In the 1970s, broadcast television, cable, and even satellite transmissions were considered viable outlets for visual artists to experiment, tamper, and often times, spectacularly fail with, all the while engaging in a generative model of art production. This talk focuses on the institutionalization of media art with a particular emphasis on the Long Beach Museum of Art’s prescient move to set up a media art center and commission artists to create a broadcast channel to distribute their works in the early 1970s. The museum was one of the first to consider video as a collecting category, managed a thriving residency program, operated a public editing facility, and launched the “museum channel.” Gloria Sutton is a contemporary art historian and a curator. She received the Emily Hall Tremaine Award as a co-curator of How Many Billboards in 2008.
Speaker: Gloria Sutton, Assistant Professor, Northeastern University, Boston.
