Film Premiere | Site-Specific: A History of the Mattress Factory

The feature-length film by David Bernabo parallels the installation of the museum’s 40th anniversary exhibition in 2017 with an in-depth, story-driven journey through the museum’s history of exhibiting boundary-pushing art. Interviews with artists like Ann Hamilton, Sarah Oppenheimer, Vanessa German, Dennis Maher, and others provide an intimate, sometimes humorous look at the indirect path a museum takes as it creates its identity. Bernabo also mined the museum’s extensive tape and video archive to unearth rare archival installation footage of James Turrell, Yayoi Kusama, Meg Webster and David Ellis.