Join us Friday before the Fest for an evening film + conversation at Big Picture Theater & Cafe at 7pm (48 Carroll Rd, Waitsfield, VT 05673). We’ll be showing the documentary film Citizen Architect: Samuel Mockbee and the Spirit of the Rural Studio. Film by Sam Wainwright Douglas. Conversation led by two Rural Studio graduates, Alexandre Landry & Jeremy Aranoff.
In 1993 the late architect and MacArthur Genius Samuel Mockbee started the Rural Studio, a design/build education program, in which students create striking architecture for impoverished communities in rural Alabama. Guided by frank, passionate interviews with Mockbee, “Citizen Architect: Samuel Mockbee and the Spirit of the Rural Studio” shows how a group of students use their creativity, ingenuity and compassion to craft a home for their charismatic client, Jimmie Lee Matthews, known to locals as Music Man because of his zeal for old R&B and Soul records.
The film reveals that the Rural Studio is about more than architecture and building. Mockbee's program provides students with an experience that forever inspires them to consider how they can use their skills to better their communities. Interviews with Mockbee’s peers and scenes with those he’s influenced infuse the film with a larger discussion of architecture’s role in issues of poverty, class, race, education, social change and citizenship.
Simultaneously there is an art opening in the lobby gallery space featuring the work of Vermont painter Fiona Morehouse, whose colorful works depicts very small houses.
Tickets are available at the door.
“Riveting”
Artwork by Fiona Morehouse on view in the lobby gallery~
“If one is looking for a rosier outlook for American ingenuity and cultural uplift through architecture..., you couldn’t be more energized by any film than Sam Wainwright Douglas’ Citizen Architect.”