Screening: "Milford Graves Full Mantis" with Director Jake Meginsky

Milford Graves Full Mantis is the first feature-length portrait of renowned percussionist Milford Graves (1941–2021), exploring the kaleidoscopic creativity and relentless curiosity of an extraordinary jazz innovator, tireless polymath, and longtime Bennington College professor. Meet the film’s director Jake Meginsky (MFA ’09), a student and collaborator of Graves, in discussion after the screening.

The screening is part of programming for the exhibition Milford Graves: A Mind-Body Deal, on view in Usdan Gallery until April 27. The gallery will be open 2:30–6:30 pm the day of the screening.

A revelatory force in music starting in the mid-1960s, Graves liberated the role of the drummer—moving drums from the background to contribute equally with other instruments—and gave rise to the free-jazz movement. Yet his life’s work encompassed medicine, botany, activism, and martial arts, elements that intertwined to inform his music and expansive consideration of healing and the mind-body relationship. Milford Graves Full Mantis offers an intimate look at Graves’s activities as a researcher, performer, and teacher, drawing the viewer through the artist’s lush garden and ornate home, into the martial arts dojo in his backyard and the laboratory in his basement, all just blocks from where he grew up in the housing projects of South Jamaica, Queens.

About the Director

A faculty member in dance at Smith College, Meginsky, a New Music USA award winner and Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in music and film, has collaborated and performed with an extraordinary range of musicians including Graves, Alvin Lucier, Joan La Barbara, Kim Gordon, Vic Rawlings, Greg Kelley, Bhob Rainey, Joe McPhee, Thurston Moore, William Parker, Daniel Carter, Paul Flaherty, John Truscinski, Arthur Brooks, and Bill Nace. He received an MFA from Bennington in 2009.

Associated Staff Members: Liza Charbonneau, Olivia Biro