of Acadian Louisiana.

Curator in attendance!