The Brooklyn Rail and The Cooper Union School of Art present a free screening of the documentary Looking at Pictures on a Screen: Thomas Nozkowski, which enters the homes of Nozkowski’s friends, family members, collectors, and critical champions to explore his life and work. The documentary on Nozkowski (1944-2019), an abstract painter and a 1967 alumnus of The Cooper Union, was produced and directed by Gabriel Rodriguez-Fuller, who also graduated from The Cooper Union decades later. The screening will be followed by a panel featuring artists Suzanne Joelson and Chris Martin as well as writers David Levi Strauss and Robert Storr, all of whom are featured in the film. Curator Sid Sachs moderates. Watch the trailer.

Thomas Nozkowski A’67 was an abstract painter who exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad. He chose to express personal experience through small-scale abstract canvases that refused to adhere to a “signature style” or align themselves with a particular movement. His works are included in the collections of major art institutions, such as the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. Nozkowski was the recipient of multiple grants and awards throughout his career, including a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, and four awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 

Gabriel Rodriguez-Fuller A’17 is a filmmaker who makes short and feature-length fiction films as well as music videos and short documentaries. His most recent feature, The Gene Pool, will stream online later this spring on NoBudge. 

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Registration required. Please note this is first come-first-served, and an RSVP does not guarantee admission.

About the Panelists

Suzanne Joelson is a painter who also teaches at the School of Visual Arts. She has held solo shows at the Catskill Art Space, Flatiron Project Space, and more, as well as group ventures in Spain, India, Morocco, Turkey, and Germany. Her writing has appeared in Bomb, Art Critical, and Two Coats of Paint. She has received awards from the American Academy, the National Academy, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Tiffany Foundation. A portfolio of her under_GROUND paintings will be in Issue #35 of Dear Dave Magazine. 

David Levi Strauss is an essayist and cultural critic. His most recent books include Co-Illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (The MIT Press, 2020), Photography and Belief (David Zwirner Books, 2020), and The Critique of the Image Is the Defense of the Imagination (Autonomedia, 2020). He is chair emeritus of the M.F.A. program in art writing at the School of Visual Arts. 

Chris Martin is a painter who has been the subject of solo exhibitions at venues worldwide, including Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany; and Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., as well as numerous group exhibitions. His paintings are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Netherlands; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. Paintings, a career-spanning monograph, was published by Skira in 2017. 

An artist, critic, and curator, Robert Storr served as curator and then senior curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 1990 to 2002, where he organized thematic exhibitions such as Dislocations and Modern Art Despite Modernism as well as monographic shows on Elizabeth Murray, Gerhard Richter, Max Beckmann, and more. Previously he was the first Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and taught painting and printmaking at the Yale School of Art, where he was Dean from 2006 to 2016. He was the first American to serve as visual arts director of the Venice Biennale. 

Sid Sachs is a writer and curator who serves as the director of exhibitions at the University of the Arts. In that role, he has curated exhibitions of artists such as Robert Crumb and Rose Wiley, as well as thematic exhibitions such as Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958-1968, which the AICA awarded Best Thematic Museum Exhibition of 2010, and Artnews listed as the seventh most important exhibit worldwide of the past decade. His writing has been published in Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, and more.