The VDB Collections include seminal works that, seen as a whole, describe the development of video as an art form originating in the late 1960's and continuing to the present. The collections feature video created by artists from an aesthetic, political or personal point of view, made available through a far-reaching and comprehensive distribution program. Featured artists include early video pioneers such as Vito Acconci, Suzanne Lacy, Bruce Nauman and Martha Rosler, to the latest works by contemporary artists including Rosa Barba, Sadie Benning, Paul Chan, Harun Farocki, Miranda July and Walid Raad.
The VDB Collections can be searched by way of a comprehensive and media-rich database that details titles and artists, alongside video clips.
New Releases
New Releases are the latest acquisitions to the VDB Collections, be they contemporary works by artists, titles that are newly-preserved or edited that are now being made available to audiences, or recently released DVD Box Sets or Compilations.
DVD Box Sets
DVD Box Sets features single artist surveys published alongside monographs with contextualizing essays, and special anthologies around a topic or theme, many of them produced by the Video Data Bank.
Compilations
Curated Compilations are multiple titles programmed around a particular subject or theme.
Single Artist Compilations are surveys of an artist's moving image work.
Special Collections
The On Art and Artists collection represents almost 40 years of producing and acquiring interviews with contemporary artists, architects, theorists, and critics. The collection features interviews made by the Video Data Bank, and by co-founders Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield, as well as by other individual producers and producing organizations such as Artists Television Network, Long Beach Museum of Art, and the University of Colorado visiting artist program. In addition, the collection includes a number of titles relating to the artists' process, including experimental documentaries and profiles.
Videofreex, one of the first video collectives, was founded in 1969 by David Cort, Curtis Ratcliff and Parry Teasdale, after David and Parry met each other, video cameras in hand, at the Woodstock Music Festival. The group soon grew to ten full-time members--including Chuck Kennedy, Nancy Cain, Skip Blumberg, Davidson Gigliotti, Carol Vontobel, Bart Friedman and Ann Woodward--and produced tapes, installations and multimedia events.
In 1971 the Freex moved to a 17-room, former boarding house called Maple Tree Farm in Lanesville, NY, where they operated one of the earliest media centers. Their innovative programming ranged from artists' tapes and performances to behind-the-scenes coverage of national politics and alternate culture. During the decade that the Freex were together, this pioneer video group amassed an archive of 1,500+ raw tapes and edits.
The Videofreex Archive, now housed at VDB, chronicles the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s and '70s. The titles listed are the early results of an ongoing project to preserve and digitize important examples of this early video art collective.
Early Video Art is a collection of over 200 titles that are central to an understanding of the historical development of video art. This collection includes, but is not limited to, many titles from the original Castelli-Sonnabend collection, the first and most prominent collection of video art assembled in the United States. All of the work in this collection was produced between 1968 and 1980. These works represent important examples of the first experiments in video art, and include conceptual and feminist performances recorded on video, experiments with the video signal, and "guerilla" documentaries representing a counter-cultural view of the historical events of the 1960s and '70s. Many of these tapes represent a desire for a radically redefined television experience that is centered on the innovative, the personal, the political and the non-commercial.
The Video Data Bank is proud to carry the collections of work on video by renowned artists George Kuchar and Mike Kuchar.