Cheryl Donegan

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is pleased to partner with Metrograph to present a series of programs highlighting our catalogue and its essential role in the history of artists’ moving image work. This program coincides with our ongoing celebration of EAI's 50th anniversary.

Beginning this month with a series of works complimenting Metrograph's Lives of Performers, a program probing titles that move between "the clarifying spectacle of the stage and the complexities of life outside of the spotlight," EAI presents a slate of works for both Metrograph's theater as well as its At Home online platform. Screening at Metrograph, catch theatrical engagements of Ellen Cantor's sprawling Pinochet Porn (2008-16); Charles Atlas's fictionalized profile of dancer Michael Clark, Hail the New Puritan (1987); and Mike Kelley's Mobile Homestead (2012), a documentary of his reconstructed childhood home's journey, as it travels down Michigan Avenue to be installed at Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (MOCAD). On their streaming platform, watch supplemental programs showcasing Ellen Cantor's diaristic appropriations of classic cinema and a collection of ebullient artists' videos by Atlas, Cheryl Donegan, Kalup Linzy, and Jacolby Satterwhite.

In-person theatrical screenings will take place at Metrograph at 7 Ludlow Street. Proof of a COVID-19 vaccine is required for entry, and a face mask or covering is required for all guests at all times. Online screenings are viewable through Metrograph's membership-based At Home streaming platform, with access beginning at $5/month. 

In theaters:

Pinochet Porn
Ellen Cantor, 2008-16, 123 min
Saturday, October 23rd, 7:30 pm
With introduction by John Brattin, the director of photography of the film

Hail the New Puritan
Charles Atlas, 1985-86, 85 min
Friday, October 29th, 8 pm 

Mobile Homestead
Mike Kelley, 2012, 157 min
Saturday, October 30th, 4:30 pm 

At home:

Selected Works by Ellen Cantor
Ellen Cantor, 1996-2002, 46 min
Available October 22 to 27

It's a Jackie Thing Shorts Program
Various artists, 1994-2007, 77 min
Available October 29 to November 3

EAI is pleased to announce its first-ever Benefit Art Auction, to be held on Thursday, April 19. This special event will raise essential funding towards our mission of preserving and providing access to media art’s rich legacies, while fostering powerful new voices.

silent auction hosted by P·P·O·W
535 West 22nd Street, 6th floor, New York, NY

cocktail reception & screenings at EAI
535 West 22nd Street, 5th floor, New York, NY

online bidding available on Artsy

April 27: "Edited at EAI": 1972-77
June 16: "Edited at EAI": Artist to Artist
June 22: "Edited at EAI": Videos by Tom Rubnitz
July 27: "Edited at EAI": Restless Generation
Aug 16: "Edited at EAI": Video Interference
Sept 22: "Edited at EAI": Dara Birnbaum

As part of EAI's ongoing 45th anniversary celebrations, we launched a series of screenings that highlight a less well-known but historically important and creatively fertile area of our programs: EAI's Editing Facility for artists. Established in 1972 with early 1/2" open reel editing equipment, EAI's facility was one of the first such post-production workspaces for artists in the U.S. Over five decades, an extraordinary group of artists has used EAI's facility to create some of the most significant works in media art's diverse histories. Many of these artists and works will be featured in screenings throughout our 45th anniversary year.

The first screening on April 27, "Edited at EAI": 1972-77 featured an eclectic selection of works from the 1970s, charted the alternative artistic, political, and cultural expressions of artists experimenting with emergent video editing technologies and strategies. The program included early works from the 1970s by Ant Farm, Juan Downey, Jean Dupuy, Shigeko Kubota, Mary Lucier, Raindance, Anthony Ramos, Ira Schneider, and Hannah Wilke, among others.

On June 16 Artist to Artist featured the rich collaborative process and the creative relationships between artists and the artists/editors with whom they worked, through the lens of EAI's editing facility. Video works by Cheryl Donegan, Ursula Hodel, Nam June Paik, Carolee Schneemann, and Michael Smith—all edited at EAI—were shown together with works by Robert Beck, Seth Price and Trevor Shimizu, three internationally recognized artists who spent formative years as EAI editors. Artists Robert Buck and Cheryl Donegan were in conversation following the screening.

