CELEBRATING CARL MICHAEL GEORGE

Aug 13

Photo of Carl Michael George with Cy Twombly drawings by Susan Salinger.

For the month of August we celebrate all Leos! We recognize Carl George as one of the earliest members of Allied’s Board of Directors. Carl is a maverick of art and activism. His energies manifested in innumerable arts projects including Allied’s inaugural Seven Days of Creation exhibition at ABC No Rio. For the Naked Eye Cinema cross-country film screening tour of Canada, Carl curated rotating groups of artists that decorated rooms at the New Leonard Beach Hotel in Miami Beach. He curated double exhibitions of ABC No Rio’s visual art archives at ArtCite in Canada with Allied-associated artists at the Michigan Gallery in Detroit, including performances by Circle X, Kembra Pfahler and Samoa.

Carl's own art works and experimental super8 films are wondrous and unique. DHPG Mon Amour (1989) is about the lives of two HIV positive men dealing with medical aspects of care and survival, was featured at the New Directors Series at the Museum Of Modern Art in 1990 and was recently incorporated into the Oscar-nominated documentary How to Survive a Plague (2012). Many of his short experimental films are shown in festivals internationally, and in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Guggenheim Museum and the New York Public Library. His 1986 film, The Lost 40 Days has recently been restored with the assistance of the National Film Preservation Foundation and is now in the permanent collections of the National Archive / Library of Congress and Anthology Film Archives, New York.and publicly available through the Film- Makers Cooperative.

As an activist Carl was a member of ACT UP and the PWA Health Group, the first underground buyer's club for AIDS medicines in the USA.

His conscientiousness extended to many friends as they succumbed to AIDS, such as Gordon Kurtti, one of Allied’s most foundational artists who died in 1987 at the age of 25 was through Carl’s initiative and direction in 2015 able to have presented an exhibition of drawings, sketches, caricatures film, video work, and related ephemera at Participant Inc. that poignantly highlighted the loss of such a promising artist gone too soon.

As an artist member and supporter of Visual AIDS he recently made available on loan, The Carl George / Felix Gonzalez-Torres / Ross Laycock Archive, a collection of correspondence and photographs documenting the lives of three friends.

These are just a few highlights of Carl’s enthusiastic and creative output.. He continues his arts practice exhibiting art, working on a film series titled “The Dream (A Work In Progress)” and recently served as Board President of ArtCite and as artist fellow at Yaddo. Currently a member of the Board of Directors co-organizing Mighty Real Queer Detroit scheduled for June 2022,as a month long series of exhibitions, performances, films, spoken word involving 180+ artists as the first major LBGTQ+ art celebration of its kind in that city. Carl was nominated for Canada’s Governor General's Award and he recently received a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. Congratulations Carl! Our sincere thanks for your devotion, generosity and joie de vivre to Allied and all artists who look to you for inspiration and joy.

Carl describes his new project:

“ I'm calling it The Dream (a work in progress). That's the whole title. I've finished three sections so far - Back In The Day, Rule Britannia and The Lie, and have at least three more in the works. It will be an endless series with many additional parts - something I will continue to work on until I die. I’m attempting to present different ways of seeing; to reconstruct the past and imagine the future, and to create an argument for archive, research, and memory as art practice. I do this in many ways; through painting, collage, writing and especially, experimental film - the best artistic tool, I feel, with which to incorporate many different mediums, cultural and political influences, and concepts. These highly autobiographical artworks acknowledge the intertwined relationship between theory and practice, intent and happenstance, and attempt to engage the audience in an interpretive, interactive, and poetic experience. As Duchamp said, 'the viewer completes the artwork.'

Since moving to Detroit six years ago I have been piecing together and slowly editing hundreds of film segments, videos and photographs shot by me, or purchased at garage sales, online, or at thrift shops from 1980 to the present - the final products to be a series of short, experimental films that blur disciplinary boundaries between dance, music, film, theater, and the visual arts and, between the personal and the public. This enables me to expand upon conventional definitions of art and incorporate many disparate and random visual and sensory elements. Like any artist with a long-established practice, and an intensive history of collaboration with artist colleagues, I recognize recurring themes in my art - tendencies that sometimes take years to fully articulate and assert themselves.”