First Friday! Exposure: Nu West: ‘Nope’ (2022) + Divination with Lily Cox-Richard

Divination with Lily Cox-Richard
5–6 p.m.
Exhibiting artist Lily Cox-Richard will facilitate a guided meditation and intention-setting in the ICA’s True Farr Luck Gallery, inviting attendees to engage with the divination objects in her Disquiet in the Sand exhibition. Participants are invited to bring their own pendulum or activate one of the pieces in the gallery.

Nope (2022, dir. Jordan Peele, 2hr., 10 min.)
6:30 p.m.
Peele’s Nope is a sci-fi neo-Western in a meta, cinematic dialogue with the nature of spectacle. Both a love letter to forgotten Black pioneers of early cinema and an acerbic critique of Hollywood’s most enduring tradition of exploitation, the film returns the Black cowboy to the center of the frame, now as storyteller, mythmaker, and survivor in a world obsessed with images but indifferent to their origins.

This film is presented as part of Exposure: Nu West, in which the ICA invites recurring guest and Exposure cinema founder Brandon Shillingford to curate a film series for Black History Month. Throughout the month of February, Shillingford will look at how four Black filmmakers rework and reckon with the American West in their narratives. From Gordon Parks to Charles Burnett to Jordan Peele, Black filmmakers have used the American West not just as backdrop, but as battleground, a space to wrestle with inheritance, legacy, and American mythmaking. Nu West spans the traditional West to the transcendent: Buck and the Preacher and Thomasine & Bushrod reimagine the outlaw and pioneer; To Sleep with Anger translates Southern folklore and mysticism into South Central Los Angeles; and Nope interrogates spectacle, authorship, and the cinematic hagiography that built America’s mythology. Together, these films ask: Who gets to claim the frontier? How do Black filmmakers reshape a mythology built to burden them? What happens when the West, as land, genre, and legend, becomes a site of spiritual and cinematic reckoning?

Exposure: Nu West dates:
February 4: Buck and the Preacher (dir. Sidney Poitier, 1972)
February 6: Nope (dir. Jordan Peele, 2022)
February 17: Thomasine & Bushrod (dir. Gordon Parks Jr., 1974)
February 25: To Sleep with Anger (dir. Charles Burnett, 1990)

About First Fridays
First Fridays are a Richmond tradition in the Broad Street Arts District. The ICA welcomes all to linger from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. for evening art viewing, food trucks, and other exciting programming.