Bridging the Arts is a curated film series co-sponsored by Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts and the Kate. The series will feature a selection of art films produced by the highly-regarded Checkerboard Film Foundation and include a brief lecture before each film.

“In my paintings I’m not inventing; my ideas come from constantly investigating how things look.”- ElIsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly (1923 – 2015) is widely regarded as one of the most important American abstract painters, sculptors and printmakers of the 20th – 21st centuries. Kelly’s work reflects the connection between abstraction and nature from which he extrapolated forms and colors.
Since the beginning of his career, Kelly’s emphasis on pure form and color and his impulse to suppress gesture in favor of spatial unity, played a pivotal role in the development of abstract art in America.
This hour-long documentary, shot in High Definition, elucidates the true complexity of the artist’s work. In following Kelly as he revisits the Paris of his early twenties, the film uncovers early influences which became leitmotifs that he would return to, reiterate, refine, and re-work for decades to come.
A spinal sequence showing, from A to Z, Kelly’s creation of two wall sculptures commissioned for the new U.S. Embassy in Beijing, provides a dramatic thrust to the film.
Insightful commentary from scholars and critics including Robert Storr (Dean, Yale School of Art), Anne d’Harnoncourt (Director and CEO, 1982 – 2008, Philadelphia Museum of Art), Alfred Pacquement (Former Director, Centre Georges Pompidou), Ann Temkin (Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA) and Roberta Bernstein (Professor Emeritus, 1981 – 2009, University at Albany) help round out this definitive portrait of one of the true giants of American art.

Winner of Award for Best Film for Television — 26th Annual Festival International du Film sur l’Art (FIFA), Montréal