The Galbut Institute is pleased to present Sorry I’m A Lady, a film directed by Jonathan Gonzalez with architecture and environments by Gonzalez and featuring the paintings of Anna Vickers. The film will be presented on the publicly facing monumental video screen at the retail and cultural hub 1212 Lincoln Road on Miami Beach. The screen occupies the south façade of 1212 Lincoln at the intersection of Alton Road and 16th Street, one of the city’s most active urban junctions. Sorry I’m A Lady will be exclusively playing on the screen from November 28 through December 31, 2025.

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The setting of the film is an idealized virtual museum digitally constructed by Gonzalez through close examination of Vickers’ paintings interrogating the female nude subject and its critique. It is defined by immaculate minimalist architecture and immense, luminous galleries forming the perfect embodiment of a contemporary art museum. Perfection is also a concept embodied by the category of the female nude, which is interpreted by contemporary art institutions through the lens of critique. By exclusively displaying Vickers’ paintings of the nude subject in multiple corollaries with the film’s idealized galleries, Gonzalez brings institutional critique into focus. The critique of the nude melts into the critique of the institution, just as the paintings melt into their surrounding spaces as Gonzalez fades the camera from one gallery to the next.

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Strikingly, Gonzalez turns institutional critique on its head. Instead of using an art object that displaced the nude as a cipher for critique, Vickers’ reframed nudes become the catalyst for it. Instead of moving the art object outside the institution, Gonzalez reinserts it on the museum’s walls in exquisite display. Instead of closing off the institution — or leaving it behind when bringing the object of institutional critique into public space — Gonzalez brings the entire institution along with it. Neither the object nor the institution is dismantled; inversely, both are depicted in states of perfection in direct interaction with the streets below.

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Gonzalez extends this inversion through a study of the grid — a motif recurring across the work’s architecture and display. The poured-in-place concrete wall that supports the 1212 Lincoln screen, the screen’s 1,500 LED modules, the curtain-wall glazing, the sawtooth roofs and the gentle grate-like shadows that fall diagonally across the figures, all echo the rectilinear order of the modernist grid. These elements unhinge the formal logic of the grid as announcing painting’s self-referential endgame through their interplays with the pictorial forms of Vickers’ paintings. They bring into focus the self-referential nature of Vickers’ figures, revealing possibilities for new ideas in painting through the most emblematic subject matter displaced by the grid: the nude. The dazzling Miami Beach sun pours across the video screen in a literal shedding of light on this point.

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The exterior landscaping elaborates on these ideas. Zen gardens of fine sand contain bare, leafless trees — both upright and fallen. They suggest the cyclical nature of life, a theme core to Vickers’ exploration of new possibilities for the female nude subject after its “death” in postmodernism, and a way of thinking about a rebirthed, reframed art object on a gallery wall where both object and wall are presented together in public space as a form of institutional critique.

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To view the full-length film, please click here.

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To view a video of the film being played at 1212 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach, please click here.

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To download the press release for Sorry I'm A Lady, please click here.