July 29, 2025

Walther Ruttmann's Silent Classic BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A CITY Opens MoMA's Silent Movie Week

July 29, 2025/ Jon Gartenberg

From July 30th to August 5th, The Museum of Modern Art will present its third annual Silent Movie Week. This year’s programming is comprised of seven recent silent film restorations screened over seven consecutive evenings. MoMA’s week-long celebration commences with the Museum’s digital restoration of Walther Ruttmann’s BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A CITY (1927), which will be shown with live musical accompaniment in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. GME distributes BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A CITY to North American universities as a DVD publication that also includes Ruttmann’s 1929 feature MELODY OF THE WORLD, and 12 short films by Ruttmann as bonus features. Also included in this release are a selection of Ruttmann’s paintings and drawings, lobby cards and original artwork for BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A CITY, and an 86-minute long radio feature from 1987 about Ruttmann’s life and career.

Jack Mitchell: Artists

April 02, 2025/ Jon Gartenberg

Photographer Jack Mitchell would have turned 100 years old in 2025. In recognition of the centennial of this creative and historically significant artist, GME now offers a series of readymade exhibitions that showcase Mitchell’s extensive photographic oeuvre.

Over the course of his half-century professional career, Mitchell documented a vast array of artists in the fields of music, dance, theatre, literature, and the fine arts. No exhibition encapsulates this history better than Jack Mitchell: Artists, which features over 50 silver gelatin and color photographs of noteworthy American visual, musical, and literary talents. This show first opened on May 16, 2021, at the Adtran, Jurenko & Thurber Galleries at the Huntsville Museum of Art, and is currently available to galleries, museums, and other cultural institutions both in the U.S. and abroad.

Roberta Flack (1937—2025)

February 28, 2025/ Jon Gartenberg

GME honors the artistry and legacy of singer-songwriter Roberta Flack with this photograph of Flack taken by Jack Mitchell in 1971 — a year before her recording of Ewan MacColl's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" became a number-one hit and made her an international star. Flack passed away on February 24, 2025, at the age of 88. Mitchell's portrait of Flack is featured in the exhibition Harlem, Hollywood, Broadway: African American Legends, which first opened at the Huntsville Museum of Art in Alabama in January 2020.

News