2022
single channel HD video with sound
dimensions variable
total run time 56 minutes, 19 seconds
Pour le Peuple (French: “For the People”) is an intimate essay film that retraces the controversial history of one of modern art’s most iconic public sculptures, Alexander Calder's La Grande Vitesse, located in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The film examines the politics of the sculpture's ownership and control, given a citizenry who first loathed and then embraced a work of modernist abstraction, in time giving meaning to such an esteemed work of art. The film also paints the portrait of a midwestern American sensibility in all of its contradictions: on the one hand, progressive and artistic; on the other, conservative and pro-Trump. Yet it is not conservatism that ultimately menaces La Grande Vitesse, but rather the inclinations of a noted arts institution.
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