Drop in to the Target Studio for a film screening of the documentary Take This Hammer, produced and directed by Richard O. Moore, featuring essayist, intellectual and social critic, James Baldwin. Filmed in San Francisco in the spring of 1963, the documentary follows Baldwin as he engages in conversations with Black community members and religious leaders, addressing focusing on unemployment, gentrification, police violence and the fate of the civil-rights movement. While the film specifically addresses the circumstances of the early 1960s, Baldwin’s emphasis on the importance of acknowledging and confronting uncomfortable truths makes this work enduringly significant, especially in the context of ongoing struggles for racial justice in places like Minneapolis and across the United States.

Film runtime is 58 minutes and runs continuously on a loop during museum open hours. 

Presented in conversation with the exhibition, More Various, More Beautiful, More Terrible, now on view in the Weisman’s Woodhouse Family Gallery. 

Richard O. Moore, Take This Hammer [Directors Cut], 1963. Shown with permission from WNET. Image credit: James Baldwin IMDB/Weisman Art Museum illustration.