Maysles Movie Center Among Grant Winners
The Maysles Institute, the Harlem organization that runs a documentary movie house and community filmmaking classes, was one of 13 nonprofit organizations to receive a grant at the 2010 Union Square Awards on Friday. Among the diverse arts groups to be honored—with interests ranging from legal aid for immigrants to traditional Peruvian dance—the Maysles Institute was the only recipient focused on film exhibition and related education.
Offered under the Awards’ Arts Program, begun in 2006, the $35,000 grant comes with no strings attached and a year of technical assistance and consulting.
“It’s just what the doctor ordered,” said the co-director of the Maysles Cinema, Jessica Green. “It’s going to be used operationally to cover our bills, and perhaps we will look to use it to expand our programming.”
At the awards ceremony, held on the ninth floor of the Riverside Church in Manhattan, Ms. Green and cinema co-director Philip Maysles accepted the award, flanked by Maysles namesakes including the cinema verité pioneer himself, Albert—co-director, with his late brother David, of “Salesman” and “Gimme Shelter,” among other documentary classics—and institute mavens Rebekah and Sara Maysles.
“[Al] just turned 85 and is still hustling every day,” Philip Maysles said of the spectacled filmmaker beside him, who quickly amended: “It’s 84, actually.”
Bookended by colorful performances of Korean and Afro-Peruvian dance against a backdrop of Gothic arches, the proceedings were marked by a mutually gung-ho audience. Recipients included Queens-based MinKwon Center for Community Action, New York Community Media Alliance, Hester Street Collaborative (focused on public space), Common Law, and “hip-hop community center” Rebel Diaz Arts Collective.
The Maysles Institute—like most of the awardees a recent addition to the city—opened its cinema in 2008 and programs a variety of hard-to-see and often uniquely New York-focused film and video, with guests who often serve as walking oral histories. It also hosts a thriving community-based documentary-filmmaking program for children and adults. (Vee Bravo, the current education programs director, accepted a Union Square Award in 2002 on behalf of the Hip Hop Cellblock project.)
The community emphasis, of which moviegoers to the Maysles Institute may not be aware, is typical of Union Square awardees.
“We do have a lot of places that to the public appear as one thing but they also serve another function,” said the executive director of the Union Square Awards, Iris Morales. “What we look for in the arts organizations is some community engagement, that they bring in people to civic engagement in some new kind of way.”
The Awards, which are funded by the Jewish Communal Fund of the Union Square Fund, were begun in 1998 and take their name from the landmarked square’s history (most notably in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) as a site for political gatherings.