OUR CITY DREAMS
Directed by Chiara Clemente
Produced by Clemente, Tanya Selvaratnam & Bettina Sulser
Released by First Run Features
USA. 87 min. Not Rated
With Swoon, Ghada Amer, Kiki Smith, Marina Abramovic & Nancy Spero
 

Director Chiara Clemente came to New York City much like her five artists/subjects with an if-I-can-make-it-here-I-can-make-it-anywhere career goal. But Our City Dreams’ perspectives on the city are far less significant than the intimate opportunity to see how successful women artists navigate the art world while infusing their work with feminist consciousness.

Swoon, born 1977 in Daytona Beach, Florida, is known only by her graffiti-artist like tag, and it is fun to watch her sketch street people, turning the drawings into stencils and pasting them guerrilla-style around the city. While she talks of her mixed feelings about turning from a street artist into gallery exhibitor, she does not explain the materials or techniques she uses as the camera looks over her shoulder. Her joy in art making, and in her artist friends, is most evident while she works with a collective to create The Miss Rockaway Armada made of found materials to float down the Mississippi River.

Ghada Amer, from Cairo, Egypt (b. 1963) incorporates traditional weaving techniques in her embroidery art, and mixes her New York freedoms with her Muslim heritage when she returns to her native city to visit her family. As the only family members interviewed of any of the artists, her parents are proud of her accomplishments, but they wish she would just get married already, which she refuses to do.

German-born Kiki Smith (b. 1954) grew up in New Jersey influenced by the New York art scene of her father, Minimalist sculptor Tony Smith. She talks a lot about her obsessions with death as she sculpts and draws angels and discusses the molds she made of her dead mother's fingers. With her long grey hair streaming out as she bikes around the city, she amusingly challenges the odalisque image of women in art lounging around: "That's not how I want to spend my life."

Performance and video artist Marina Abramovic (b. 1946 in Belgrade, Serbia) seems like a Saturday Night Live satire of the contemporary New York art scene. Just when you think her obnoxious pretentiousness peaks with a nude performance at the Guggenheim Museum, she rounds up a lot of uniformed men in Phuket, Thailand, on the anniversary of the tsunami to participate in a memorial whipping of the ocean. One hopes they were paid or at least fed.

The film climaxes with Nancy Spero (b. 1926 in Cleveland, Ohio)—the wife and collaborator of the late painter Leon Golub, mother of three, grandmother, and activist fighting for women's inclusion in New York museums (whom the other four women should thank). Despite what appears to be severe arthritis, she prepares retrospective exhibitions of her collages and paper cut-outs as well as a new piece for the Venice Biennale. (Her public art is at the Lincoln Center subway station). She accomplished what the dreamers in Revolutionary Road only fantasized about, going to Paris to create art while raising a family, though it was she who had to fit her work into late nights when the babies slept.

Despite the title, there is only a fleeting sense of New York City's impact on these women, other than to fulfill their ambitions. Most of the insights about women in art have to be inferred from the intriguing glimpses of their lives and work process. But far too much repetitive screen time is spent on yet another gallery opening and another show, with a lot of people standing around with wine glasses and air kissing greetings. Thankfully, these women manage to have time to create challenging art. Nora Lee Mandel
February 4, 2009