On June 22 EAI celebrated the video work of Tom Rubnitz (1956-1992), whose deliriously camp genre parodies and music videos capture the anarchic spirit and talents of the 1980s East Village scene of Club 57 and the Pyramid Club. The rich body of work that Rubnitz edited at EAI includes TV spoofs, music videos, and the musical parody Psykho III The Musical (1985). Artist John Kelly participated in a conversation following the screening.

On July 27 Restless Generation focused on a group of conceptually driven performance videos by women artists who reenergized and redefined the genre in the 1990s, as seen through the lens of EAI's editing facility. These lo-fi performances staged for the camera­—by artists such as Vanessa Beecroft, Alix Lambert, Kirsten Mosher, Alix Pearlstein, and Beverly Semmes, among others—evoke the strategies of the first generation of artists working with video in the early 1970s, even as their bold stylizations, ironic sensibility, and explicit nods to consumer culture announced a fresh approach to representations of female identity and the body that spoke emphatically to its time.

On August 16 the series continued with an evening of activist video work from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. Shot largely on low-end consumer equipment and edited, often off-hours, at EAI, these works use video as an activist tool, confronting urgent issues around the AIDS crisis, race, gender, and sexuality. Videos by ACT UP affinity groups DIVA TV (Damned Interfering Video Activist Television) and House of Color, as well as art collective X-PRZ, were screened along with work by artists Robert Beck and Tom Kalin. Although rooted in the specific political and cultural contexts of that moment, these powerful activist voices

EAI is pleased to collaborate with Friends of the High Line and High Line Art, on the occasion of our 45th anniversary, to present Your Plastic Video, a program of six videos by Cheryl Donegan, including four rarely seen video works from the 1990s and early 2000s - Guide (1993), Sunflower (1993), Scenes + Commercials (1997), Craft (1999), Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before (2008), and a selection from her recent VINES PROJECT (2015 - ongoing). Exhibited as part of High Line Channel 14, a series of outdoor projections of art videos in the semi-enclosed passageway on the High Line at West 14th Street, this program will be on view daily from 6 pm–10 pm, Aprl 28 –June 29.

"Edited at EAI": Artist to Artist featured the rich collaborative process and the creative relationships between artists and the artists/editors with whom they worked, through the lens of EAI's editing facility. Video works by Cheryl Donegan, Ursula Hodel, Nam June Paik, Carolee Schneemann, and Michael Smith—all edited at EAI—were shown together with works by Robert Beck, Seth Price and Trevor Shimizu, three internationally recognized artists who spent formative years as EAI editors. Featuring works from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, Artist to Artist was the second in EAI's "Edited at EAI" program series. Artists Robert Buck and Cheryl Donegan in conversation following the screening.

Organized in conjunction with EAI's 45th anniversary, the "Edited at EAI" series highlights a historically significant but less well-known area of EAI's programs: EAI's Editing Facility for artists, one of the first such creative workspaces for video in the United States.

Continuing the tradition of its annual summer group shows, EAI hosted a free evening spotlighting emerging artists alongside recent and historical works from the EAI collection. This program was structured like a late-summer mixtape rallying against the fleeting season: a deftly sequenced flow of bangers, classics, deep cuts, and hidden gems.

Cheryl Donegan joined EAI to present a selection of works from the 1990s to the present, from iconic lo-fi performance videos such as Head (1993) and Practisse (1994) to rarely screened works and the premiere of a new fashion-inspired piece, Blood Sugar (2013), which was shown at EAI with a live performance element. Following the screening program, she appeared in conversation with EAI's Josh Kline.

EAI celebrated the art of short-form video and film with a summer screening of works that clock in at two minutes or less. Between Yoko Ono's fifteen second Eye Blink (1966) and Leslie Thornton's two minute Let Me Count the Ways: Minus 6 (2006), the forty-five works in this forty-five minute screening demonstrated why a concise statement is so powerful. Ranging from analog video abstraction to quick visual comedy, conceptual exercises to formal experiments with duration, commissioned public service announcements to critiques of the quintessential short-form structure, the TV commercial, the works in this screening demonstrated the enormous possibilities that artists have found in less than one hundred and twenty seconds.

