Ithaca College

Patricia Zimmermann, Professor of Screen Studies and Codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF), presented and lectured on We Tell: Fifty Years of Participatory Community Media at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC on December 7, 2019. 

The National Gallery of Art is screening five programs of exhibition over a one-month span.  Zimmermann presented two programs and talks: “Collaborative Knowledges” and “Environments of Race and Place,” featuring collaboratively produced works spanning 1967 to 2019.

We Tell is cocurated by Zimmermann and Louis Massiah from Scribe Video Center, with research and archival assistance from the XFR Collective.  It is currently slated to screen at over twenty venues including major museums, universities, and community film centers across the United States in the next six months.

We Tell: Fifty Years of Participatory Community Media, a national touring exhibition five years in the making, is a thematic collection of short documentaries collaboratively produced in a participatory mode by community media entities from across the US.  It chronicles the hidden histories of place-based documentaries that arise from specific locales, communities, and needs for social and political change.

The exhibition, as well as the research, archival, and curatorial work to mount it, are supported by major grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ford Foundation, and Independence Media.