MOCA Artist Film Series: Bruce and Norman Yonemoto
Garage Sale, 1976, 75 min.

MOCA Artist Film series is an active and dynamic platform for the presentation of artist films. Inspired by film and video works in MOCA’s renowned collection, the series will offer engaging and notable screenings and live programs with MOCA collection artists and beyond. With presentations in the Ahmanson Auditorium, screenings and Q&As will feature artists, historians, and critics in dialogue with special focus on experiments in long-form, narrative or feature-length films. Centered in the cinema capital of the world, these programs will explore the critical issues of our time and our place.

MOCA presents a screening of Bruce and Norman Yonemoto’s Garage Sale (1976) followed by a conversation with artist Bruce Yonemoto and film director Kirby Dick.

Garage Sale is a campy X-rated feature film centered on a story of marital upheaval between drag queen Goldie Glitters and her fair-haired husband Hero. A one-time member of San Francisco’s legendary Cockettes theater troupe, Goldie was famously crowned Santa Monica College’s 1975 Homecoming Queen, captured in Bruce Yonemoto’s documentary Homecoming (1975). Garage Sale subverts the drag aspect of Goldie’s performance enabling her to sympathetically play a woman whose fantasies and expectations have been shaped by Hollywood romance films. The film follows the couple as Hero tries to regain Goldie’s love by seeking the advice of a cast of eccentric characters.

Bruce Yonemoto is a video and digital media installation artist, educator, writer and curator. Many of the works from the mid-1970s into the 1980s were done in collaboration with his brother, Norman. Since 1989, Bruce Yonemoto’s solo work has been exploring experimental cinema and video art within the context of installation, photography and sculpture. The Yonemotos has been honored with numerous awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Film Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the Maya Deren Award for Experimental Film and Video. Their work was the subject of major surveys and retrospectives held at the Long Beach Museum of Art (1989), Japanese American Museum (1999), the Tate Modern, London, and Anthology Film Forum, New York. Bruce has had solo exhibitions at the ICC in Tokyo, the ICA in Philadelphia, the St. Louis Art Museum and the Hong-Gah Museum in Taipei. He presently has the installation: Enviromental at the Whitney Museum.

Kirby Dick is a two-time Academy Award nominated and Emmy Award winning documentary director whose films have appeared on HBO, Netflix, CNN, PBS and the BBC. His work includes the HBO series Allen v Farrow (2021) and The Invisible War (2012), which broke the story of the epidemic of rape in the US military and led to five Congressional hearings and dozens of national policy reforms being signed into law. Dick also directed Derrida (2002), a complex portrait of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and Sick, The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (1997), about the acclaimed writer, performance artist and comedian. Notable accolades he has received include an Independent Spirit Award, Peabody Award, duPont-Columbia Award, Nestor Almendros Prize for Courage and Filmmaking, Upton Sinclair Award, Ridenhour Documentary Film Prize, and George Polk Award.

MOCA Artist Film Series is organized by Clara Kim, Chief Curator & Director of Curatorial Affairs, with Brian Dang, former Programming Coordinator, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

MOCA Artist Film Series is presented by The Edward F. Limato Foundation.