Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Fund

About the Fund
Mission Statement
Who Was Lyn Blumenthal?

About the Fund

Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Fund supported artists and collaborative projects working in the Media Arts. The LBMF reflected Lyn Blumenthal's life and work as an artist.

Before her untimely death in 1988, Lyn Blumenthal was recognized as a leading and innovative experimental feminist media artist and teacher. Her multi-disciplinary body of work included videos, sculpture, drawings and critical essays. Along with Kate Horsfield, she founded the Video Data Bank at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The VDB received international recognition for its innovative interviews of artists. The VDB's video art distribution network soon became a standard in the field and has been emulated by many other organizations.

The LBMF existed to carry on Lyn's spirit and vision in the field of Media Arts. The Fund reflected her legacy of leadership and innovation in encouraging technical and intellectual risk taking, access for marginal voices, radical politics, analysis of cultural issues and the integration of theory and practice.

Between 1990 and 2000, the LBMF awarded grants for both video production and critical essays through an open submission process. (A complete list of these projects can be found elsewhere in this website). In 1999, after one decade of using the open submission process, the Board of the Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Fund held a retreat to evaluate the funding process and its impact on the field. The outcomes of the retreat led to a revision of the funding process. The Board determined that it would be more cost effective to invite a select number of nominators to recommend artists for funding rather than continue the open submission process. the Challenge to the Field Award is the result of this new funding process.

In 2001, the Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Fund announced the Challenge to the Field Award. It was a bi-annual award given to a U.S. based artist, organization, or critic to realize an innovative strategy or project within the field. A number of well-established professionals in the field were invited by the Board to recommend names of artists whose work has challenged and expanded the media arts. The Board of the Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Fund reviewed the applications and chose an individual or group to produce a project that continued in the spirit of Lyn Blumenthal's legacy.

Mission Statement

The Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Fund existed to carry on the spirit, vision and impact of Lyn Blumenthal's professional and artistic contributions to experimental and independent media. The Fund was guided by Lyn's legacy of:

• leadership and innovation in expanding notions of art
• assisting emerging makers and radical and experimental media
• creating opportunities for marginalized voices
• demonstrating courage and risk-taking in advocating feminism, in advancing the understanding and analysis of cultural and political issues, and in impacting the larger art and media world
• supporting the integration of creative work with scholarship, as well as the mixing of other boundaries and categories.

Who Was Lyn Blumenthal?

Quotes

"I had heard about Lyn long before I met her in the mid-70's and I had heard strange and wonderful things. When I finally met her, suddenly there she was across the room, and because there were so many wild and fantastic stories and rumors that had sprung up around her, suddenly I felt pretty much like the way a hunter feels when they first see a deer that they've been stalking for years.

There she is! I had been cautioned that she was somehow dangerous and yet I liked her right away. I started talking to her and I liked her, and I thought this person isn't the terrorist that I've been told about."
— John Manning, Professor of Art and Technology, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

" Lyn Blumenthal had a passion for image, and the immanence of desire within the image. She recognized the power of the media and desired to reconstruct it. Lyn was fearless, unafraid to be criticized in a community that some considered small for constructive derision. At heart, she was a feminist, a passionate supporter of sexual difference, and an outspoken voice for sexual preference. Lyn was a brave champion of all artists struggling to decode the hallucinatory world which has re-presented the world of reality, the spectacle (now fact) called television. She was a natural entrepreneur even before business became art. Lyn wore her many hats with the panache of high Japanese fashion. In my mind's eye she has scale, she is grande. "
— Bruce Yonemoto, artist

"The day we opened the library in the new school building (at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, September, 1976) here on Columbus Drive, Lyn and Kate appeared at the door at nine o'clock in the morning and said "We're the Video Data Bank, where's our office?" What office? Nobody even thought that to run the Data Bank you might need an office and a telephone, and even a desk! So we opened up a little closet in the back of the library which was about three feet by three feet, and we put in a counter and a telephone and we said: "There's your office!" And for at least a year, or maybe more, the two of them, well not both at once, but one at a time, sat in this little closet; and from that tiny space, they built this world wide operation called the Video Data Bank. That is how I remember Lyn, building something that good and that big out of this tiny little three by three broom closet." 
— Nadine Byrne was the Librarian in the John M. Flaxman Library at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

"In the summer of 1984, the Video Data Bank was doing the first Video Drive-In at Grant Park. They were presenting the Science of Fiction / The Fiction of Science, which were two evenings of video projected onto a big screen that was hung in the bandshell in Grant Park, Chicago. The crowds were expected to be about 5,000 people each night and it was also supposed to rain that weekend. Both Lyn and Kate were very worried that this was going to ruin the Drive-In. As part of my professional duty working in the Office of Public Programs and Information at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I was asked to call a special pilot's weather service every hour to find out the forecast. I would report in every hour, but most of the time I couldn't get back to Lyn and Kate on the phone because they were over in Grant Park cleaning off all of the 5,000 metal chairs with paper towels, so that when the audience did come they could sit on dry chairs. To me that's an image of their generosity and how important it was that video reach the public." 
— Cynthia Chris has just finished her PhD.in Media Studies at University of California, San Diego.