Academy reelects Bailey as president
Veteran cinematographer John Bailey, who was ¿rst elected president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the ¿rst time a year ago, becoming the 34th person to hold the position, will serve for one more year before terming out as a member of the board of governors.
No of¿cial campaigning precedes this annual board meeting on the seventh Àoor of the Academy’s Wilshire Boulevard headquarters in Beverly Hills. Instead, as always, the governors — there are 54, three representing each of 17 branches, plus three representing the interest of diversity — nominated colleagues for the Academy’s various of¿cer posts, and a vote took place under the oversight of their general counsel, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, Hollywood Reporter reported.
Past presidents of the Academy include Douglas Fairbanks, Frank Capra, Bette Davis, George Stevens, Arthur Freed, Gregory Peck, Robert Wise, Karl Malden and, more recently, Sid Ganis, the late Tom Sherak, Hawk Koch and, immediately preceding Bailey, Cheryl Boone Isaacs.
Incumbent presidents of the Academy are almost always granted another one-year term until they max out at four consecutive terms at the top of Hollywood’s most elite club. But while Academy presidents can serve up to four successive one-year terms, governors can serve no more than three consecutive terms, so Bailey will have to step away from the board and the presidency next year.
The other of¿cers elected include Lois Burwell, ¿rst vice president (chair, Awards and Events Committee); Ganis, vice president (chair, Museum Committee); Larry Karaszewski, vice president (chair, Preservation and History Committee); Nancy Utley, vice president (chair, Education and Outreach Committee); Jim Gianopulos, treasurer (chair, Finance Committee); and David Rubin, secretary (chair, Membership and Administration Committee).
Burwell, Utley, Gianopulos and Rubin were all reelected to posts that they had been serving in. Past president Ganis will step into a vice president slot that opened up when Kathleen Kennedy chose not to seek reelection to the board in June. It is the ¿rst of¿cer stint for Karaszewki, a governor representing the writers branch.
But Bilal is also responding to other disasters, including the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, in which many cultural institutions, including the College of Fine Arts at the University of Baghdad, were burned and looted. The project seeks to redress that, inviting the public to donate money to replace each fake book in the installation with a real one drawn from a wish list compiled by students and faculty. Each donor receives one of the white limited-edition numbered and signed artist books from the exhibition in return.
Eventually, the real books will be sent to the college, joining 1,700 that arrived last year. “I am building a system of exchange that will connect people directly with each other in order to resurrect the College of Fine Arts library,” Bilal explained in a video about the Toronto show, ‘From Baghdad to Timbuktu: Libraries Rising From The Ashes’. Over 70,000 titles were lost when looters set the college ablaze in 2003, and “to this day, many students have few books to study from”, he said.
The traveling installation, which was ¿rst shown at the Art Gallery of Windsor in 2016, has assumed different site-speci¿c forms. It featured a Babel-like book tower when it traveled to the FACT media arts center in Liverpool and occupied an entire room from Àoor to ceiling when it was exhibited at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.
The bookshelves at the Aga Khan Museum are joined by a white table and chair. Filiz Cakir Phillip, a curator at the museum, has also included a Persian miniature depicting the Mongol looting of Baghdad and a photograph of the burned-out library in the aftermath of the 2003 US military campaign.
Bilal, an associate arts professor at New
Bailey, whose credits include the best picture Oscar winner ‘Ordinary People’ and fan favorites like ‘The Big Chill’ and ‘Groundhog Day’, has a long history of service to the board, on which his wife, Carol Littleton, also currently serves as a governor of the ¿lm editors branch. He was ¿rst elected to the board in 1996, and then was reelected in 1999, serving until 2002. After eight years away, he ran again and won in 2010 and was subsequently reelected in 2013 and once more in 2016.
Bailey has not generally sought out the spotlight during his ¿rst year in of¿ce — for example, he did not make an appearance on stage at the most recent Oscar telecast. The Academy’s biggest move during his tenure has been further growing the organization by inviting a record 928 new members to join. It also has established a new code of conduct and disciplinary procedures, expelling from its ranks Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby and Roman Polanski. York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, is not the ¿rst Iraqi-born artist or intellectual to link the two invasions. But his project is unique in “raising awareness and delivering tangible results to Iraqis” via a participatory work that “connects conàict and comfort zones”, as the artist puts it.
In an interview, Bilal said he sees his work as part of Iraq’s ‘healing process’ and as a project that that “ushers in a new era of reconstruction”.
While the initial thrust of 168:01 was to restore the library, “now it’s about restoring Iraqis’ faith in humanity after the dust of war has settled”, he said.
The installation’s next destination will be the National Veterans Art Museum Triennial in Chicago in July 2019, in collaboration with a group called ‘Combat Paper’ that turns uniforms into handmade paper for art making.