ASAP Conference | SHOW NO SHAME, FEEL NO PITY
Date & Time
Fri. Oct. 24, 2025
5:30 PM-7:30 PM
This event has passed
Location Main Campus | Law Building
Parking at Beck Garage
Drop off at Beck Building
Email Your Questions [email protected]
ASAP Conference | SHOW NO SHAME, FEEL NO PITY
Date & Time
Fri. Oct. 24, 2025
5:30 PM-7:30 PM
This event has passed
Location Main Campus | Law Building
Parking at Beck Garage
Drop off at Beck Building
October 24, 2025
The MFAH hosts a screening of the film SHOW NO SHAME, FEEL NO PITY. A confluence. A provocation. Drawing together the work of Christopher Harris and Cauleen Smith, the program is devoted to experimentalism, film, and the art of blackness. Both filmmakers are in attendance for a post-screening conversation.
This event is part of the annual conference of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP), held this year at Rice University and throughout Houston. ASAP prioritizes the exchange between critical analysis and creative practice, partnering with more than a dozen cultural institutions throughout Houston to showcase local artists and activists.
Plan Your Visit
- Included with Museum admission.
- This event takes place in Brown Auditorium Theater on the lower level of the Law Building. Seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis.
About the Speakers
Christopher Harris is a filmmaker whose films and video installations read African American historiography through the poetics and aesthetics of experimental cinema. Often drawing on archival sounds and images, his work features staged re-enactments, hand-cranked cameras, rear-projection, close-focus cinematography, re-photography, photochemical manipulations, and screen-captured video, among other strategies.
Cauleen Smith is an interdisciplinary artist whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the imagination. Operating in multiple materials and arenas, Smith roots her work firmly within the discourse of mid-20th-century experimental film. Drawing from structuralism, Third World cinema, and science fiction, she deploys the tactics of these disciplines while offering a phenomenological experience for spectators and participants.
Michael Boyce Gillespie is author of Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film and co-editor of Black One Shot, an art criticism series on ASAP/J. His work focuses on black visual and expressive culture, film theory, visual historiography, popular music, and contemporary art. He is associate professor in the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies at New York University.
Email Your Questions [email protected]