A Rare Look at Haiti: Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen

Breathtaking beauty, voodoo violence, and what the Guggenheim has to do with ritual sacrifices.

Filmmaker Maya Deren is one of the most influential women in art history. Though most famous for her seminal avant-garde film Meshes of the Afternoon, Deren went on to produce a prolific and diverse body of work. In 1946, much thanks to her critical acclaim for Meshes, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship grant, which she used to travel to Haiti and film Meditation on Violence — a controversial piece on the rituals of vodoun, which she not only filmed but also participated in, ultimately disregarding the terms of her Guggenheim Fellowship.

After Deren’s death in 1961, footage from the 18,000 rituals she filmed was incorporated in Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti — a fascinating posthumous documentary completed in 1985 by Deren’s third husband, Teiji Ito, and his then-wife, Cherel Winett Ito. The film, which explores the tension between beauty and violence in the dancing at the center of vodoun rituals, is now available for free on YouTube, though in poor quality, and we’ve gathered here all six parts. (Though to do Deren’s work justice, we highly recommend the DVD.)

The mesmerizing film is based on Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, the book Deren published in 1953 — an absolute cultural treasure we highly recommend. It offers a glimpse of a complex and largely misunderstood culture, even more so after being dragged across the global newsscape in light of the recent tragedy.

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PICKED: Conversations with Mr. Lois

Legendary art director George Lois, an original Mad Man, came of age in the 1960′s, when his Esquire magazine covers revolutionized graphic design and shaped the aesthetic direction of magazine publishing for decades to come.

Conversations with Mr. Lois is a series of four short clips of Lois, charmingly profane and non-linear and curmudgeonly as ever, sharing his thoughts on everything from the moral state of advertising the essence of magazines to the sensual sterility of tablets. The series was timed around MoMA’s George Lois retrospective and the publication of the fantastic companion book earlier this year.

There are too many assholes in advertising now.” ~ George Lois

People say the magazine is dead — bullshit it’s dead!” ~ George Lois

When you read a magazine, you put it on your lap, it’s like a lap dance. [With tablets], you’re just looking at a screen.” ~ George Lois

Hat tip to the SPD filmmakers for using Cat Power’s “The Greatest” as the score for the final part of the series.

When you do a magazine with great content and real visual excitement — oh my God! — pages of it, or spreads of it, every week, every month — wow, that’s fun! Let’s do this, let’s do that — it’s terrific stuff. It’s stuff where you can really influence the culture. I don’t care what magazine you do, any kind of magazine [should be] a cultural provocateur.” ~ George Lois

The series was a teaser for an event where Wired creative director Scott Dadich sat down with Lois to talk about his iconic Esquire covers. You can watch the hour-long program below:

We highly recommend George Lois: The Esquire Covers, MoMA’s beautifully curated anthology of Lois’s most influential work. You may also enjoy our recent look at the evolution of magazines over the past century.

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Modern Women: MoMA Celebrates Women in Art

A few months ago, we raved about Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art — MoMA’s ambitious retrospective on women’s legacy in the art world, covering both the museum’s own history and the work of over 300 pioneering female artists. Here, Museum Archivist Michelle Elligott — who contributed to the anthology an eloquent essay titled ‘Modern Women: A Partial History’ — talks about the project and the impact some of these women had both on MoMA itself and on the art world in general.

From the very beginning, MoMA really was the idea of three remarkable women — Lillie Bliss, Abby Aldrich Rockerfeller and Mary Quinn Sullivan.” ~ Michelle Elligott

Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art features essays by nearly 50 of today’s most compelling art and gender writers, including MoMA curators as well as outside scholars, and covers an ambitious spectrum of artists, from iconic avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren to pioneering modernist designer and architect Ray Eames to the great performance artist Marina Abramovic.

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