Curator Chrissie Iles re-examines the history of video art to foreground Black artists’ under-represented contributions to the field, and considers how an inter-disciplinary crossover between video and other mediums including performance, music, poetry, cinema, and theatre addresses issues of surveillance, resistance, space, and power, creating new hybrid forms of media art. Response by Stuart Comer.

Chrissie Iles is the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she focuses on contemporary art, film and video, and art of the 1960s and 70s. Though Iles has created major museum survey shows of work by well-known artists such as Donald Judd, Louise Bourgeois and Sol Lewitt, she is regarded as a champion of younger, less-established artists.

In addition to her work at the Whitney, Iles teaches in the Fine Art Department at Columbia University and is a member of both the Graduate Committee at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and the Integrated Media Arts Advisory Board at Hunter College. She was also awarded an honorary doctorate by the Department of Art History at her alma mater, Bristol University, England.

Stuart Comer is The Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance at The Museum of Modern Art. He oversees the collection and diverse program of exhibitions, events, and acquisitions for the Department of Media and Performance. He also leads The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio, the Museum’s new space dedicated to performance, music, sound, spoken word, and expanded approaches to the moving image.