FEDERAL

Mary Ellen Carroll, Federal (detail), 2003. Image and work courtesy the artist / MEC, Studios. Add to calendar Google Calendar iCalendar Outlook 365 Outlook Live About Beginning at 9AM on Tuesday, August 25, 2026 and continuing for 24 hours until 9AM on Wednesday, August 26, 2026, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) will present a non-stop screening of Mary Ellen Carroll’s FEDERAL at the River Oaks Theater in Houston. The 24-hour twin-screen movie was made by filming the north and south facades of the Federal Building in Los Angeles for an entire day in 2003. This screening is presented in conjunction with Carroll’s exhibition How To Talk Dirty and Influence People, curated by Rebecca Matalon at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. With technical direction by Michael Isabell, EYESPY Films. Mary Ellen Carroll will be at the River Oaks Theater for the duration of the screening of FEDERAL. Support for FEDERAL was made in part by the Guggenheim Foundation, Strypmonde Foundation, and The Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York.Limited food and beverage service will be available over the course of the 24-hour program.RSVP Recommended. Member First Access: June 10-16 RSVPs open to the public: June 17 RSVP Seating is first come, first served. RSVP does not guarantee a seat. If the theater is full, attendees are welcome to wait in the lobby and bar area until seating is available. Attendees are welcome to attend at any time over the course of the 24-hour program. Accessibility and Parking FEDERAL will be screened simultaneously in two upper-level auditoriums, which include four ADA accessible seats per auditorium. There is an elevator that will take guests directly to the floor where our upper auditoriums are located. The River Oaks Theatre guests can park for free across the street in the parking garage behind Barnes & Noble. In addition, paid parking is available on either side of the theater. About FEDERAL Designed in 1969 by architect Charles Luckman, the Federal Building on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles has been referred to as “the embodiment of bureaucracy,” and is frequently the site for protests. Fittingly, Carroll navigated through a bureaucratic labyrinth for nearly two years to get permission to film it to make a durational photograph for their ongoing series of portraits of federal buildings in the US and elsewhere in the world that seemed impossible to realize post 9.11. FEDERAL acknowledges Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale (1971), Chantal Akerman’s, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), and Andy Warhol’s legendary eight-hour film Empire (1965). Since its making over two decades ago, FEDERAL remains a remarkably timely work that explores United States national security in the post-9/11 social and political landscape. The building is the western headquarters for the Federal government and houses divisions of Veterans Affairs, the State Department, the FBI, Secret Service, and the CIA. Its documentation turns these high-level government agencies from the watchers to the watched. FEDERAL is a testament to the process involved in gaining access to the inner workings of governmental agencies with their complicitness and the impossibility of ever fully understanding or visualizing bureaucracy. A series of 24 photographs as well as ephemera related to the work are currently on view in the exhibition Mary Ellen Carroll: How To Talk Dirty and Influence People, May 22-November 1, 2026 at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Upcoming Programs View Calendar