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This film program presents Finding Christa (1991, 55 mins.) by Camille Billops and Birthright (2005, 12:51 mins.) by Maren Hassinger. Both are intimate searches for connecting with difficult familial histories that stem from separation from kin and incestuous marital bonds. In Finding Christa, Billops reconciles with her decision to put up her then four-year-old daughter for adoption in 1961 by interviewing her friends, family, as well as Christa and her adoptive family through a dramatic and confessional documentary approach. Hassinger’s Birthright is a short documentary in which she traces her father’s mixed-race family lineage in Louisiana, reckoning with slavery’s role and the incestuous union that bore her grandmother. 

A post-screening conversation between Allie Tepper, a writer and curator who recently organized Las Vegas Ikebana: Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi, and Ethel Renia, researcher and cataloguer for the Camille Billops and James V. Hatch Collection, follows—moderated by Denny Mwaura, UIC Gallery 400’s Assistant Director and Curator.

ACCESS INFORMATION: This program is free, and CART captioning will be available. For questions and access accommodations, email gallery400engagement@gmail.com.

ABOUT:

Allie Tepper is a curator, writer, and educator specializing in contemporary art and performance, and commissioning new work. Her curatorial work and research is invested in experimental practices from the 1960s–present, and in shaping spaces of expansive access, collaboration, and intergenerational exchange. Most recently, she organized the traveling exhibition, Las Vegas Ikebana: Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi, the first retrospective on Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi’s five-decade collaboration and friendship, recently presented at the Columbus Museum of Art at The Pizzuti. Previously, she was an associate curator at the Cooley Gallery, Reed College. She has curated exhibitions, performances, and public art for the Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum of American Art, SculptureCenter, MoMA, and the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling. She is also the former assistant director of the magazine Triple Canopy. As an educator, she lectures in curatorial studies and art history at the University at Albany, SUNY.

Ethel Renia is an independent researcher, editor, and curator specializing in Black feminist art history and alternative institutional models. She is currently co-editing the first major publication on the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, and serves as Researcher and Cataloger for the Hatch-Billops Collection in New York. She recently worked extensively on Vivian Browne: My Kind of Protest, the first major retrospective dedicated to the artist, co-organized by the Phillips Collection and the Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati. Previously, Renia spent five years as Assistant Director of Research and Communications at RYAN LEE / Mary Ryan Gallery in New York. She holds an MA with Distinction from the Courtauld Institute of Art and a dual BA from Brown University.