Visual Art

Judy Chicago (b.1939) creates large-scale, collaborative artwork has brought greater prominence to feminist themes and craft arts such as needlework and ceramics. Her most famous work, The Dinner Party (1979), was an enormous collaboration with hundreds of volunteers including ceramicists, china painters and needleworkers. The monumental finished piece has place settings for 39 mythical and historical famous women, writing them back into the heroic history usually reserved for men. Earlier in her career, Chicago was part of the Finish Fetish movement within Minimalism.

Part 3 profiles three California women artists: sculptor and lint and installation artist Slater Baron, mixed media installation artist Beverly Nadius, and book artist Sue Ann Robinson.

Cacheu is a 10-minute shot of a lecture, performed by Joana Barrios, revolving around four colonial statues, which are stored today at the Fortress of Cacheu, one of the first bastions constructed by the Portuguese in 1588 in order to facilitate slave trade in the West African country of Guinea Bissau. Barrios evokes symbolic conflicts by tracing back different contexts in which the statues make an appearance: on a pedestal during Portuguese colonialism, dethroned and broken in pieces after Independence in the film Sans Soleil by Chris Marker, as background ghosts in Mortu Nega by Flora Gomes, and finally displayed at the Cacheu fort. The montage is a process that takes place before shooting, so that the image production is a result of a performative assemblage between text, acting, projected image and the framing of the camera by the director of photography, Matthias Biber.

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) was born in Kleve, Germany. After serving as a volunteer in the German military, Beuys attended the Dusseldorf Academy of Art to study sculpture, where in 1959 he became a professor. Much of his artwork reflects his attempt to come to terms with his involvement in the war. During the ’60s, Beuys became acquainted with the group Fluxus and artists such as Nam June Paik.

Fred Tomaselli’s mosaics and collages compose patterns and images that suggest ancient global influences. His materials, however, are products of modern consumption, addiction, bodily abuse, and pleasure: pills, nicotine patches, bandages, and the like. The surfaces are coated with a lacquered veneer, making these mundane sources of highs or healing gleam. Interview by James Rondeau. A historical interview originally recorded in 1999 and re-edited in 2007.

This video trilogy of Camera, Monitor, Frame, Observer / Observed, and Observer / Observed / Observer creates a semiology of video as a work on video rather than a written text.  Its main purpose is to study the structural relationships between video and language, in this case using the English language.  I designed a system depicting the relationship between the observer and the person being observed using words such as "I" and "YOU" through a video feedback system as the basis.  This trilogy is a remake of my 1975-76 piece.  It is shorter in

This film originated as an expanded portrait of artist Carol Bove as she created four monumental sculptures commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One week after filming began, New York City went into its first pandemic lockdown. Filmed against the backdrop of the progressing pandemic, Medium evolved into a meditation on materiality and the artist as a medium through which ideas move into the world.

Perceptual concerns predominate in my videoworks. In Locating #2, Zeroing In, and Points of View, large outdoor spaces — as much as five miles in depth and one mile in width from fifteen floors up — are spanned on the video screen. Space is flattened and contracted. By placing a prop (a movable tube or a piece of cardboard with holes that open and close) in front of the camera, I block off most of the static camera view, leaving one or more circular images to come and go.