David Shapiro is a visual artist and co-director, writer, and producer of the award-winning documentary film Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale. The film presents the strange but true story of Tobias Schneebaum, a Jewish abstract expressionist painter from New York who disappeared in the Amazon rainforest in 1955. Presumed dead, Schneebaum emerged a year later, having lived among the Amarakaire Indians in Peru. Schneebaum later wrote about his adventures in a memoir, Keep the River on Your Right (1969), which details his homosexual liaisons among the Amarakaire as well as his participation in a single act of cannibalism. Schneebaum went on to become a noted cultural anthropologist and explorer of erotic folkways in remote communities. David Shapiro’s film documents Schneebaum’s return to the places and people that changed his life. He collaborated on the documentary with his sister, Laurie Gwen Shapiro. Shapiro is a UAlbany graduate with a B.A. in English.

“A loving, complicated film [that] proves as quietly
mythic as this strange man’s quest itself.” (Pulitzer
Prize-winning author Allan Gurganus in Bomb Magazine).

Recent work by David Shapiro is on view at the University Art Museum’s West Gallery from March14 –April 13, 2003.

Thursday, March 20, 4:15 p.m.
“Navigating the Documentary”
A prosumer camera, a good story, and an $8 tape: the digital revolution has opened the floodgates for documentary filmmaking, for better and for worse. In this informal seminar, David Shapiro will discuss how this democratized and revolutionized approach to documentary filmmaking has made it one of the most exciting mediums in which to explore personal narrative and history.

Friday, March 21, 7 p.m.
Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale
(American, 2000, 93 minutes, color, 35 mm)
David Shapiro will provide film commentary and answer questions immediately after the screening.

Gary Schneider is a New York-based artist whose groundbreaking photographic installation Genetic Self-Portrait employs various medical imaging techniques to examine and present the contours of individual identity from the inside out. By making art that reveals the invisible world of his own cells, chromosomes, and DNA sequencing, Schneider contributes to the larger discourse that surrounds the impact of genetics on our daily lives. His work has been reviewed or featured in Artforum, Art on Paper, The New York Times, and Le Temps, among other publications and his work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Boston Museum of Fine Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the International Center of Photography.

Gary Schneider’s Genetic Self-Portrait is on view at the University Art Museum from March 14 –April 13, 2003.

Dr. Dorothy Warburton is director of the Genetic Diagnostic Laboratory at the Babies and Children’s Hospital at New York Presbyterian, as well as professor of genetics and development at Columbia University. In her own work, her interest in the uses of visualizing the genome led her to collaborate with Gary Schneider on his Genetic Self-Portrait. Dr. Warburton’s current research focuses on the epidemiology of human chromosome abnormalities.

Tuesday, March 25, 7 p.m.
“Redefining Identity: Art, Genetics, and the New Nature of Portraiture”
Gary Schneider and Dr. Dorothy Warburton will discuss the nexus between art and science in relation to their collaborative work on Schneider’s Genetic Self-Portrait.

Mark Dery is a cultural critic and author of Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (Grove Press, 1996) and The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (Grove Press, 1999), a collection of essays on end-of-the-millennium America. A frequent commentator on new media, fringe thought, and unpopular culture, he has written for Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, Lingua Franca, Salon, Suck, and Bookforum, for which he writes the column ”Invisible Lit.” He teaches in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at New York University.

McKenzie Wark is the author of three books, including the award-winning Virtual Geography. He was a co-editor of the Nettime anthology Readme!, and currently teaches in the Department of English at UAlbany.

Thursday, April 10, 3 p.m.
“The Politics of Media: Culture Jammers, Hackers, Hacktivists, and Other Encounters between Art, Media, and Technology”
Mark Dery and McKenzie Wark will lead an informal public conversation on the spontaneous and calculated alliances between artists, theorists, and activists that are creating new zones for cultural resistance in the Digital Age.