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.

 

VDB TV: Decades
2010s: Future-Past-Present

An original program for VDB TV: Decades curated by Omar Kholeif.

Future-Past-Present: A Journey Through the Twenty-Tens So Far

VDB TV: Decades
2010s: Future-Past-Present

An original program for VDB TV: Decades curated by Omar Kholeif.

Future-Past-Present: A Journey Through the Twenty-Tens So Far

VDB TV: Decades
2010s: Future-Past-Present

An original program for VDB TV: Decades curated by Omar Kholeif.

Future-Past-Present: A Journey Through the Twenty-Tens So Far

VDB TV: Decades
2010s: Future-Past-Present

An original program for VDB TV: Decades curated by Omar Kholeif.

Future-Past-Present: A Journey Through the Twenty-Tens So Far

VDB TV: Decades
2010s: Future-Past-Present

An original program for VDB TV: Decades curated by Omar Kholeif.

Future-Past-Present: A Journey Through the Twenty-Tens So Far

VDB TV: Decades
2010s: Future-Past-Present

An original program for VDB TV: Decades curated by Omar Kholeif.

Future-Past-Present: A Journey Through the Twenty-Tens So Far

VDB TV: Decades
2010s: Future-Past-Present

An original program for VDB TV: Decades curated by Omar Kholeif.

Future-Past-Present: A Journey Through the Twenty-Tens So Far

In 1971, graduate student Gloria Orenstein receives a call from surrealist artist Leonora Carrington that sparks a lifelong journey into art, ecofeminism, and shamanism. A wife and mother of two writing her dissertation for New York University, Orenstein never expects to have her life transformed through female friendship.

Gloria's Call, Cheri Gaulke

This husband and wife team has collaborated on numerous projects in the U.S.and abroad. Their approach to making art involves finding solutions to ecological problems. Both are emeritus professors in the department of visual arts at the University of California-San Diego. Interview by Michael Crane.

 

Helen and Newton Harrison

Eco-artists Helen and Newton Harrison define truth as a series of interactions that anyone may join. The Harrisons choose survivalist subjects because we have so encroached upon this environment, we must give it every advantage we can. Only available on the Fellows of Contemporary Art compilation.

 

Helen and Newton Harrison: Altering Discourse

Taped shortly after the creation of the Air Gallery, this conversation between painter Howardena Pindell and Hermine Freed concerns the women’s independent gallery and its role in the feminist movement. Pindell also discusses the development of her work and the relation between black artists and the art world.

Howardena Pindell

Matt Wolf returns to Joe Brainard's iconic poem I Remember (1970) in this videowork. His archival montage combines audio recordings of Brainard reading from the poem, as well as an interview with his lifelong friend and collaborator, the poet Ron Padgett. The result is an inventive biography of Joe Brainard, and an elliptical dialog about friendship, nostalgia, and the strange wonders of memory.

Matt Wolf, I Remember: A Film About Joe Brainard

An elegy to Diane Burns on the shapes of mortality and being, and the forms the transcendent spirit takes while descending upon landscapes of life and death. A place for new mythologies to syncopate with deterritorialized movement and song, reifying old routes of reincarnation. Where resignation gives hope for another opportunity, another form, for a return to the vicissitudes of the living and all their refractions.

“I’m from Oklahoma I ain’t got no one to call my own.
If you will be my honey, I will be your sugar pie way hi ya
way ya hi ya way ya hi yo.”

I'll Remember You as You Were, Not as What You'll Become, Sky Hopinka

J. Morgan Puett is an internationally renowned artist living on a 95-acre compound in the deciduous forests of northeastern Pennsylvania. Touching on ideas of creative domestication, radical pedagogy, and a critical engagement with one’s environment, Ms. Puett describes her unique home, which she calls Mildred’s Lane.

“It (J. Morgan Puett: A Practice of Be(e)ing) tells a unique story of an important artist that truly lives her art. It’s an exclusive biography of a woman who is widely known to the art world but, as yet, undiscovered by our culture.”

—Roderick Angle

J. Morgan Puett: A Practice of Be(e)ing