Artist Portraits

On Art and Artists: Artist Portraits

This section of the On Art and Artists collection highlights a number of experimental portraits of artists, and documentaries about the artistic process, from intimate one-on-one close-ups and dialogues, to full studio production studies. These works do not follow a traditional interview format, but are often intended as artworks in their own right. The artists and makers of these Artist Portraits draw artistic inspiration and stylistic license from the collaborators and interlocutors they depict.

Akram Zaatari

Twenty Eight Nights and A Poem

2015

Founded in 1997, the Arab Image Foundation preserves the legacy and collection of photographer Hashem el Madani and the Sheherazade photo studio.

VDB TV: Decades

2017

VDB TV: Decades is a unique series that casts a distinctive eye over the development of video as an art form from the early 1970s to the present, produced to mark the 40th anniversary of the Video Data Bank. Each program in this five-disc box set was curated by an inspiring artist, scholar, or media arts specialist focusing on a specific decade. Curators surveyed the VDB collection to create personal, distinctive, and relevant programs, accompanied by original essays and texts, available as ROM content on each program disc.

Deborah Stratman

Vever (for Barbara)

2019

A cross-generational binding of three filmmakers seeking alternative possibilities to the power structures they are inherently part of. Each woman extends her reach to a subject she is outside of. Vever grew out of the abandoned film projects of Maya Deren and Barbara Hammer. Shot at the furthest point of a motorcycle trip Hammer took to Guatemala in 1975, and laced through with Deren’s reflections of failure, encounter and initiation in 1950s Haiti.

A vever is a symbolic drawing used in Haitian Voodoo to invoke Loa, or god.

Long Beach Museum of Art

Viewpoints on Video: Open Channels Five Year Survey

1990

Long Beach Museum of Art

Dorothy and Herbert Vogel

1979

Part of the Long Beach Museum of Art’s Collectors of the Seventies series, this tape enters the home and art collection of Dorothy and Herbert Vogel. The Vogels live in a nondescript high-rise in the Yorkville section of New York City’s East Side. Their three and a half rooms serve as their museum for Larry Poons, Robert Morris, Philip Pearlstein, Robert Mangold, Sylvia Mangold, Dennis Oppenheim, Richard Nonas, John Tuttle, Sol Lewitt, Dan Graham, Richard Nonas, John Chamberlain, Christo, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Robert Ryman.

Interview by Douglas Davis.

Louis Henderson

A Walk With Nigel

2010

A Walk with Nigel is a video essay that constructs a dialogue between two artists from two different times, between movement and stillness, between speech and silence. An archaeological study of a community, reawakening the archive in the present. A materialist study of streets and social relations.

Suzanne Lacy

Whisper, The Waves, The Wind

1986

In today’s youth-oriented society, the experience and knowledge of older women is typically unheralded and neglected. Countering these ideas is Suzanne Lacy’s Whisper, The Waves, The Wind—a performance evoking and reinforcing the strong spiritual and physical beauty of older women. Lacy says, “They reminded me of the place where the ocean meets shoreline. Their bodies were growing older, wrinkled. But what I saw was the rock in them; solid, with the presence of the years washing over them.” This tape is a document of that performance.

Jonathan Reiss

The Will to Provoke

1988

Director Jonathan Reiss and cinematographer/editor Leslie Asako Gladsjo traveled to Europe with Survival Research Laboratories to produce this entertaining and challenging portrait of the innovative group of artist technicians. The tape shows their machines in action and provides insight to their inspirations, political objectives, and budgetary constraints. The tape also reveals SRL’s efforts to confound and confront their foreign audiences with an artform that is, perhaps, uniquely American.

Liza Béar

Jackie Winsor: Work in Progress: Parts I, II and III

1978

This is a three-part tape shot in 1975, ’76, and ’78 as Winsor was working on three pieces: 50/50, Copper Piece, and Burnt Piece. The rhythms and rituals of her working process as well as her comments on the work are documented. Part III is the only filmic record of the final stage of construction of Burnt Piece.

Irene Sosa

Woman as Protaganist: The Art of Nancy Spero

1993

Woman as Protagonist: The Art of Nancy Spero is an invigorating look at the 40-year career of acclaimed feminist artist Nancy Spero, who, in her own works, is concerned with “rewriting the imaging of women through historical time.” With Spero’s own voice as narration, this documentary tracks her development as she matured against the grain of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Pop Art when “there wasn’t room in the art world to make way for political or activist art.” This tape includes footage of the artist at work on installations in the United States, Northern Ireland, and

Cecilia Dougherty

The Writers Series

2012

The Writers Series consists of a number of video portraits of writers whose work I love.

— Cecilia Dougherty

Scott Rankin

A Tribute to Claire Zeisler

1991

In this tape made shortly after fiber and sculpture artist Claire Zeisler’s death, art critic Dennis Adrian discusses her influence and aesthetic strategies. Adrian’s commentary is intercut with images of her work and archival footage of an interview with the artist.