Professor Emerita, Cornell University
India’s Single-Screen Cinemas | Mary Woods
A lecture by Mary N. Woods, Department of Architecture, Cornell University. Designed by some of India’s first professional architects, single-screen cinemas represent a popular modernism long predating Chandigarh. They are monuments to a once inclusive India where films brought men and women from different faiths, classes, and communities together. Unable to compete with multiplexes and digital platforms, many of India’s 13,000 cinemas are now shuttered or demolished. The Liberty, an Art Deco picture palace in Mumbai, has survived, reinvented for live performances, exhibitions, and symposia. Seeking greater opportunities migrant workers from northeastern India find community but also sectarian violence in Mumbai’s redlight cinemas redesigned for films in Bhojpuri, their mother tongue. 700 miles to the south in Calicut prosperous Gujarati migrant traders set themselves apart from the local Malayalam-speaking population by watching Hollywood and Bollywood films in a converted picture palace. This lecture explores architectural resiliency through the reimagining and repurposing of Indian cinemas to serve new communities.
Women in the archives
The lecture explores the archives of work and lives of women designers highlighting importance of archiving their work.
Art in the Time of Deindustrialization
Mary Woods, 2015 Visiting Scholar, looks at Gordon Matta-Clark's activities in deindustrializing cities in New York: "During the 1960s and 1970s, Buffalo and New York City were in economic decline and social and political turmoil. Drawing on the Gordon Matta-Clark collection and other CCA archives, this lecture explores the art and community he and others created from the ruins of Buffalo and New York." —Mary Woods
The Woolworth Building in the Eye of the Avant-Garde
This lecture was given as part of the "Medieval or Modern: Questions and Dialogues on Architecture and Modernity on the Occasion of the Woolworth Building Centennial" Symposium, held in the lobby of the Woolworth building on June 14th, 2013.
