Film historian Jacqueline Stewart and Stan Douglas, an exhibiting artist in MONUMENTS, discuss his work Birth of a Nation, 2025—in particular, how the film it is based on, D.W. Griffith's 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, served as a quasi-monument. The conversation will also explore Hollywood’s complicity in advancing the Lost Cause ideology.
Stan Douglas was born in Vancouver in 1960. He is an artist featured in MONUMENTS, with a new work based on D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. His work reenacts historical moments of tension that connect local histories to broader social movements of struggle and utopian aspiration. In the artist’s intricate works, time and place fold back onto themselves to create a parallax of both vision and narrative—multiple moments in history and geography are experienced by the viewer simultaneously and reconciled into a new story.
Jacqueline Stewart is a Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. Her research and teaching explore African American film cultures from the origins of the medium to the present; silent cinema; film spectatorship and exhibition; as well as the archiving and preservation of moving images and “orphan” media histories—including nontheatrical, amateur, and activist film and video.
Stewart founded the South Side Home Movie Project, a community-centered archival program housed at the University of Chicago’s Arts + Public Life initiative, which will celebrate its 20th year in 2025. She is chair of the National Film Preservation Board and former director and president of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. She also hosts Silent Sunday Nights on Turner Classic Movies (TCM).
Stewart is the author of Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity, which has received recognition from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. She is co-curator, with Jan-Christopher Horak and Allyson Nadia Field, of the L.A. Rebellion Preservation Project at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, which produced new restorations of landmark films by the “L.A. Rebellion” group of Black independent filmmakers, as well as the edited volume L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema, a symposium, a DVD set, and a retrospective that toured nationally and internationally.
She is co-editor, with Scott MacDonald, of William Greaves: Filmmaking as Mission. In 2015, she co-curated, with Charles Musser, the five-disc set Pioneers of African American Cinema for Kino Lorber.
Stewart is the recipient of numerous honors, including a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship, the 2023 Silver Light Award from the Association of Moving Image Archivists, and the 2024 Distinguished Career Achievement Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018.