The screening included works by Dan Asher, Beth B, Phyllis Baldino, Michael Bell-Smith, Dara Birnbaum, Cheryl Donegan, VALIE EXPORT, Forcefield, Matthew Geller, Gran Fury, Gary Hill, Ken Jacobs, Tom Kalin, Kalup Linzy, George Maciunas, Charlotte Moorman, Shana Moulton, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Nam June Paik, Martha Rosler, Paul Sharits, Stuart Sherman, Shelly Silver, Michael Smith, Leslie Thornton, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Lawrence Weiner and Bruce and Norman Yonemoto.

EAI presented 45 Years of Performance Video from EAI, a survey of four decades of artists' engagement with video and performance. This project is presented in conjunction with 100 Years, an exhibition on the history of performance art organized by P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and Performa 09.

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is pleased to participate in The 2008 New York Art Book Fair. EAI will present a special program of videos that considers issues of access, circulation and obsolescence. The program explores "out of print" art and media, in the form of limited edition videos, site-specific installations, Internet searches, one-off broadcasts, and ephemeral actions and performances that exist only as documents or artifacts.

During the PERFORMA07 performance biennial, EFA Gallery was transformed into a video lounge to host Electronic Arts Intermix's Viewing Room, a program that provides free public access to one of the foremost collections of video art in the world. Visitors to EFA Gallery were able to choose from a curated selection of major performance-based video works by over 30 artists from the EAI Collection. Viewers were able to watch these seminal performances and contemporary classics at their own pace in a comfortable viewing environment. During the opening reception on Friday, November 2nd, programs featuring selected works were installed throughout the gallery.

EAI participated in Off LOOP, the video art festival associated with LOOP '04 Barcelona. EAI screened screening a program of recent additions to the EAI collection that combined evocative, at times haunting, themes with a baroque style. Included in the program were works by Cheryl Donegan, Seoungho Cho, Peggy Ahwesh, Leslie Thornton, Phyllis Baldino, and Cecelia Condit.

EAI presented a special event that celebrated new interactive media and video works: open source Web art, hacked video games, restaged and reworked films, girl-band music videos, and underground legends of the downtown music and art scenes. This event was also the official launch of Tux Dog, artist collective Paper Rad's new open source Web project, which is hosted by EAI. Cory Arcangel and members of Paper Rad were present to introduce and demonstrate this new project. In addition to the Web launch, EAI presented a program of new and newly released video projects by multimedia, multigenerational artists, including Cory Arcangel, Cheryl Donegan, Ken Jacobs, Kristin Lucas, Tony Oursler, Pipilotti Rist and Stan VanDerBeek

Dia and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) presented a day-long screening of video works from EAI's collection. The videos screened featured works by artists who participated in collaborative programming presented by Dia and EAI at Dia:Chelsea from the mid-1990s until 2004. Artists included Marina Abramovic , Joan Jonas , Gordon Matta-Clark , Kristin Lucas , Mike Kelley , and Dan Graham , among others. Admission was free.

The Winter 2001 edition of this ongoing screening series at Dia's rooftop Video Salon and Café featured works by Peggy Ahwesh, Tony Cokes, Cheryl Donegan, Gary Hill, Mike Kelley, and Rita Myers.

Mediated Presence: Three Decades of Artists' Video from Electronic Arts Intermix is a three-part survey, spanning the years 1967 to 1997, that explores the rich and diverse modes by which artists use video to investigate self. Tracing how artists have articulated a mediated relationship with the viewer and technology, this program re-visits notions of performance and gesture within the framework of three decades of artists' video, and provides a historical context for recent works.

Young and Restless featured 21 recent performance-based works by 17 women artists. These energetic, often ironic pieces, made between 1993 and 1997, showcased artists who engage in dynamic explorations of female identity. Organized into 4 programs, each between 45 minutes and one hour in length, the exhibition was curated by Stephen Vitiello, co-organized by Barbara London and Sally Berger, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and distributed by EAI.