If you were out Sunday to see Zoe Strauss‘s 7th Under I 95 exhibition you may have noted the film crew hanging out and shooting footage. Who were they? A crew from City Projects in Los Angeles working with US Artists, the group that gave a $50,000 grant to Strauss (and a bunch of other artists) last year. City Projects is documenting the artists who received the grants and putting the videos up on the website, Encounter: USA Fellows. The film of Strauss’s event isn’t up yet but there are videos already about other US Artists — Lourdes Perez, Victor LaValle, Marc Bamuthi Joseph and Moeslinger/Udagawa. The crew, whom I spoke with briefly to gush over the Strauss photo I had picked off the wall to take home, was led by Phillip Rodriguez, a USC Senior Fellow at the Institute for Justice and Journalism. The short videos are lovely and direct in their storytelling — and blissfully non-formulaic, each one I watched was idiosyncratic to the artist portrayed. Below is one of the four videos already up on the site.
Writer Victor LaValle talks about his writing process while the words from his book scrolls down the screen and the background shows children playing games and singing.
