Washington, D.C.-based African-American artist Sylvia Snowden paints what she calls “figural or structural abstract expressionist” works. Three years after this tape was produced, her son was shot to death, and she spent the next three years producing 87 works in a variety of media.
Ree Morton (1936-77) was an American artist working with large-scale mixed media installations. Her mature career was brief, extending from 1971 to 1977. However, her output and growth during these years was unusually large. This was the first of two interviews Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield conducted with Morton; the second was for the journal Heresies in 1977.
Estelle Jussim (1928-2004) was regarded as one of the most influential voices in photography and media. An art historian and a communications theorist, Jussim wrote extensively about photographers, movements, and institutions, incorporating postmodern, deconstructionist, and feminist viewpoints in her many writings without being hemmed in by any one critical ideology. Jussim was the award-winning author of Slave to Beauty and the pioneering Visual Communication and the Graphic Arts, which charted new ground in the investigation of the meaning of images.
In this experimental interview with Jill Ker Conway, Freed outlines a portrait in chalk on a black surface as the soundtrack conveys Conway describing her fascination with the way ones visual self appears on camera and the way an artist perceives their subject. When the sketch is complete, Freed begins to apply paint, revealing Conway’s actual photograph beneath the chalk outline through a chroma-keying technique.
Beloved by filmmakers such as John Waters and Todd Solondz, George Kuchar has been working with the moving image for nearly half a century. In the 1950s, Kuchar and his twin brother Mike began producing ultra-low-budget underground versions of Hollywood genre films, with names like I Was a Teenage Rumpot and The Devil's Cleavage.
Fiber artist Claire Zeisler discusses her techniques, ideas on art, and training; the conversation is inter-cut with images from her 1979 retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago. “I... realized I cannot change my techniques too often. I would rather use techniques that I know and keep on perfecting them because I feel that in keeping on and perfecting them, I’m going to find something else to say,” Zeisler says in this interview with Rhona Hoffman.
Alice Neel (1900-1984) is known for portrait paintings of well-known persons and eccentric New York street types. Neel worked as a figurative painter throughout the decades of WPA realism, postwar abstract expressionism, 1960s Pop, and 1970s minimalism. She persevered in her work despite a turbulent personal life and critical neglect that continued until the 1960s. Neel lived and worked in New York City from 1932 until her death in 1984.
The fourth in a series of cross-cultural symposia organized by Lucy Lippard, the four artists interviewed hereÑJapanese-American painter and political activist Betty Kano, conceptual and performance artist Lorraine O'Grady, Hopi weaver Ramona Sakiestewa, and Chicana narrative and installation artist Celia Alvarez Muñoz–discuss their work and its cultural contexts.
Born in 1943 in Poland, Wodiczko lives and works in New York and Cambridge, MA, where he has been professor at MIT since 1991. Wodiczko is best known for his large-scale slide and video projections, which amplify political issues locally to their place of installation. Rather than use a screen or gallery wall as backdrop, Wodiczko projects these pieces onto public edifices and monuments, making explicit on their very surfaces the communal contexts and myths or ideologies that they represent.
Confrontation is the element that defines Acconci’s work, from explorations of the body and self to his performances, videos, and installations to the more recent “transporting and self-erecting architecture.” Throughout his work Acconci has aggressively challenged the status quo: he has violated sexual/cultural roles and has pointed out social/political ambivalence—and in doing so, his notorious activities have stretched the boundaries of what we accept as art.
This video was produced for the Artists TV Network series Conversations.
Ming Wong creates videos that explore performance and issues of race and gender. Born in Singapore of Chinese heritage, and now based in Berlin, his work examines cross-cultural experiences by appropriating scenes of iconic world cinema. Wong casts himself anachronistically as the star, critically exposing the otherness of the relationship of media and world history.
The Luminous Image was an international exhibition of video installations held in the fall of 1984 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
A collage of informal interviews and short clips, this collection of material comes from guerilla TV excursions at the 1976 Democratic National Convention. Conducted off hand, usually amidst crowds of other journalists, the footage oscillates between slight antagonisms, genuine interest, and tongue-in-cheek play. The sheer breadth of participants being engaged with, however, is quite impressive as the soon-to-be First Lady, Jesse Jackson, David Dellinger, Bella Abzug and Jerry Brown all make appearances.
