Taking place on the occasion of the publication of Feedback, The Video Data Bank Catalog of Video Art and Artist Interviews and MoMA’s The Feminist Future symposium, this exhibition offers screenings of video art and interviews with women in the arts drawn from the Chicago-based Video Data Bank. The Video Data Bank (VDB) was started in 1976 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a collection of student productions and interviews with visiting artists. Around the same time, VDB codirectors Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield began conducting their own interviews with women artists who were underrepresented critically in the art world; these interviews soon became part of the archive. In 1980 VDB began distributing video art due to the growing need for artists’ representation. Over the past thirty years both collections have grown and are annotated in their newly published catalog. For this presentation, interviews and videotapes were chosen to reflect women’s art making and the evolution of feminist theory over the past thirty years. Interviews are by Kate Horsfield and Lyn Blumenthal, and the videos are produced in the U.S. unless otherwise noted.
Organized by Sally Berger, Assistant Curator, Department of Film; with Blithe Riley, Editor and Project Coordinator, On Art and Artists collection, Video Data Bank.
Special thanks to Kate Horsfield, Director Emeritus; Tom Colley, Collections Manager; and Abina Manning, Interim Director, Video Data Bank; and the Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Fund.