ARC OF LIGHT: A Portrait of Anna Campbell Bliss

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Images

Anna Campbell Bliss in her studio, 1972

Budget

Raised to date: $14,000.00
Estimate to complete: $44,000.00
Total Estimated Budget: $58,000.00
The budget numbers above are accurate as of 07/27/2010

Status

Production

Media Type

Video

Project End Use

Key Personnel

Cid Collins Walker
Executive Producer & Director

Cid Collins Walker is the executive producer and director of Black Opal Productions and the documentary film ARC OF LIGHT: A Portrait of Anna Campbell Bliss. She has extensive experience in television and film production. Collins Walker has produced award-winning short films, documentaries, set design, creative direction, 2/3D animation, special effects, print design and brand management. She has worked as an art director, broadcast designer and animator in network and cable television. Her clients have included CBS and NBC networks, Black Entertainment Television, Discovery Networks, National Geographic, Atlantic Video, Paramount Pictures, and the Voice of America. Her prestigious awards in television and film include four Telly Awards for her work in production design.

Richard W. Walker
Writer/Producer

Richard W. Walker, writer/producer for ARC OF LIGHT, is a journalist and art editor. He earned a B.A. degree in philosophy at the University of Maryland at College Park and did postgraduate study in philosophy at Columbia University. He also lectured at the University of Maryland on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein for graduate students of Anne Truitt, a major American Minimalist artist. He was staff writer at ARTnews, the world's largest circulation art magazine, and managing editor of The ARTnewsletter, a biweekly report on the international art market. He also was founder, publisher and editor of The Art Law Report. He has written extensively about the history of the art market, lectured on the business and politics of collecting art at Pennsylvania State University and participated in seminars on art-related law and legislation.

Tara Leigh Tappert
Scholar

Tara Leigh Tappert is an independent scholar, archivist and American arts consultant. She holds a Ph.D. in American civilization from George Washington University where she wrote a doctoral dissertation on American artist Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942), one of the most successful portrait painters of her era. Dr. Tappert has been a guest curator, researcher, and archivist at such institutions as the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and Goucher College in Baltimore, MD. Dr.. Tappert has also been an adjunct faculty member of the History of Decorative Arts Masters program at the Smithsonian and the Corcoran College of Art + Design. Her areas of expertise include American portraiture, women and art, 20th c. American craft, and the history of arts and healthcare.

Outreach/Engagement Plan(s)

Outreach and distribution plans for ARC OF LIGHT: A Portrait of Anna Campbell Bliss include a wide variety of methods to reach the largest possible audience for the film. The primary function of the website is to draw attention to the documentary and to inform visitors about opportunities to see the completed work. The website offers trailers and shorts and behind the scenes stories and information about upcoming screenings and fundraising events. The website also contains information about the artist, filmmakers, funders and sponsors and offers updated information and links about the artist and all aspects of the project. In order to monitor traffic, there is a feedback link to the film’s producers. ARC OF LIGHT is an ideal candidate for leading documentary film festivals, such as Sundance and SilverDocs. Exposure at festivals generates industry, press and buzz for the film. Distribution deals are often reached, resulting in greater audiences. Post-screening questionnaires and evaluations are distributed to the audience, which creates the awards system and provides filmmakers with invaluable feedback. ARC OF LIGHT will be screened at colleges and universities, art galleries, museums, film centers, small theatres and educational institutions. Post-screening Q&A sessions will provide an opportunity for objective evaluation. We are currently in contact with representatives of domestic and international broadcast entities. We are working to establish a relationship with a top-tier PBS station that can act as the presenting station to the rest of the network. Our projections for outreach include both domestic and international audiences.

Funders

Name	Amount	Date
Harold W. Sweatt Foundation	$1,000.00	04/10/2010
Individual Private Donors	$11,500.00	03/20/2010
Utah Humanities Council	$1,500.00	09/08/2008

Location

16005 Kenny Road
Laurel, MD, 20707

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Short Synopsis

ARC OF LIGHT: A Portrait of Anna Campbell Bliss is a documentary film about an artist, architect, and designer who has been an exponent of Modernism devoting her life to the creation of art that explores the fascinating intersections of art, nature, science, mathematics, and technology. The film explores the range of her work from architectural commissions to painterly and digitally-based studies of color and light, and Utah-based public art commissions that tell stories of the human condition.

Description/Treatment

ARC OF LIGHT: A Portrait of Anna Campbell Bliss traces the broad spectrum of this important artist's life and work, ranging from the aesthetic influences of her early childhood and her ground-breaking career as a Harvard-trained architect to her emergence as a cutting-edge artist whose work fuses an astonishing range of elements, including architecture, mathematics, computer technology, painting, printmaking and calligraphy. The documentary film examines the roots of Bliss's art in the Bauhaus school, which flourished in Germany in the 1920s, and how the Bauhaus artists influenced the development of Bliss's extensive contribution to American modern art.

ARC OF LIGHT explores Bliss's direct connections to the Bauhaus, especially through Gyorgy Kepes, with whom she studied visual design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Josef Albers, another Bauhaus artist, who taught at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina after leaving Germany in 1933.

In the film, Bliss describes how Kepes inspired her interest in combining art, science and technology in her work. At MIT, where he taught, Kepes created artworks that reflected his fascination with scientific instruments, integrating images generated by devices such as x-ray machines and electron microscopes that anticipated Bliss's pioneering use of computer technology, geometry and numeric systems and foreshadowed the Digital Age.

The film underscores Bliss's talent for tapping the core ideas that began in the 1920s inspiring her to create important and unique works of her own, such as Windows, which can be seen at the Utah State Capitol, and Extended Vision, now a permanent installation at the Cowles Mathematics building at the University of Utah. The film also touches on the most challenging periord in her life when she discovers that she is losing her sight but miraculously overcomes the condition.

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