Crista Grauer was 9 when she had her first museum experience at the Albright Knox, where she went to take Saturday morning classes. The museum was part of her life while growing up in Buffalo, NY. At 10, she was the only girl to take the carpentry class at grade school, and working with wood is still important to her now. When Grauer was 14 she went to Europe with her family. Intellectually, it was the most important experience of her teen years -- it opened her eyes to all the arts and, most importantly, it released her imagination. Europe was to play a part in Grauer’s future work: in 1959 she studied drawing and painting with Nerina Simi in Florence, Italy; and in 1971 she had a one-person show at Galleri Heland, Stockholm, Sweden. Coming to NYC and studying at Parsons School of Design was another key experience. Parsons offered in equal parts academic training and new ideas. It was a place to interact with students and teachers, which opened her to contemporary art and thought. New York itself was a part of her education, by just walking the city streets she found an environment that embodied the art that she was studying: Surrealism, Pop, and Abstract Expressionism. Grauer had concentrated on painting at Parsons but, after graduation, she started working with plaster and making small sculptures often combining them with collage. In 1964 she met filmmaker Beryl Sokoloff, who was to become her life partner and at times an artistic collaborator. After seeing his work, she became very inspired by experimental film. She was at a point in her life in which all that she had learned was coming together, she was able to funnel her experience as a painter and her interest in sculpture, collage and film into a unique form she calls “Motorized Boxes”. They have been the core of her artistic output ever since, even if her art sometimes branches out to other techniques, such as pottery, woodcuts or pieces that move by hand. Grauer reflects: “My art mixes many disciplines and experiments with them: printmaking, painting, collage, sculpting, and cinema as an art form. This developed into mixed-medium, kinetic constructions -- the “Motorized Boxes”. These filmic worlds contained in a box give me not only the opportunity to use a variety of materials, but also the satisfaction of putting many elements together to produce a visual and tactile experience. It is important to me that the exterior images of the boxes play in contraposition with the interior imagery. I like the new layer of meaning in the dialogue between the two. When I use the woodcutting technique for the exterior of a box, I first carve the wood for the sides, front, and back, then I print each piece before putting them together as a box. I am open to new ideas and materials, which often bring discoveries when my artwork is transformed from two dimensions to a three dimensional piece. I want my vision to imply a playful interaction with the audience. The concept of movement is important to my work -- objects open, close, turn, and spin. Even a more stationary piece has an element of change. I think of my media as miniature performances, as a collage of optical illusions where motion plays against symmetry”.
Artist Arlene Ducao writes for Bright Lights Film Journal, 2010: "Though they were born two decades apart, Sokoloff and Grauer developed strong artistic similarities early in their lives: a playful skepticism of authority, a love of modern urban life, and a strong non-Western influence. Both spent a formative amount of time outside the United States before they first met. As a wartime military meteorologist in the early 1940s, Sokoloff played in a Hawaiian military orchestra and witnessed battles on Kwajalein and the Solomon Islands. Walking through the jungles, forests, and beaches of these islands, he was struck by the jumble of ocean and war debris. After he returned home, Sokoloff wrote in his sketchbook: 'The savage uses nothing. He is the experience. New Shells Old Experience.' In 1959, Grauer and her sister spent a year studying art and music in Italy. Then in the early 1960s, Grauer traveled with her widowed mother to the Middle East, Asia, and Mexico. She had already cultivated an interest in human representation, and on her travels she observed unfamiliar forms of it, forms rooted in the same natural mystery that struck Sokoloff in the Pacific: multi-appendaged Hindu gods, hamsa amulets, golems, sphinxes, and calaveras".
