Martine Syms’s “The African Desperate” begins on the last day of art school for a Master of Fine Arts student named Palace. She’s facing the final critique from a committee of four instructors who sit in her studio, lobbing comments about her work — some earnest, some passive-aggressive, altogether a bit bewildering.
“It’s been interesting having you in the sculpture department.” “Where are you going to go with this?” “You’re afraid of your own appetite. It’s all a bit polite, isn’t it?” “Where’d you grow up? West Side Chicago?”
Palace — played by the artist Diamond Stingily, with bright orange hair and a deadly deadpan — holds her own. She calls out problematic questions, quoting Saidiya Hartman and others. Then, at a seemingly arbitrary moment, it’s all over: She passed.
“That’s it?” Palace asks quietly. “You’re free,” one examiner says, meaning well. But the comment also implies that art school wasn’t always liberating.
“The African Desperate” stakes out new terrain in the rarefied niche of movies featuring art schools. Unlike many films set adjacent to the art world, it focuses on a Black protagonist and avoids the cliché of “making it big” amid unfathomable pretension — a satirical staple of movies like “Velvet Buzzsaw,” “Pecker” and “The Square.”
Syms, a thriving artist who currently has multiple shows on, drew upon her time as an M.F.A. student at Bard College and years of teaching in universities and other settings. Syms remembers both feeling invisible and sticking out in white-dominated professional spaces at the upstate institution.
“It’s not even impostor syndrome, because you’re doing the stuff and you’re there,” she said in an interview. “But even now I get people I went to school with who were like, ‘You weren’t even making art when we were in school.’ And I’m like, ‘No, I was literally in film class with you!’ So I wanted to capture this feeling of not being seen sometimes,” Syms said last month, in advance of the film’s streaming release Friday on Mubi.
Her portrayal of art school pulses with the energy and humor of Palace and her friends, but it’s also a story of emotional survival.
“It’s a brilliant lampooning of art schools, but it also felt like a catharsis in a way,” David Velasco, editor in chief of Artforum, told me. “Some of the greatest art is someone who’s working through something they experienced that they have contradictory feelings about it.”
Syms, who co-wrote “The African Desperate” with Rocket Caleshu, created the part with Stingily in mind. The two connected at a Chicago bookstore and arts space Syms was running called Golden Age, and the director has cast the performer in other works. Syms, Stingily and Caleshu all drew on their experiences navigating professional spaces, and Palace, like Stingily at the time, also has the family responsibility of an ailing mother.
Syms and Stingily would talk and laugh about how they would respond to situations.
“She was like, ‘Man, I don’t know what I would have done in that program!’ Because some of the things that I experienced were really out of pocket,” Syms said.
Instead of a traditional dramatic arc, “The African Desperate” exists in the moment with Palace. She’s ready to leave, but people keep coaxing her into hanging out. Her closest friend drives her to a lake to decompress; another friend buzzes with anticipation for the big graduation party; and there are last-chance flirtations with a guy who hasn’t made a move all summer.
The film’s style zigs and zags with Palace’s conversations. It captures her very funny shorthand with friends and colleagues, using pop-up memes and head-on shots for phone dialogues. Syms said she had wanted to show “how talkie talkie talkie everything is” in art school.
It’s a sharp contrast with the style of “Art School Confidential,” the 2006 feature directed by Terry Zwigoff and written by Daniel Clowes (“Ghost World”). Clowes adapted the story of a starry-eyed art student, Jerome (Max Minghella), from a 1991 comic, loosely based on experiences at the Pratt Institute. The film is set on a cruddy, crime-ridden urban campus where a killer is on the loose.
Zwigoff and Clowes’s acerbic satire leans into caricature: a horn-dog roommate, a pretentious instructor (John Malkovich) who draws only triangles (“I was one of the first”), an overbearing wannabe director with a “Film Threat” T-shirt. There’s a simmering skepticism about idolizing anyone, from a once-great alcoholic recluse (Jim Broadbent) to an arrogant art-star (Adam Scott).
“Art School Confidential” was partly shot at Pasadena City College, which Syms attended. She liked the comic — and remembers getting caught in middle school reading Clowes’s books — but the movie “is not my favorite.”
“I think it’s in the canon,” Syms said. “But it’s also about a white guy, which almost every art movie is about.”
In her own time at art school, Syms said she saw precious little work by Black artists and filmmakers, like Edward Owens. “I remember really leaving school feeling — and not in any dejected way, just as a fact — I just don’t think I’m an artist,” Syms said.
“The African Desperate” centers on Palace’s experience and subjectivity. The title comes from a verbal slip in conversation with Syms when Stingily meant to say “the African diaspora.” Syms remembered the accidental phrase and found it “evocative of the mood and what it feels like sometimes to be part of the diaspora in those spaces.”
Palace does go to the party everyone’s talking about. It’s a happily spacey affair in a cavernous half-empty studio space. It might not look like much, but that’s also part of Syms’s realism. (“That was one scene I really didn’t want to be movie-fied, because it’s not a cool party! You’re upstate and there’s maybe 10 people you hang out with.”) Palace’s studio in the opening scene, for example, is a collage of life and art in progress, populated with books and Tarot cards and art materials (including long locks of hair she works with).
Perhaps because it’s Diamond’s last day on campus, we see fewer artists at work than in another film featuring an art school: Kelly Reichardt’s “Showing Up,” which recently screened at the New York Film Festival.
Michelle Williams plays a Portland ceramist, Lizzy, who is finishing a collection for her imminent show at a gallery in town. The camera traces her gaze as she considers the pieces in her home studio. We also see the hive of student activity at the arts college, where she works as an administrator.
“I was watching next to a friend of mine I went to RISD with, and we talked about how authentic the scenes felt to us,” Cynthia Lahti, the Portland artist who made Lizzy’s works, said, referring to the Rhode Island School of Design. “The way studio work flowed into the hallway. The painting class, the person throwing on the wheel, the fabric people wringing out cloth and hanging it up.”
Syms’s film shares this embrace of the many creative energies in flux at an art school. The “African Desperate” cast includes a number of practicing artists, and the effect is effervescent without feeling gratuitously eccentric.
“It’s not portraying this already joke-fied version of the art world,” Velasco said. “‘The African Desperate’ is portraying art school, but it’s doing it as an artwork itself.”
Syms’s film doesn’t pretend that Palace emerges unscathed from her experience. “I mean, people out here really want me to get mad,” the character says early on, evoking a whole history of aggravation before the film’s 24 hours. “And it’s like, I don’t want to fight you.”
But if the movie doesn’t offer a blandly happy ending, it affirms that a story has begun that only Palace can truly tell.
