Please join us for a conversation that will bring together Nancy Holt, Joan Jonas, Anthony Ramos, and Paul Ryan, four artists featured in the exhibition Circa 1971: Early Video & Film from the EAI Archive, currently on view at Dia: Beacon. The panel will initiate a dialogue on the generative artistic and political landscape that influenced the video art scene of the early 1970s.

Anthony Ramos, Balloon Nose Blow-Up (1972)

Saturday, September 22, 2012
2 pm

Dia:Beacon
3 Beekman Street
Beacon, NY 12508
www.diaart.org/circa1971
www.eai.org

A reception will follow the panel.

Free with admission.
Space is limited. Reservations are required. To make a reservation, please click here.

General Admission: $10
Students/Seniors: $7
Free for EAI & Dia Members

To become an EAI Member, please click here.

Circa 1971: Early Video & Film from the EAI Archive, which was organized on the occasion of EAI's 40th anniversary, features 23 works from 1970-72. The exhibition presents a snapshot of a countercultural moment, when contemporary art practices had moved away from object making toward an emphasis on process; television was the dominant mass cultural force; the social movements of the 1960s had upended long-held cultural assumptions and the new medium of video was deployed as a radical art-making tool.

Circa 1971: Early Video & Film from the EAI Archive was organized by guest curator and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) Executive Director Lori Zippay, in collaboration with Dia's curatorial department. The exhibition is made possible in part by Pamela and Richard Kramlich.

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Conversation with Nancy Holt, Joan Jonas, Anthony Ramos and Paul Ryan


Nancy Holt

A pioneer of earthworks, Land Art and public art, Nancy Holt has also worked in sculpture, installation, film, video, and photography. Her works address memory and perception, often in relation to the natural environment. Holt was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1938. She has produced site-specific environmental works in numerous public places, including Sun Tunnels (1976), a large-scale sculptural work in Great Basin Desert, Utah; Stone Enclosure (Rock Rings) in Bellingham, Washington; Astral Grating (1987) in a New York City subway station, and Dark Star Park, in Arlington, Virginia, among many others. She has also completed large-scale land reclamation projects, including Sky Mound (1988) in the New Jersey Meadowlands, and Up and Under (1998), in Nokia, Finland. A major retrospective exhibition, Nancy Holt: Sightlines, originated at Columbia University's Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, New York, and traveled to Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Germany, among other venues. Holt's works have been seen in exhibitions at Haunch of Venison, London; John Weber Gallery, New York; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Dia Center for the Arts, New York, and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York. Holt lives in Galisteo, New Mexico.


Joan Jonas

An acclaimed multi-media performance artist, Joan Jonas is also a major figure in video art. Employing an idiosyncratic vocabulary of ritualized gesture and symbolic objects that include masks, mirrors, and costuming, she explores the self and the body through layers of meaning. Jonas was born in 1936 in New York. Jonas has performed at venues throughout the world, including at the European Kunsthalle, Cologne, Germany; the Kitchen, New York; Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. She has had retrospective exhibitions at the Queens Museum of Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands, and Stadtsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany. In 2005, Jonas presented a site-specific performance at Dia:Beacon, New York. Other one-person exhibitions and performances include Kunstmuseum, Bern; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; San Francisco Museum of Art; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Yvon Lambert Gallery, Paris and New York; Pat Hearn Gallery, New York, and Sonnabend Gallery, New York, among others. Group exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Documentas 5, 6, 8, and 11 in Kassel, Germany; Kunsthaus Graz, Austria; and Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna. Jonas lives in New York.


Anthony Ramos

Painter, performance and media artist Anthony Ramos was among the pioneering video artists who used the medium as a tool to critique mass media and give voice to marginalized individuals and communities in the 1970s. His early performance-based works combine conceptual art and political engagement. Ramos was born in 1944 in Providence, Rhode Island. He is the recipient of a Rhode Island Council for the Humanities grant, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and is an Aspen Fellow at the Aspen Institute in Colorado. His video works have been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Light Industry, New York, and Centre Pompidou, Paris, among other venues. He received an M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts, where he was assistant to Allan Kaprow. In the 1970s Ramos was a video consultant for the United Nations and the National Council of Churches. In the 1980s, he lived in Paris where he was a Professor at the American Center, and oversaw the television cabling of ten blocks of Paris. He has taught at Rhode Island School of Design, New York University, and University of California at San Diego. Ramos lives in Eyguieres, France.


Paul Ryan

A founding member of the pioneering activist media collective Raindance, Paul Ryan was both a practitioner and theorist of the early video movement in the 1970s. He continues to work in video, performance, writing and other media. Ryan was born in 1943 in New York City. He received a B.A. from New York University and pursued graduate studies with Marshall McLuhan at Fordham University. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany; Howard Wise Gallery, New York; Venice Biennale; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, New York, among other venues. Works by Ryan are currently being archived at The Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., including his Television Ecochannel, Earthscore Notation and his Hall of Risk Program. Ryan authored seminal texts on video, published in Radical Software (1970-74), as well as The Three Person Solution (2009), Video Mind, Earth Mind (1992), and Cybernetics of the Sacred (1974). He has also published in numerous journals, including Leonardo, Afterimage, Millennium, Terra Nova, and Semiotica. Ryan is an Associate Professor in Graduate Media Studies at the New School in New York. He lives in New York.

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Dia Art Foundation

A nonprofit institution founded in 1974, Dia Art Foundation is renowned for initiating, supporting, presenting, and preserving art projects. Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries, opened in May 2003 in Beacon, New York, on the banks of the Hudson River as the home for Dia's distinguished collection of art from the 1960s to the present. The museum, which occupies a former Nabisco printing factory, features major installations of works by a focused group of some of the most significant artists of the last half century, as well as special exhibitions, new commissions, and diverse public and education programs. Dia:Chelsea is located on West 22nd Street in the heart of New York City's gallery district, which it helped to pioneer. Currently open for artist lectures and readings, Dia is developing plans to expand its presence in Chelsea. Dia also maintains long-term, site-specific projects. These include Walter De Maria's The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979), Max Neuhaus's Times Square (1977), Joseph Beuys's 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks) (1988), and Dan Flavin's untitled (1996), in Manhattan; The Dan Flavin Art Institute, in Bridgehampton, New York; De Maria's Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977), in Kassel, Germany; Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970), in the Great Salt Lake, Utah; and De Maria's The Lightning Field (1977), in Quemado, New Mexico. For additional public information, visit www.diaart.org.

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About EAI

Founded in 1971, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is one of the world's leading nonprofit resources for video art. A pioneering advocate for media art and artists, EAI fosters the creation, exhibition, distribution, and preservation of video art and digital art. EAI's core program is the distribution and preservation of a major collection of over 3,500 new and historical media works by artists. EAI's activities include viewing access, educational services, extensive online resources, and public programs such as artists' talks, exhibitions and panels. The Online Catalogue is a comprehensive resource on the artists and works in the EAI collection, and also features extensive materials on exhibiting, collecting and preserving media art: www.eai.org

Electronic Arts Intermix   535 West 22nd Street, 5th Floor   New York, NY 10011
info@eai.org   t (212) 337-0680   f (212) 337-0679


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