IFP ANNOUNCES GOTHAM AWARDS; VENUE SWITCH FOR JACOB LAWRENCE EXHIBITION

IFP, the organization of independent filmmakers, announced the winners of the seventeenth annual Gotham Awards last night, reports the New York Times. The main winners were Into the Wild, for best feature; Sicko, for best documentary; Craig Zobel, of Great World of Sound, for breakthrough director; Ellen Page, of Juno, for breakthrough actor; Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and Talk to Me, for best ensemble cast; and Frownland, for best film not playing at a theater near you.

The paper also reports that a traveling exhibition of panels from Jacob Lawrence’s seminal “Migration” series—scheduled to appear at the Studio Museum in Harlem—has opened instead at the Whitney Museum of American Art because of last-minute problems with the Studio Museum’s space. The thirty paintings, seventeen of which are owned by the Phillips Collection in Washington, depict the flight of African-Americans from the rural South to the industrial cities of the North. Thelma Golden, the Studio Museum’s director and chief curator, said that as she was preparing to install the works, instruments showed that one wall in the exhibition space was undergoing temperature fluctuations that could have threatened the paintings. “For me, it was very important that the show be in New York,” she said, “and with the help of the Whitney it is.” The show will remain at the Whitney through January 6, then travel to the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson before returning to the Phillips.