The Frick Collection Partners with the Ghetto Film School in Unique Educational Collaboration Focusing on Narrative in Art History and Film
#FrickFilmProject
The Frick Collection and the Ghetto Film School announce The Frick Film Project, a pilot collaboration between the Bronx-based independent film organization and the celebrated museum. The initiative provides onsite arts education across two creative disciplines, the fine arts and the cinematic arts. Over the last year, honor students from The Cinema School—the nation's first and only high school devoted to film making, founded by GFS in partnership with the New York City Department of Education—participated in seminars led by the Frick's Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator Xavier F. Salomon. The seminars focused on the concept of narrative in the works of art in the museum's collection and encouraged the students to consider the visual arts in relation to their own storytelling and filmmaking. The program culminated with the creation of a student-produced short film inspired by the Frick and filmed on location at the museum. This year's inaugural film, written by senior Gabby Martinez, entitled The Progress of Love, is loosely based on the series of works of the same name by the eighteenth-century French artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard. For more information about the Ghetto Film School, visit ghettofilm.org.
Comments Dr. Salomon, "The collaboration between The Frick Collection and the Ghetto Film School has been an extraordinary journey for everyone involved. I found it a deeply enlightening, enriching, and often moving experience. I have learned so much from these twenty talented students and I am so proud of their work and what they have achieved."
Director Ian Wardropper adds, "At the Frick we find special satisfaction in developing a relationship over time with a school or institution. We look forward to continuing and deepening our partnership with the Ghetto Film School, opening our collections and staff to these creative students and in turn seeing art afresh through their eyes."
About the Ghetto Film School and The Cinema School
Ghetto Film School is an award-winning, independent film organization with the mission to educate, develop, and celebrate the next generation of great American storytellers. Based in the South Bronx and MacArthur Park (LA), the program allows 650 diverse teen and young artists to participate each year in high quality, pre-professional programs focused on the intersection of art, business, and education. In 2009, the Ghetto Film School initiated a partnership with the New York City Department of Education to open The Cinema School, the nation's first and only film high school offering rigorous liberal arts curriculum grounded in creativity. TCS is a select admissions public school in the South Bronx, NY, serving 360 students.
About The Frick Collection and the Frick Art Reference Library
Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919), the coke and steel industrialist, philanthropist, and art collector, left his New York residence and his remarkable collection of Western paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts to the public "for the purpose of establishing and maintaining a gallery of art, [and] of encouraging and developing the study of fine arts and of advancing the general knowledge of kindred subjects." Designed and built for Mr. Frick in 1913 and 1914 by Thomas Hastings of Carrère and Hastings, the mansion provides a grand domestic setting reminiscent of the noble houses of Europe for the masterworks from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century that it contains. Of special note are paintings by Bellini, Constable, Corot, Fragonard, Gainsborough, Goya, El Greco, Holbein, Ingres, Manet, Monet, Rembrandt, Renoir, Titian, Turner, Velázquez, Vermeer, Whistler, and other masters. Mr. Frick's superb examples of French eighteenth-century furniture, Italian Renaissance bronzes, and Limoges enamels bring a special ambiance to the galleries, while the interior garden and the amenities created since the founder's time in the 1930s contribute to the serenity of the visitor's experience. The Frick Collection also is renowned for its small, focused exhibitions and for its highly regarded concert series and dynamic education program. Adjoining The Frick Collection is the Frick Art Reference Library, founded more than ninety years ago by Henry Clay Frick's daughter, Helen Clay Frick. Housed in a landmarked building at 10 E. 71st Street, the Library is one of the world's leading institutions for research in the fields of art history and collecting.