The Elephant (In My Room)

USA/Canada/2025 — directed by K.L. Dunn and Joel Martin

Barbara Greene Mann was a brilliant and prolific printmaker and watercolor painter who emerged from Detroit’s Cass Corridor arts community in the late 1960s. 

Greene Mann chronicled the people, places, and energy of a city in cultural upheaval, until she vanished from the scene in the early 1980s. Thirty years later, filmmaker Joel Martin found her living in Toronto, struggling with mental illness but still creating visionary images with relentless intensity, as if her life depended on it. 

Her final works reflected on the plight of an orphaned elephant named Lucy, who was being kept in solitary captivity at the Edmonton Zoo.

The Elephant (in my room) premieres alongside Wayne State University Press’s publication of Strange Beauty, an illustrated retrospective of Greene Mann’s prints, watercolors, and lithographs.