Artists & Activists Video Archive

About the Video Data Bank
Founded in 1976 at the inception of the media arts movement, the Video Data Bank is the leading resource in the United States for videotapes by and about contemporary artists. The VDB collections feature innovative video work made by artists from an aesthetic, political or personal point of view. The collections include seminal works that, seen as a whole, describe the development of video as an art form originating in the late 1960's and continuing to the present. The videos in our collections employ innovative uses of form and technology mixed with original visual style to address contemporary art and cultural themes.
Through a national and international distribution service, the VDB makes video art, documentaries made by artists, and taped interviews with visual artists and critics available to a wide range of audiences.
This Video Data Bank is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art, and the Illinois Arts Council, an agency of the state.

Essays on Lyn Blumenthal
Text by Robert Storr, Senior Curator, Museum of Modern Art
My first encounter with the Data Bank interviews was at the Art Institute of Chicago, where, in a denuded utility room, Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield, Data Bank's founders and at the time sole representatives, screened tapes during lunch hour to a random and self-selected audience of painters, sculptors, media artists and lost souls. As it happened, the voice I first overheard from the corridor outside, and which drew me into this circle, was that of Louise Bourgeois. Familiar to me only as a name credited to a large marble piece I had once seen at the museum, Bourgeois was otherwise completely unknown to me; too famous to be considered a part of the world we as students inhabited, yet still not famous enough for us to have ever been taught about her work or its importance. It was a limbo, I subsequently learned, that harbored more artists of importance to my development. Meanwhile, there in the dark safety of a room permeated by the sweet stink of adjacent painting studios, Bourgeois spoke in the most personal and at times breathtakingly frank way about her life, her motivations and her struggles. It was a revelation to me, as were many of the other tapes I watched during the next months.

From the Village Voice, January 23, 2007
Before YouTube
Plunge into the archives of the Video Data Bank
by Ed Halter, January 23rd, 2007 2:25 PM
[…] No one familiar with contemporary art should be surprised at lavish commissions for video-art stars like Aitken, or at guerrilla responses from nameless pranksters enabled by relatively cheap but powerful technology and the social-media possibilities of the Internet. But MOMA's own program "Feedback," a tribute to Chicago's nonprofit distributor Video Data Bank and its founders Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield, sheds light on a time when video remained, as Horsfield told the Voice recently, "the stepchild of the artworld"—a rough new technology, proudly outside the gallery market system, inextricably bonded to political movements like feminism.
"It was really kind of an accident," Horsfield recalls, that she and her partner Blumenthal (who passed away in 1988) began taping a series of longform interviews with women artists in 1974. "It was at the very beginning of video, and we were both very young, working artists in our twenties: She was doing sculpture and I was doing painting. We became good friends, and we ended up buying a Panasonic Portapak." Introduced by Sony barely seven years earlier, the portable rig revolutionized mobile video production, but it remained ponderous and clunky, with a lower-quality image than contemporary studio television. "It's an open-reel player that has a camera attached to it, and it weighs about 30 pounds," says Horsfield. "Carrying it around was hard."
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