Vera is an assisted self-portrait of consumption. The subject is a woman whose passions and compulsions are of spending and loss, taste and subjectivity.

This work was produced in connection with Icono Negro, a three-artist show at Long Beach Museum of Art exploring the dynamics and distinctions of black video art. Three works featured in the show—Tony Cokes’s Black Celebration, Philip Mallory Jones’s What Goes Around, and Lawrence Andrews’s An I for an I—are shown in their entireties and commented upon by curator Claire Aguilar and video artists Ulysses Jenkins and O. Funmilayo Makarah.

Electronic musician and sound artist Stephen Vitiello (b.1964) creates sonic installations that function to give a physical form or space to audio. In this interview, Vitiello discusses his beginnings as a film student, and his transition from music to fine art through his investment in storytelling aspects of soundtracks. As a teacher, artist, and long-time curator at Electronic Arts Intermix, Vitiello’s insights and anecdotes offer up sentimental reflection and hard-learned life lessons, as well as perspective on the historic landscape of music and art in the 1980s and 90s. By discussing his partnerships with Tony Oursler, Jem Cohen, and Nam June Paik, Vitello provides entry into the myriad influences and collaborations that have shaped his working process and artistic career.

Danh Vo is a Vietnamese-born Danish conceptual artist, currently living and working between Berlin and Mexico City. His large installations often deal with issues of personal identity and belonging. In conversation with Norah Taylor, an art historian specializing in South and Southeast Asian art, Vo discusses his upbringing, career, and what led him to become an artist.

Part of the Long Beach Museum of Art’s Collectors of the Seventies series, this tape enters the home and art collection of Dorothy and Herbert Vogel. The Vogels live in a nondescript high-rise in the Yorkville section of New York City’s East Side. Their three and a half rooms serve as their museum for Larry Poons, Robert Morris, Philip Pearlstein, Robert Mangold, Sylvia Mangold, Dennis Oppenheim, Richard Nonas, John Tuttle, Sol Lewitt, Dan Graham, Richard Nonas, John Chamberlain, Christo, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Robert Ryman.

Interview by Douglas Davis.

Although trained as an art historian, Jeff Wall has been working on his expansive photographic light boxes of staged scenes for more than 25 years. Using back-lit, photographic transparencies typically used for advertising display, Wall subverts their commercial association by filling them with quotidian objects.

Michele Wallace's attention to the invisibility and/or fetishization of black women in the gallery and museum worlds has made possible new critical thinking around the intersection of race and gender in African American visual and popular culture, particularly in what she has called "the gap around the psychoanalytic" in contemporary African-American critical discourse.

Eyal Weizman is a British-Israeli architect and academic. He’s the founder of Forensic Architecture, which uses architectural research to investigate violations of human rights around the world. In this interview, Weizman discusses his career and the importance of Forensic Architecture’s work with Jonathan Solomon, Director of the Department of Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

William T. Wiley (b. 1937) combines a variety of materials (found objects, wood, animal hides, rope, paint) with poetry, puns, hearsay, and legends to present a very complex and enigmatic personal vision. Besides making sculpture, he also does prints, drawings, and paintings. His witty and often ironic work emphasizes both the commonality and impenetrability of everyday life and its contents. Wiley continues to live and work in the San Francisco Bay area.

Linda Williams writes on what she calls “body genres”: melodrama, horror, and, most famously, pornography. One of the most influential feminist film scholars to emerge in the 1980s, she wrote important essays on the women’s film (melodrama) before publishing her most influential work, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible (1989 and 1999).

Pat Ward Williams’s socially charged works confront issues of race, often dealing specifically with African American history and identity. Using a variety of photographic processes, video, audio tapes, assemblage and text, Williams layers meanings and images. Her subjects range from the autobiographical to the public, often combining documentary techniques with personal responses. “When I make photos about my family, I think my family is not a lot different than other peoples’ families, so that is a way people can access my work...

David Wilson is the founder and curator of the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. His collection of found and contributed objects provides an astonishing array of materials derived from craft and nature. Interview by Rachel Weiss. A historical interview originally recorded in 1998.

Millie Wilson is an installation artist whose work proposes a relationship between modernist art practices and modernity’s production of deviance, particularly regarding lesbian stereotypes. She uses humor, parody, and beauty as disruptive strategies to insist on a dyke presence in postmodern revisionism. Wilson has exhibited her work internationally and is on faculty at CalArts. Interview by Robert Blanchon.

A historical interview originally recorded in 1998.

Sculptor Jackie Winsor creates large-scale constructions in wood, fiber, twine, and wire. Recent works are subjected to explosions and fire. Winsor lives and works in New York City. Interview by Kay Miller and Albert Alhadeff.

This is a three-part tape shot in 1975, ’76, and ’78 as Winsor was working on three pieces: 50/50, Copper Piece, and Burnt Piece. The rhythms and rituals of her working process as well as her comments on the work are documented. Part III is the only filmic record of the final stage of construction of Burnt Piece.

Born in 1943 in Poland, Wodiczko lives and works in New York and Cambridge, MA, where he has been professor at MIT since 1991. Wodiczko is best known for his large-scale slide and video projections, which amplify political issues locally to their place of installation. Rather than use a screen or gallery wall as backdrop, Wodiczko projects these pieces onto public edifices and monuments, making explicit on their very surfaces the communal contexts and myths or ideologies that they represent.

Woman as Protagonist: The Art of Nancy Spero is an invigorating look at the 40-year career of acclaimed feminist artist Nancy Spero, who, in her own works, is concerned with “rewriting the imaging of women through historical time.” With Spero’s own voice as narration, this documentary tracks her development as she matured against the grain of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Pop Art when “there wasn’t room in the art world to make way for political or activist art.” This tape includes footage of the artist at work on installations in the United States, Northern Ireland, and

Ming Wong creates videos that explore performance and issues of race and gender. Born in Singapore of Chinese heritage, and now based in Berlin, his work examines cross-cultural experiences by appropriating scenes of iconic world cinema. Wong casts himself anachronistically as the star, critically exposing the otherness of the relationship of media and world history.

Fiber artist Claire Zeisler discusses her techniques, ideas on art, and training; the conversation is inter-cut with images from her 1979 retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago. “I... realized I cannot change my techniques too often. I would rather use techniques that I know and keep on perfecting them because I feel that in keeping on and perfecting them, I’m going to find something else to say,” Zeisler says in this interview with Rhona Hoffman.