"The brilliant, iconoclastic Louise Bourgeois, now 96 and surely the grande dame of the art world, will have a full-career retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum simultaneously with the premiere of this riveting documentary portrait. Co-directed by Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach, the movie records Bourgeois at work and play, fashioning art in her studio and ruminating upon the deep emotional and psychological roots of her work. Bourgeois's massive spiders, some as large as 30 feet, have been exhibited throughout the world. They symbolize the maternal impulse, but it is the artist's passionate connection with various childhood traumas (her father's live-in mistress being just one) that fuel much of her groundbreaking work. Critic/curators Robert Storr and Deborah Wye, and the artist's longtime aide-de-camp Jerry Gorovoy, lend piquant commentary." -Karen Cooper, Film Forum

A discussion with director Amei Wallach and Valerie Hillings will follow the screening.

Amei Wallach is an art critic, author, filmmaker, and television commentator. She was for many years an on-air art essayist on the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour and chief art critic for New York Newsday. She is the author of the first monograph on Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away, as well as Reflections on Nature: Paintings by Joseph Raphael. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times, The Nation, The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, New York Magazine, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Elle, Elle Decor, Town And Country, and Architectural Digest, among many others. As a frequent public speaker on art and arts on film, she has appeared at the Whitney Museum, Board of American Federation of Art, Cleveland Museum, Cincinnati Museum, Guggenheim Museum, the Wexner Center, and the College Art Association. She has chaired panels at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Drawing Center, and The American Crafts Museum.

Valerie Hillings earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in art history from Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She joined the curatorial staff of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in April 2004, where she is presently an assistant curator. She has organized exhibitions for the Guggenheim branches in New York, Bilbao, Berlin, and Las Vegas, and she has curated Guggenheim collection shows for venues in Germany and Australia.

This event is presented in collaboration with Film Forum, New York's leading nonprofit cinema for independent film premieres and repertory programming. The film premieres at Film Forum on June 25, 2008. A full-career retrospective of the work of Louise Bourgeois runs at the Guggenheim Museum June 27-September 28.