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The Giverny Suite was filmed in Harlem, New York, and in Claude Monet’s gardens in Giverny, France. The Giverny Suite is a cinematic poem that advocates for the safety and bodily autonomy of Black women. Employing techniques including hand-painted film animation and montage editing, Gary first developed the work during an artist residency in Giverny, where the gardens offered a space of respite.

Centrally featured are person-on-the-street interviews in which the artist approaches women at the intersection of Lenox Avenue (also known as Malcolm X Boulevard) and West 116th Street and asks, “Do you feel safe?” These interviews are interspersed with footage of singer Nina Simone, performer Josephine Baker, political activist Fred Hampton, and Diamond Reynolds recounting the killing of her boyfriend Philando Castile by police in 2016. The installation also includes antique furniture as well as altars dedicated to the Yoruba deities Yemaya and Oshun. “Healing is at the root of the work,” Gary explains. “Making art is a transformative process that transmutes pain or trauma into something beautiful, useful, functional, instructive.”

About the author

Ja’Tovia Gary is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist working across documentary, avant-garde video art, sculpture, and installation. Gary seeks to trouble notions of objectivity and neutrality in nonfiction storytelling by asserting a Black feminist subjectivity and employs a rigorous interrogation and apprehension of the archive in much of her multivalent work.

Previous films have received awards at Ann Arbor Film Festival, BlackStar Film Festival, New Orleans Film Festival, and Locarno Film Festival, among others. Select exhibitions include The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, The Hammer Museum, and Centre Pompidou. Gary has received generous support from the Trellis Art Fund ,Ford Foundation, Cinereach, Sundance Documentary Institute, Field of Vision, and is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow.

Ja’Tovia Gary