History
In 1974, VDB co-founders Kate Horsfield and Lyn Blumenthal, graduate students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, began conducting video interviews with women artists who they felt were underrepresented critically in the art world. After buying a Panasonic Portapak and successfully conducting talks with painters Joan Mitchell and Agnes Martin and curator Marcia Tucker, the pair decided to continue the series. "It was really a kind of accident,” noted Horsfield in a 2007 interview. “We were looking for inspiration for ourselves, but we were also looking for information on what was happening. If you read art magazines in the early '70s, it was very rare to see any real coverage of any women artists." In 1976 Horsfield and Blumenthal officially founded the Video Data Bank, taking over a small collection of student video productions and interviews that was begun by Phil Morton at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They went on to add to the archive, conducting talks with prominent artists of the period such as Alice Neel, Lucy Lippard, Lee Krasner, Barbara Kruger, and the Guerilla Girls, who appeared wearing their trademark gorilla masks.
Lyn Blumenthal died in 1988 and the VDB maintains the Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Fund for independent video. Horsfield remained director of the collection until her retirement in 2006. The current director, Abina Manning, was named in December 2007. In 2007 the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC) named Video Data Bank as the year's "Outstanding Media Arts Organization"
Read more about this topic: Video Data Bank
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