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Providence Deals With Disaster

Laurie McDonald

1978 00:08:10 United StatesEnglishB&WMono4:31/2" open reel video

Description

The historic Great Blizzard of 1978, one of the most severe blizzards in U.S. history, hit southern New England with paralyzing effects. When no one could drive, and thousands of cars were buried under five feet of snow on local highways, people took to the streets, including Laurie with a Portapak. The tape features commentary provided by local citizens, a National Guard helicopter invasion, the five-day traffic jam frozen on the I-95 highway, and an optimism-in-the-face-of adversity speech by the Governor of Rhode Island.

About Laurie McDonald

Laurie McDonald is a media artist, writer, graphic designer, and photographer. In 1972, she began exploring video as an art-making tool and was a founding member of the video art collective Electron Movers, Research in the Electronic Arts, based in Providence, Rhode Island. Her early work was exhibited at The Kitchen (NYC) and included in the 10th, 11th, and 12th annual New York Avant Garde Festivals, and at venues throughout New York and New England.

She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship and four American Film Institute/NEA Fellowships. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pierre du Chardin Gallery (Paris), The Gallery of Modern Art (Rome), and at festivals including the American Film Institute’s Film/Video Festival, the Tokyo Video Festival, the Festival du Cinema in Montreal, and at Filmfest (Berlin, Budapest, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Moscow). 

As a writer, her experience ranges from novels to screenplays to instructional/informational writing. Using the pseudonym Eva Rome, she has written and published three books: Travel for STOICS; What It Means: Myth, Symbol, and Archetype in the Third Millennium, Vol. 1; and Location X: A Quest for Place. She has served as a screenplay consultant to the National Endowment for the Arts Media Grants Committee, as a contract screenplay and script writer/consultant, and as both a book editor and book cover designer. As a graphic designer and photographer, she has designed and built Web sites, graphics for print, and graphics for video. She has published two books of her own photographs: Chair, and Fotocollées

Laurie is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and holds a Master of Literature degree from the University of Houston. She lives in Evanston, Illinois, USA, and in San Miguel de Allende, México.