Submitted Photo: The 1891 Fredonia Opera House will present a recent film from Filmmaker Michael Maglaras titled “America Rising: The Arts of the Gilded Age on Thursday, June 29, at 7:30 p.m., as part of its Art & Architecture: On Screen series. To celebrate local artists, the Opera House has partnered with members of the North Shore Arts Alliance on a special art installation at the Opera House from 6:30-7:30pm, immediately prior to the screening. The exhibit will include work by artists including Katherine Galbraith who created portraits at the National Gallery of Art under their Copyist Program, both of them from portraits by John Singer Sargent including this one of Mrs. Henry White.

The 1891 Fredonia Opera House will present a recent film from Filmmaker Michael Maglaras titled “America Rising: The Arts of the Gilded Age” on Thursday, June 29, at 7:30 p.m., as part of its Art & Architecture: On Screen series. Maglaras and Producer Terri Templeton will introduce the film and will lead a talk-back and Q&A following its screening. In addition, the Opera House has partnered with the North Shore Arts Alliance to present an exhibition of local artists’ works at the Opera House immediately prior to the screening.

“America Rising: The Arts of the Gilded Age” tells the story of the painting, the sculpture, the music, and the literature of America’s renaissance … the tremendous outpouring of artistic endeavor that occurred between the death of Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and the death of Mark Twain in 1910.

Employing more than 90 paintings, drawings, photographs and sculptural works by such important America artists as John Singer Sargent, Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, Alfred Stieglitz and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, writer/director Maglaras tells the story of the rising of American society through the voices of some of its most creative spirits.

Included in this film is recently discovered film footage (the only known footage) of Mark Twain taken in 1909.

“We are very excited to be screening this film and to have the filmmakers available to talk about its creation,” notes Opera House Executive Director Rick Davis. “As part of our effort to offer a wide variety of intriguing programming, we believe this event will appeal not only to lovers of art and history, but to movie buffs as well.”

To celebrate local artists, the Opera House has partnered with members of the North Shore Arts Alliance on a special art installation at the Opera House from 6:30-7:30 p.m., immediately prior to the screening of “America Rising: The Arts of the Gilded Age.” Local artists exhibiting include: Nancy Nixon Ensign, Katherine Galbraith, James Hoggard, Ronnie Lafferty, Susan Forrester Mackay and Carrie Anne Tredo.

Michael Maglaras has been hailed as a “virtuoso filmmaker.” He founded 217 films in 2003 with the aim of introducing a new audience to the rich history of the art of the American experience. His first project was a film about the American painter Marsden Hartley called Cleophas and His Own, which was based on a forgotten personal narrative by the iconic and seminal Modernist.

Since then, he has produced the first-ever documentary film about Hartley, titled “Visible Silence: Marsden Hartley, Painter and Poet,” which was followed closely by the first feature-length documentary about Hartley’s contemporary and friend, the painter John Marin, titled “Let Paint be Paint.”

Maglaras has been called a “filmmaker of nearly Bergman-like gravitas.” His work with producer Templeton has been called “comparable to that of the widely acclaimed Ken Burns.” “America Rising: The Arts of the Gilded Age” was released earlier this year. It is his seventh film. Opera House audiences will remember Maglaras from his appearance here in 2016 with his film Enough to Live On: The Arts of the WPA.

Tickets to this Meet the Filmmaker event are $15 ($10 Students). A special Live in HD Series flexible subscription of eight tickets that can be used anytime — one at a time to eight different events, all at once for eight people, or anything in between — is $116. Tickets may be purchased in person at the Opera House Box Office or by phone at 679-1891, Tuesday-Friday, 1-5 p.m. Tickets may be purchased online anytime at www.fredopera.org.

The Art & Architecture On Screen series is sponsored by Fredonia Place. Presentation of America Rising: The Arts of the Gilded Age is made possible in part with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts’ Electronic Media and Film Presentation Funds grant program, administered by the ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes.

The 1891 Fredonia Opera House is a member-supported not-for-profit organization located in Village Hall in downtown Fredonia. A complete schedule of Opera House events is available at www.fredopera.org.