Marcia Tucker, the first woman curator at the Whitney Museum, was fired for challenging the artworld establishment. Undeterred, she founded the New Museum of Contemporary Art in 1977 as a platform for marginalized artists. For the first time through film, BAD GIRL MARCIA TUCKER unearths her trailblazing story to reveal how her feminism and idealism can continue to inspire us.
SYNOPSIS
BAD GIRL MARCIA TUCKER (BGMT) is a kaleidoscopic biography of Marcia – and the contemporary artworld in the second half of the twentieth century. Serving as a call to action, BGMT illuminates the life of this unsung iconoclast highlighting how the artworld mirrors our world more broadly.
The archival based film is crafted through rich materials from Marcia’s professional and personal archives. These include never-been-seen-before interviews, home videos, photographs, Marcia’s performances as a stand-up comedian and singer, complemented by contemporary interviews.
Born in Brooklyn in 1940, Marcia grew up in a Jewish immigrant household with no family wealth or status. Feeling like an outsider from an early age, she found solace in art. BGMT traces her defiant ascent into the male-dominated artworld, which she irrevocably changed by creating the New Museum.
During her tenure, Marcia pushed against the status quo through diverse and polemical exhibitions with topics ranging from shopping mall culture to ‘bad’ painting to age and aging. She was responsible for launching the careers of now-superstars like Betye Saar, John Baldessari, Ana Mendieta, and David Wojnarowicz, to name just a few. The film proudly takes its name from Marcia’s transgressive 1994 “Bad Girls” exhibition, which featured artists confronting gender, race, class, and age issues head-on.
When Marcia died of cancer in 2006 at just sixty-six years old, she left behind a legacy that now insists on being told.
Director Statement
Why Now?
In the 1980s, a new wave of conservatism seeped into every part of society. But Marcia didn’t back down. She spearheaded major breakthroughs, including the first exhibition about gay and lesbian art ever mounted in an American museum. She then collaborated with ACT UP and the SILENCE=DEATH project to expose the brutal realities of the AIDs epidemic – marking the first time a museum partnered with an activist group.
Over her twenty-two years as director, Marcia sustained an unorthodox institution despite mounting challenges. She proved the immense power of art and museums to be platforms for community and resistance.
Watching our film in an eerily similar political climate, we are reminded of what was once possible during such a dire moment in history. Though Marcia’s story is rooted in New York, its implications are global: the fight to protect creativity is universal.
ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)
Director Simone Estrin
Simone Estrin (she/ her) is a Toronto-based filmmaker, programmer, and curator whose work questions the experience of art and its value for society. Her short film, A SHIFT IN THE LANDSCAPE, about the battle to protect Richard Serra’s sculpture, “Shift”, has screened internationally including at the Musée du Louvre in Paris, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago, and The Chinati Foundation in Marfa. She is an International Features Programmer at Hot Docs, and contributes to film programming at TIFF, and Le Festival International du Film sur l’Art.
Mafe Simonsen (she/ her) is a Brooklyn-based, Brazilian producer and filmmaker. Her work has screened at the IDFA, DOC NYC, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, and International Short Film Festival Nijmegen. She is an adjunct professor in the Film and Media department at Hunter College and has worked at Uniondocs and Cinema Tropical in NYC, and art galleries in São Paulo.
Cheryl Dunye (she/ her) is a director, producer and writer, whose work frequently touches on themes of race, sexuality, gender, and intersectional identity. Dunye emerged as part of the “Queer New Wave” of young filmmakers in the early 1990s. Her feature film, THE WATERMELON WOMAN (1996), won the Teddy Award for Best Feature at the 1996 Berlin International Film Festival. In recent years, Dunye has applied her filmmaking talent in television, first by joining Ava DuVernay and Oprah Winfrey for two episodes on Season 2 of OWN’s QUEEN SUGAR. She has further worked on CLAWS for TNT, THE FOSTERS for Freeform, THE CHI for Showtime, DEAR WHITE PEOPLE for Netflix, DAVID MAKES MAN, LOVE IS and DELILAH for OWN, ALL RISE for CBS, UMBRELLA ACADEMY and BRIDGERTON for Netflix, Y: THE LAST MAN for FX, and LOVECRAFT COUNTRY for HBO; for which her “Strange Case” episode earned her a 52nd NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Directing in a Drama Series, and has been named one of the best episodes in 2020 by The Hollywood Reporter and Entertainment Tonight.
Launched by Cheryl in 2018, Jingletown Films is an Oakland-based production company focusing on providing a platform for storytellers and filmmakers that identify as people of color and/or queer.
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Women Make Movies (WMM), Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit media arts organization registered with the New York Charities Bureau of New York State and accepts charitable donations on behalf of this project. Your donation will be spent by the filmmaker(s) toward the production and completion of this media project. No services or goods are provided by Women Make Movies, the filmmaker(s) or anyone else associated with this project in exchange for your charitable donation.
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