CARVING DEFIANCE is a documentary about artistic ambition, identity and the price of refusing to surrender one’s calling.
Prophet left behind something extraordinary: her own account of her struggle.
Her diaries and correspondence—together with her surviving sculpture, archival photographs and historical records—allow us to encounter Prophet not simply as a figure being rediscovered a century later, but as a woman describing her ambitions, hardships, relationships and determination in her own time and in her own words.
Her journey takes us from Rhode Island to the studios and salons of Jazz Age Paris, and eventually to the historically Black colleges of Atlanta.
Through Prophet’s life, CARVING DEFIANCE explores larger questions that remain with us today:
Who gets to become an artist?
Who gets written into cultural history?
And what happens when an artist refuses the identity and destiny that society has assigned to her?
WHY NANCY ELIZABETH PROPHET — AND WHY NOW
Nancy Elizabeth Prophet’s place in American art history is finally being reconsidered.
More than a century after she began her career, museums, scholars and audiences are looking again at her surviving work and at the remarkable life behind it.
CARVING DEFIANCE will carry that rediscovery beyond museum and academic audiences through the intimacy and reach of documentary film.
This is not simply the recovery of a forgotten biography.
It is the story of an artist’s determination to define herself—and of the cultural memory that nearly lost her.
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