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In Review

MEMORIAL ART GALLERYMuseum Launches Media Arts Project Renowned curator John Hanhardt ’67 will lead an effort to build a collection featuring the aesthetics of film, video, and other technologies. By Scott Hauser
magBODIES OF ART: The exhibition Bodies in Space was the first presented by John Hanhardt ’67 (left) in his role as senior curator for media arts, a position established by Jonathan Binstock, the Mary W. and Donald R. Clark Director of the Memorial Art Gallery. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

An initiative of the Memorial Art Gallery is bringing a new type of “moving work” to the museum. Under the direction of John Hanhardt ’67, a former curator for the Smithsonian Institution, the museum has launched a new project to explore the technologies and aesthetics of film as well as the emerging tools and practices of video, computers, virtual reality, the Internet, software, and mobile devices.

Called the Media Arts Watch project, the initiative will feature four exhibitions a year. The inaugural exhibition, Bodies in Space, was opened to the public during Meliora Weekend in October and ran through December.

Internationally recognized as an authority on art involving moving images, Hanhardt began his museum career in the department of film and video at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He later established the film program and film study collection at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and he was curator and head of the film and video department at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

He was the senior curator of film and media arts at the Guggenheim Museum from 1996 to 2006. He joined the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s staff in 2006, and was a consulting senior curator of film and media arts there until 2016.

At Rochester, he will serve as consulting senior curator of media arts and will oversee efforts to bring media art into the museum’s permanent collection. Works featured in the Media Arts Watch exhibitions will form the core of the museum’s media art collection.

The first exhibition featured work by Nam June Paik and Bruce Nauman, key artists from the early years of video art, alongside more recent work by Sondra Perry and Takeshi Murata, artists in a new generation transforming digital media arts.