Grauer's education:
Albright Knox Arts Program, Buffalo, NY (1948-1950)
Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY (1957-1958)
Studied drawing and painting with Nerina Simi, Florence, Italy (1959)
Parsons School of Design, New York, NY (Graduated with Honors, 1963)
Studied drawing and painting with John Kacere, New York, NY (1962-1964)
Studied woodcut printmaking with Nicholas Sperakis, New York, NY (1997)
Beryl Sokoloff (August 13th, 1918 – September 11th, 2006) was a cellist, a painter, a photographer, and a photojournalist but, primarily, he was a filmmaker. He grew up in the Bronx, New York and Philadelphia. For two years he worked for the WPA (Works Projects Administration) on a mural project in San Francisco. In the mid-'40s Sokoloff lived and painted in intellectually charged Greenwich Village. It was an inspiring period for him, full of new ideas and artistic encouragement from his friends Reuben Kadish and Jackson Pollock. In the '50s he moved to Chelsea, and in 1960 he started making films. Filmmaking was a self-taught craft, but it seemed a natural step for him, an extension of painting and of his musicianship. He studied the films of Sergei Eisenstein and early cinema, and learned from his friend Hy Hirsh’s experimental films. He started shooting 8mm and made 32 films in four years. Several of these films were shot during his trips to France and Spain. The 8mm film GAUDI was a breakthrough for him. In 1963 he received a grant from the Lannan Foundation and, with it, bought his 16mm Bolex camera. Throughout that year he filmed Clarence Schmidt, a visionary artist in Woodstock, NY, who spent his life building a fantastic multi-storied house. The resulting film, MY MIRRORED HOPE, was to be screened at the White House at the request of President and Mrs. Kennedy in December 1963. With JFK’s death, it was not to be. Beryl made a total of almost 100 films in both 8mm and 16mm, whose lengths vary from 2 to 25 minutes. Beryl’s uncle, Nikolay Sokoloff, was the founder of the Cleveland orchestra, and his pianist brother, Vladimir Sokoloff, was a leading figure at the Curtis Institute. Beryl Sokoloff worked for 40 years as an independent experimental filmmaker, and he filmed a range of subjects, artists and their work (like MURAL on Catalan artist José Bartolí), eccentric architecture, and his city of New York, that was his inspiration and muse – his approach to the city as it was in the '60s to the '90s brings to them an unintended historical value, especially in his early work. Sokoloff would frequently show his films in his artists friends' studios, most often at Rueben Kadish’s. Rueben, being enthusiastic and supportive of Beryl’s films, saw to it that his friends, including Jackson Pollock and Phillip Guston experienced these screenings. After an evening of Beryl’s films, Guston, who was especially moved by Beryl’s very personal vision in such works as IMMIGRANT and FIRE, wrote: "Dear Beryl — I am so moved by your films, I wish I could really write. It is not what people say when the lights go on, it’s what we feel in the darkness with these images and later in memory. I am moved by your loneliness, when you walk around this dream we call the city, it is so poignant—and your solitude and passion I can imagine when you splice and give sequence to this inner world. I want you to know that I feel this. Ever, Phil." In New York, he made three films with his partner, artist Crista Grauer: NECROMANCIA, a world of dreams' imagery; CROMOCROME, as much about color as the subject matter; and AUTOMATA, in which mechanical figures take over the city. In 1970, Sokoloff was commissioned by Princeton University to film TETE DE FEMME, the execution of Picasso’s monumental sculpture on the university’s campus. Sokoloff spent almost a year (1971-72) in Europe. While there he presented his films in Scandinavia at The American University, Gallery Heland in Stockholm, and the Sonja Henie Museum, in Oslo. He shot four films: In Sicily he captured the fantastic 18th century palace and garden of THE PRINCE OF PALAGONIA. He made another film in Italy showing that all roads do lead to ROME, and in Barcelona made another GAUDI, this time in 16mm. THE WALL, filmed mostly in Berlin and Prague, it is a commentary on political and psychological barriers. KAPITOL and LIBERTY MACHINE would follow THE WALL’s leit-motif to exemplify a political credo critical of all repressive regimes. His last film, MIRROR EYE, animates New York in abstract reflections and broken images.
As the archivist and curator, Jon Gartenberg wrote to introduce a screening of Sokoloff's films at the Anthology Film Archives in 2009: "...Sokoloff’s filmmaking style lies on the dividing line between documentary and avant-garde film. His films can be viewed in the experimental filmmaking tradition with links in filmmaking technique to Bruce Conner, Stan VanderBeek, Francis Thompson, and numerous other artists, but distinct from those artists in terms of cinematic style and strategy... Sokoloff’s films are distinguished for their beautiful pictorial quality and dynamic editing. His cinematography exhibits a flair for vividly capturing the tactile feel of objects. His montage style involves radical spatial and temporal displacements, disrupting the presentation of sequences of images found in classic narrative or documentary films… [It is important to] ensure that Beryl Sokoloff's moving image works are repositioned in their proper art historical context among his contemporaries". In 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2019, Beryl Sokoloff’s films have been awarded grants from the National Film Preservation Foundation to make new preservation and exhibition prints.