Lee Krasner (1908-1984) was born in New York and attended Cooper Union, the National Academy of Design, and the Hofmann School to study painting. Married to Jackson Pollack, Krasner's own practice was largely overlooked by the art world during her lifetime. She is one of the few women to play a major part in the transition from Modernist painting of the 1930s to the eventual triumph of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s. Krasner, with Pollack, launched the New York School after World War II.
Paul D. Miller (b. 1970) is a conceptual artist, writer, and musician better known as DJ Spooky. A popular and prolific recording artist, he has collaborated with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Butch Morris, Yoko Ono, Thurston Moore (of Sonic Youth), Kool Keith, and Killa Priest (of Wu Tang Clan). Miller’s work uses a wide variety of digitally created music as a form of postmodern sculpture.
Douglas Hollis (b.1948) was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan and continued to live there throughout the years of his college education at the University of Michigan. From an early age he had a deep interest in Native American culture. His experiences traveling in Oklahoma to live with Indian families has strongly influenced his life and his art ever since. Hollis began working with natural phenomena and responsive environment structures in the later part of the 1960's. At that time he completed several projects with musicians, dancers, film makers, engineers, and physicists.
Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) gained international recognition with her three-and-a-half hour masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), which portrays a housewife’s dull existence and eventual violent action. She has continued to be one of Europe’s most innovative filmmakers with more than forty film and television projects to her credit. Akerman’s work is minimalist, structuralist, and feminist. Major themes in her films include women at work and at home; women’s relationships to men, other women, and children; food, love, sex, romance, art, and storytelling. In this interview from 1976 Akerman discusses her early films, and the development of her particular vision.
Betty Parsons (1900-1982) was an influential art dealer in mid to late 20th century New York. She used her gallery as an influential advocate for the abstract avant-garde, and was renowned for championing new styles and new artists well before they received wider recognition or commercial success. Notable examples of Parson's circle include abstract expressionist giants Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still.
Roger Brown's (1941-1997) quirky, stylized paintings were influenced by such disparate sources as comic strips, hypnotic wallpaper patterns, medieval panel paintings, and early works of Magritte. His work is epitomized by a series of claustrophobic urban scenes with their drop-curtain-like gray clouds and cardboard-box apartment buildings, suggesting an amalgamation of boyish enthusiasm for model making and adult despondency. In 1996 he donated his apartment, complete with all of his belongings, artworks, writings, and automobile to the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, where it is on public display.
Painter and multi-media artist Jack Goldstein lived and worked in New York City. His airbrushed paintings of lightning and night skies are shown here accompanied by synthetic music, which the artist also composed. Goldstein committed suicide in 2003.
Interviewed by Jim Johnson.
Danny Tisdale is a performance artist from New York City. His performances challenge prevailing ideas of race, assimilation, appropriation and success by offering passers-by the chance to racially change their appearance as a means to achieve greater financial success. The mimicry of museological practices of cataloguing and preservation, display and presentation provides one of a range of rhetorical frameworks upon which Danny Tisdale hangs his practice of social critique.
Sphinxes Without Secrets is an energetic and transgressive acount of outstanding female performance artists, and an invaluable document of feminist avant-garde work of the 70s and 80s. No Mona Lisa smiles here, as performance artists spill their guts about what outrages and delights them. Performers, curators, and critics unravel the mysteries of a new art form and ponder the world women confront today. Since its inception, performance art has provided a forum for artists who create work that challenges the dominant aesthetic and cultural status quo.
In the 1960s and '70s, Hollis Frampton (1936-1984) emerged as one of the most important experimental filmmakers, creating structuralist works such as Zorns Lemma (1970), Poetic Justice (1972), and Nostalgia (1973).
Joyce Kozloff was at the forefront of the 1970s pattern and decoration movement—a feminist effort to incorporate typically “feminine” and popular decorative arts into the fine arts. She has been involved with public art and murals for more than two decades. In this video, Kozloff prepares and installs her mural Around the World on the 44th Parallel, which features sections of maps from 12 cities around the world on the same latitude. The work was constructed at the Tile Guild in Los Angeles and installed at the library at Minnesota State University-Mankato.
This video reveals John Baldessari's thoughts and intentions for his work over the course of his career, providing clues to the understanding of his paintings, books, and photos. What emerges is a portrait of a rebellious artist who attempts to undermine the catagories and dogmas of the art world--with the full realization that in the long run, some catagory or other will be named to label his work.
