Ja'Tovia Gary

Filmed on location in Harlem and in Monet’s historic gardens in Giverny, this multi-textured cinematic poem meditates on the bodily integrity and creative virtuosity of black women.

Quiet As It’s Kept (2023) is an intimate bricolage of vintage Hollywood, direct animation, original super 8 and 16mm film footage, and documentary conventions. Mediating on the gaze and Black women’s particular embodied realities, Gary also re-contextualizes contemporary social media footage. Creating conceptual links for each viral clip to a character, event, or thematic element from Morrison’s story, the film emphasizes questions around the book’s themes of internalized and externalized anti-blackness in contemporary culture.

An electrifying portrait of a young artist determined to live life on his own terms. Born Rashard Bradshaw, Cakes Da Killa is a 22 year old hip hop artist. As an openly gay man he is not your run of the mill rapper, but he just might be your new favorite.

2018, 2 minutes

2017, 3 minutes

A meditative invocation on transcendence as a means of restoration.

Filmed on location in Harlem and in Monet’s historic gardens in Giverny, this multi-textured cinematic poem meditates on the bodily integrity and creative virtuosity of black women.

Filmed on location in Harlem and in Monet’s historic gardens in Giverny, this multi-textured cinematic poem meditates on the bodily integrity and creative virtuosity of black women.

Quiet As It’s Kept (2023) is an intimate bricolage of vintage Hollywood, direct animation, original super 8 and 16mm film footage, and documentary conventions. Mediating on the gaze and Black women’s particular embodied realities, Gary also re-contextualizes contemporary social media footage. Creating conceptual links for each viral clip to a character, event, or thematic element from Morrison’s story, the film emphasizes questions around the book’s themes of internalized and externalized anti-blackness in contemporary culture.

An electrifying portrait of a young artist determined to live life on his own terms. Born Rashard Bradshaw, Cakes Da Killa is a 22 year old hip hop artist. As an openly gay man he is not your run of the mill rapper, but he just might be your new favorite.

An electrifying portrait of a young artist determined to live life on his own terms. Born Rashard Bradshaw, Cakes Da Killa is a 22 year old hip hop artist. As an openly gay man he is not your run of the mill rapper, but he just might be your new favorite.

2018, 2 minutes

2017, 3 minutes

A meditative invocation on transcendence as a means of restoration.

This filmic collage, shot on location in Claude Monet's garden in Giverny, France, aims to examine the precarious nature of Black women’s bodily integrity, the ethics of care as resistance work, and how class position shapes the contours of violence. Set against the backdrop of the West's continued global imperialist campaigns and its historical artistic canon, this experimental video features a mélange of HD video, archival footage, and analog animation to assert an oppositional gaze in the re-telling of modern history.

A documentation of the creative process of Simone Leigh, a Brooklyn based sculptor and video artist.